A local church pastor visited me today, and he was saying that so many Christians are living in the past, in the 'good old days' when revival was being experienced in our churches. I said that I disagreed, and argued that the problem with today's church is that it has not re-visited the past frequently enough. The church of today simply does not know its Christian history, and is therefore ignorant of what God has done in the past by His Spirit.
Thankfully, he agreed and saw the point I was making. We need to re-learn our history of the Christian Church, and become more familiar with it so that we can see what good He did then, and be inspired to plead with Him to do it again in our day. We need to return to the greatest days of the Church's history, and learn from those days when God was working mightily by His Spirit, back to the Reformers and Huguenots, to the Covenanters and Puritans, back to the days of the great Methodist Revival in these islands (British isles) and to the Great Awakening in America. Ignorance of the past is what leaves us vulnerable to mistakes in the present and future. In order to go forward properly and with conviction, we need to go back to the days when God visited the churches and poured out His blessings upon them.
For further information on some aspects of those great days, please visit here.
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I read just today that scholars were saying that Jesus was "a man of His time," and that that explained why He said and taught the things He did. Had He been born and lived in the twenty-first century with all the modern knowledge, He would have seen things differently.
While at a liberal theological college in the seventies, I was taught that Paul was "a man of his time," and that was why he held the views, for example, about women, that he did.
Also, Moses was described as "a man of his time," therefore we cannot take seriously what he wrote in the Bible.
And then just the other day, a Christian friend said that John Calvin was "a man of his time," and that explained his theology.
While there is a commonality in all these statements, there is one underlying principle that drives each of them - theological liberalism.
What do you think?
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