Miscellanea
Learn how to do good.
To live righteously is to do right.
A dirty dollar gained is a dead loss.
No one can go to heaven who wants to go alone.
An uneasy conscience makes a restless night.
We enjoy our blessings as we share them with others.
We like men who come out flatfooted on everything.
Sin will never be exterminated by sugared sentiments.
A good time that is no more than a good time is a bad time.
Thousands of our fellow-citizens think that sprinkling is baptism. What are we doing to show them better before it is too late?
Every Christian can lead a soul to Christ. It will be mighty serious in the judgment for those who could have but did not.
The over-advertising of the institutional Sunday School Literature Lessons threatens to wean the churches away from using them.
Send a subscription to the Gospel Guardian. Get the brethren of your congregation to make up a list. Thus you would be having a part in a lot of good preaching.
Every brother ought to be well-informed on the church versus human institutions. The Gospel Guardian is the only weekly that stands for the church against the man-made monopolistic institutions.
Every church should itself do the work it indifferently leaves to the preacher and leave him free to spend his time preaching. It will enable them to grow and develop into what each one of them ought to be.
Our Saviour could not sit on the Board of an Orphan Home. He had not where to lay his head. Men are put on Boards of Orphan Homes because they have money, or can beg it from others. Big, general, monopolistic institutions are built on money, certainly not on faith in God, that "comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God."
Christ established his church. Every one who "repents, and is baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins," is a member of it. Obeying the Spirit's command to repent and be baptized does not make a man a member of any other church. What must be the state of a man's mind who is willing to be a member of a church that Christ did not establish?
Where there is no pattern there can be no faith. And where there is no faith there can be no worship, or service of God. Every thing that is the work of the church is specified in the divine pattern delivered by the apostles. Such talk on "where there is no pattern" is disgraceful. And it comes from the president of a theological seminary!
Brother Blankum says that the real Gospel Advocate passed out of existence a quarter of a century ago, but that an unsuspecting brotherhood is just now beginning to find it out. He says that the great mistake of David Lipscomb was in building up a self-perpetuating institutionalism that enables weak and unsound men, through the power of its money, to exert a terrible influence over the churches.
Instrumental music in the worship is sinful, because God does not command it. A thing that God does not command cannot be offered "by faith." Abel offered what God commanded. Cain offered what God did not command. Singing is in the pattern that is given by the apostles and is sealed with the blood of Christ. It is a profane thing to attempt to come to God except through the blood of our Redeemer. To attempt to approach God in the observance of an ordinance that is not sealed with the blood of Jesus is a presumptuous thing that every one should carefully and diligently avoid.
The Gospel Advocate is one hundred and three years old, big rich and powerful. Who ever inherits control of it exerts a terrible power over the churches. David Lipscomb College has four million dollars, more or less. When the Gospel Advocate, David Lipscomb College and the wealthy Orphan Homes, get behind a preacher, he is "made". When they turn the back of their hand to him, he had better send in his "confession" to the Gospel Advocate, or he is in for a disillusioning experience. A few preachers of whom I had held a better opinion, have come forward to confess that until they saw which way the wind was blowing, they believed that the church in every neighborhood is all-sufficient to do every good work and that it is not dependent on any human institution for any thing. And this "confession" of the turn-coats is gloatingly published as a great triumph of the human institutions over the church. Every beat of my heart is a prayer for the triumph of the church of God.