Not corrupting the word

by JC Ryle

borrowed from: http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2006/03/word-from-late-bishop-of-liverpool.html

J. C. Ryle's book Warnings to the Churches contains a sermon preached in August of 1858, titled "Not Corrupting the Word." The following excerpt from that sermon was published exactly ninety-nine years later, in the August 1957 issue of The Banner of Truth. That issue of the magazine is included in a wonderful compilation recently re-released by the Banner of Truth Trust: The Banner of Truth: Magazine Issues 1-16, Sept. 1955—Aug. 1959. (The following excerpt may be found on page 265). I highly recommend the whole book - Phil Johnson.

Ryle's words here offer some much-needed advice that certain pastors ministering in the morass of modern and post-modern churches would do well to heed.

The Pelagian Captivity of the Church

R. C. Sproul

borrowed from: http://www.modernreformation.org/default.php?page=printfriendly&var2=383

Shortly after the Reformation began, in the first few years after Martin Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses on the church door at Wittenberg, he issued some short booklets on a variety of subjects. One of the most provocative was titled The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. In this book Luther was looking back to that period of Old Testament history when Jerusalem was destroyed by the invading armies of Babylon and the elite of the people were carried off into captivity. Luther in the sixteenth century took the image of the historic Babylonian captivity and reapplied it to his era and talked about the new Babylonian captivity of the Church. He was speaking of Rome as the modern Babylon that held the Gospel hostage with its rejection of the biblical understanding of justification. You can understand how fierce the controversy was, how polemical this title would be in that period by saying that the Church had not simply erred or strayed, but had fallen-that it's actually now Babylonian; it is now in pagan captivity.
I've often wondered if Luther were alive today and came to our culture and looked, not at the liberal church community, but at evangelical churches, what would he have to say? Of course I can't answer that question with any kind of definitive authority, but my guess is this: If Martin Luther lived today and picked up his pen to write, the book he would write in our time would be entitled The Pelagian Captivity of the Evangelical Church.

by J. Gresham Machen
An address delivered, in substance, in the Wayne Presbyterian Church, Wayne, Pennsylvania, November 3, 1921, before the Twenty-Eighth Annual Convention of the Ruling Elders' Association of Chester Presbytery, on the subject, "The Present Attack against the Fundamentals of our Christian Faith, from the Point of View of Colleges and Seminaries." Originally published in The Princeton Theological Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1922, pages 93-117, Machen later turned this short essay into a manuscript which was published in 1923 under the title: Christianity & Liberalism (Macmillan, 1923). This article is now in the public domain (original pagination is preserved in {brackets} for purposes of reference).

The Princeton Theological Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1922, Page 93
The attack upon the fundamentals of the Christian faith is not a matter merely of theological seminaries and universities. It is being carried on vigorously by Sunday School "lesson-helps," by the pulpit, and by the religious press. The remedy, therefore, is not to be found in the abolition of theological seminaries, or the abandonment of scientific theology, but rather in a more earnest search after truth and a more loyal devotion to it when once it is found.
At the seminaries and universities, the roots of the great issue are more clearly seen than in the world at large; among students the reassuring employment of traditional phrases is often abandoned, and the advocates of a new religion are not at pains, as they are in the Church at large, to maintain a pretence of conformity with the past. In discussing the attack against the fundamentals of Christianity "from the point of view of colleges and seminaries," therefore, we are simply discussing the root of the matter instead of its mere superficial manifestations. What, at bottom, when the traditional phrases have all been stripped away, is the real meaning of the present revolt against historic Christianity?

Giving ground to the world is a bad missional strategy

by Charles Spurgeon

(The Following excerpt is taken from "The Broad Wall," a Sermon of Charles Spurgeon first published in 1911, preached on some unspecified earlier date at least 20 years earlier at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London.)

Satan will tell you that, if you bend a little; and come near to the ungodly, then they also will come a little way to meet you.

Ay, but it is not so. You lose your strength, Christian, the moment you depart from your integrity. What do you think ungodly people say behind your back, if they see you inconsistent to please them? "Oh!" say they, "there is nothing in his religion but vain pretense; the man is not sincere."

Although the world may openly denounce the rigid Puritan, it secretly admires him. When the big heart of the world speaks out, it has respect to the man that is sternly honest, and will not yield his principles,—no, not a hair's breadth.