Lifted Veil

“In one sense the whole object of being a Christian is that you may know the love of Jesus Christ, his personal love to you; that he may tell you in unmistakable language that he loves you, that he has given himself for you, that he has loved you with ‘an everlasting love.’ He does this through the Holy Spirit; he ’seals’ all his statements to you through the Spirit. . . . He tells you directly. You believe it because it is in the Word; but there is more than that; he will tell you this directly as a great secret. The Spirit gives manifestations of the Son of God to his own, to his beloved, to those for whom he has gladly died and given himself.”

D. M. Lloyd-Jones, Romans: An Exposition of Chapters 7.1-8.4 (Edinburgh, 1973), page 61.

Source: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/rayortlund/

“The power of prayer has never been tried to its full capacity in any church.  If we want to see mighty wonders of divine grace and power wrought in the place of weakness, failure and disappointment, let the whole Church answer God’s standing challenged; “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knows not.” - James Hudson Taylor

“The Protestant Churches owe an immeasurable debt to the Evangelical Revival… it added an intense sense of civic responsibility, and this naturally found its expression both in such movements of reform as the campaign for the abolition of slavery and in zeal for missionary endeavour…  At a time when all these movements were showing signs of dying down, the Second Evangelical Awakening crossed the Atlantic from America to Britain in 1858.  This was undenominational in character, and produced that new phenomenon of the nineteenth century, the interdenominational or undenominational missionary society.” – Stephen Neill

“In regard to our foreign mission, we are at present in need of almost everything. We are greatly in need of money, and we are sorely in need of missionaries; but what we want most is life and an increase of spiritual power… Money will flow in streams to God’s treasury, and men will offer themselves in companies, and our missionary enterprise will expand into missions worthy of the name, when the enthusiasm of Christ, the fire of the Holy Ghost, possesses the Church - never till then.” – Rev. Archd Scott, The Church of Scotland Home & Foreign Missionary Record

“Following the 1858 Prayer Revival, a world-wide interdenominational student missionary movement began to flourish.  In 1886, the Student Volunteer Movement was founded. This movement heightened missions awareness and over the next several decades helped recruit some 20,000 students who went forth to serve on the mission field.” - Timothy K. Beougher, Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions

Restore us again, O God of our salvation,and put away your indignation toward us!
Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger to all generations?
Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?
Show us your steadfast love, O Lord, and grant us your salvation.
Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people,
to his saints; but let them not turn back to folly.
Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him, that glory may dwell in our land.
Psalm 85: 4-9

http://liftedveil.org/

“When the Church sets itself to pray with the same seriousness and
strength of purpose that it has devoted to other forms of Christian
effort, it will see the Kingdom of God come with power.” - Report of
The Edinburgh Missionary Conference

“When the prayer-life of the people of God comes to be the dominant
feature of Christian experience, the power of God will sweep the earth
with the victories of grace.” - Howard Agnew Johnston

“Ask , and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock,
and it will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives, and he
who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” (Matt
7:7-9)

“Prayer is the greatest force that we can wield.  It is the greatest talent which God has granted us. He has given it to every Christian. We may differ among ourselves as to wealth, social position, educational equipment, natural ability, inherited characteristics; but in this matter of exercising the greatest force that is at work in the world today, we are on the same footing.  It is possible for the most obscure person in a church, with a heart right toward God, to exercise as much power for the evangelization of the world, as it is for those who stand in the most prominent positions.” -John R. Mott

“When we rely upon organization, we get what organization can do; when we rely upon education, we get what education can do; when we rely upon eloquence, we get what eloquence can do. But when we rely upon prayer, we get what God can do.”  - A. C. Dixon

“Ask of Me, and I will give you the nations for Your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for Your possession.” (Ps 2:8)

http://liftedveil.org/prayer-quotes/

The Assembled Church

I. Introduction and Background

Andrew Chester – “The Pauline Communities” – A Vision for the Church: Studies in Early Christian Ecclesiology (ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Michael B. Thompson; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997):

Paul’s vision for the communities that he wrote to can be summed up quite succinctly. He sees them as being a new creation in Christ, filled with the Spirit, possessing gifts of the Spirit and overflowing with the fruit of the Spirit, controlled above all by love; they are communities that should be pure and holy, mutually supportive and interdependent, completely united, transcending the oppositions and tensions between different groups within the community, and with every kind of barrier that would divide them in normal society broken down.

This brief summary may seem over-idealized; it may indeed seem somewhat grandiose and abstract, especially in the light of the occasional letter that Paul wrote to quite different communities, often on very specific and mundane issues… It is also to be said that theory and practice in any case often fail to coincide, and the way that a particular community lives can be very far removed from Paul’s vision of what it should be. Paul himself is made painfully aware of this. Indeed, it is probably true to say that we have a semblance of Paul’s vision for his communities, to a large extent, because of the problems that have arisen in a number of those communities and that Paul feels the need to counter. That is, Paul finds himself faced with what he considers false practice, or even a complete negation of his ideal of the Christian community, and hence has to urge those in these communities that he has founded to become what they know they should be, and not remain as they are. (105)

As Chester points out, we have Paul’s vision for the church because the churches that Paul wrote to were not living according to that vision.

The church in Corinth is a good example of a church that failed to live according to that vision.

Margaret Mitchell (Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation) suggests that Paul’s purpose in writing to the church in Corinth was to reconcile the many factions that had formed. Why? Because division and factions were contrary to what he taught in all the churches.

Continue Reading »

12 Oct 2009 Shane Becker 2 comments