September 10
James M. Gray, longtime Dean at Moody Bible Institute, tells his story: “I regularly attended church. At 14, when I knew ‘the creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the ten commandments’ I was ‘confirmed in the most holy faith’ by a bishop of our church, and was taught that I had become a child of God. But this I do not now believe. My true conversion took place seven years later. I was reading a book by William Arnot called Laws from Heaven for Life on Earth. For my Bible I did not care, but this book had a strong attraction to me. One night, after an exciting evening among worldly people, my eye...
Read MoreSeptember 9
Historian Arnold Toynbee, in an essay titled Christianity and Civilization, presented at Oxford University, said: “Democracy is another leaf from the book of Christianity, which has also, I fear, been torn out and, while perhaps not misread, has certainly been half emptied of meaning by being divorced from its Christian context and secularized; and we have obviously, for a number of generations past, been living on spiritual capital, I mean clinging to Christian practice without possessing the Christian belief, and practice unsupported by belief is a wasting asset, as we have suddenly...
Read MoreSeptember 8
H.A. Ironside tells of open-air meetings in Albuquerque, NM. A gambler who had moved there for his tuberculosis had been convicted of sin, but was unsure there was mercy for him. When Ironside visited him, “he said, ‘I’m praying; I’ve made up my mind that if I have to go to hell, I’ll go praying.’” Ironside explained that salvation was a gift, gave him some gospel booklets to read, and left. The following evening he returned and, rapidly succumbing to the disease, brokenly told what had transpired: “This afternoon I lay on the bed–I took the tracts and tried to read–My aunt came in–I asked...
Read MoreSeptember 7
“You have heard him and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus” (Eph 4:21). “We should always remember that God is, so to speak, his own evidence. That is to say, since he is the Creator, he is the ultimate source of everything. There is no being in the universe who is…independent of God and is able on that account to give us an independent assessment of God’s claims to be God! Neither is there anyone able to provide us with evidence that did not ultimately originate with God himself. God is self-evident; and true faith on our part is our response to God’s self-revelation. And so...
Read MoreSeptember 6
“And they shall be all taught of God” (Jn 6:45). Harold St. John was given permission to have some Bible discussions in a post office in Somaliland. “It was a small tin shack with a floor inches deep in dust,” he wrote. One man, a recent believer, dressed only in a leopard skin, had been named “2½ Pence.” St. John asked him, “Dear brother 2½ Pence, have you any thought as to why the Scriptures tell us that the soldier plunged his lance into the Savior’s side and there came out blood and water?” As St. John continued, this untutored man, “so recently emerged from degraded heathenism, gave an...
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