"If we don't come apart; we will come apart."

"If they had a social gospel in the days of the prodigal son, somebody would have given him a bed and a sandwich and he never would have gone home."

Every Christian is a contradiction to this old world. He crosses it at every point. He goes against the grain from beginning to end. From the day that he is born again until the day that he goes on to be with the Lord, he must stand against the current of a world always going the other way. God expects him to be "beside himself," "a fool for Christ's sake," "drunk on new wine." If he allows it, men will tone him down, steal the joy of his salvation, and reduce him to the dreary level of the general average. If the devil cannot keep us from being saved, he next endeavors to make average Christians of us, and in this he usually succeeds. He tames the holy recklessness of God's dare-saints until they sink into the drab pattern of most of us, "faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly dull." The devil does not mind our joining church if we behave like most of those who are already inside. But when a real, wide-awake Christian breezes along, taking the Gospel seriously, the devil grows alarmed and begins plotting his downfall. He gets plenty of assistance right in the church, for many church folk do not like to have their Laodicean complacency upset by these who turn the world upside down. So they conspire with Satan to turn the young Christian's fever into a chill. There are always plenty of human wet blankets to smother the zealot's flame, and they have put out more spiritual fires than have all the skeptics and infidels

We live in an hour when the foundations of civilization are crumbling, the night of apostasy is deepening, lawlessness runs wild to its awful climax, the powers of Anti-Christ increase and abound, and wars and rumors of wars belt the globe. Yet the Church of God, with the only hope and cure for mankind's sin and misery, rests, for the most part, at ease in Zion, and we who claim that Name above every name make mud pies and daisy chains and twiddle our thumbs while a world sweeps over the brink of disaster. We preach a Gospel that is God's dynamite and we live firecracker lives. We sing of showers of blessing and the old-time power and faith, the victory and higher ground, and then we leave it all in the hymn books and go home. We read that when our Lord held a service the congregation went home amazed and glorifying God and filled with fear and saying, "We have seen strange things today" (Luke 5:26). How many, do you think, go from our meetings today in such a frame of mind?

The subject of prophecy has, of course, held an attraction for a great many superficial souls with a flair for the spectacular. Gog and Magog, the 666, the beasts of Revelation, have, indeed, fallen into the hands of too many mere sensationalists who have ranged over the country with wild and weird charts of their own devising, setting dates almost as brazenly as ever the Millerites dared to do. But then any kind of light will attract a certain number of bugs.

Our Lord said, "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." It is evident, then, that a true disciple is a soul-winner. It is possible to sit on the shore discussing the signs of the times when we ought to be driven by the signs of the times to launch out into the deep and let down our nets for a draught.



People Some people are like wheelbarrows; useful only when pushed, and very easily upset. The time to stop talking is when the other person nods his head affirmatively but says nothing.

God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.

Sometimes your medicine bottle has on it, "shake well before using." That is what God has to do with some of His people. He has to shake them well before they are ever usable.

The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps. We must step up the stairs.

The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.

The hope of dying is the only thing that keeps me alive.

“A country schoolteacher, applying for a job, was asked, ‘Do you teach that the earth is round or flat?’ ‘Which way do you want it taught?’ was the reply, ‘I can teach it either way.’ Havner concluded, ‘Something like that is the attitude in many a pulpit today.’”

Too many are not willing to give the Gospel a fair trial. They are too ignorant to speak wisely but not wise enough to speak ignorantly. A man is not a sinner because he is a skeptic; he is a skeptic because he is a sinner.

We are sometimes repentant because of the harm we have done ourselves and others in our transgressions but there is little repentance toward God... We may regret what our sins do to our testimony and the evil effect on others but we are little concerned because the fellowship with God is broken. This makes for shallow and inadequate confession because we have not touched the heart of the trouble.

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SI Moderator - Greg Gordon