David Lipscomb
(Gospel Advocate, August 15, 1907)
"Be
ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves."
(James 1:22)
A man who imagines he is benefited by hearing the
word when he does not do it deceives himself. A knowledge of the
word of God adds guilt to the failure to do it. He that knows his
Master's will and refuses to do it will be punished with many stripes.
Believing in Christ without obeying him adds nothing to salvation.
Obedience to Christ is faith put into practice. Faith is never regarded
as fixed and helpful until it leads to obedience, until it controls
the whole man. This obedience involves not only baptism and the
Lord's supper, or obedience to the positive ordinances of the Lord,
but it embraces obedience to the moral and spiritual precepts of
the Scriptures.
One must love God with all the mind and soul and body.
- He must
subdue and hold in proper restraint his own fleshly lusts, desires,
and ambitions.
- He must be truthful, upright, honest,
and at all times ready to do good to all the children of men.
- He must help the poor and needy,
the widow and the orphan.
- He must seek to save the lost and
to reproduce in his own life the life of Jesus, who gave his life
as the example we should follow.
The apostle follows up this admonition with the
warning that the forgetful hearer is not blessed in the hearing,
but that man is blessed only in doing the things required in the
word.
"He
that looketh into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and so continueth,
being not a hearer that forgetteth but a doer that worketh, this
man shall be blessed in his doing."
The law of God is "the law of liberty,"
because it frees him who continues in it from the bondage of sin
and the service of the evil one. The blessing it bestows is found
in his doing the will of God. He then insists that true religion,
or the obedience to the law of God, requires persons to control
the tongue; that it violates no law of God, and that the practice
of religion, pure and undefiled, is to so refrain from the sins
and corruptions of this world as not to be spotted or tarnished
by them, and to actively engage in helping the widow and orphan
in their need. This shows the words to be done, the laws to be kept,
whence the active discharge of the duties we owe both to God and
our fellow men. Only in doing his word can his blessing be found.
Orange Street Church of Christ, BULLETIN
ARCHIVES ONLINE, 01/07/2001
We will be meeting with Commonwealth
Church Finance on Tuesday regarding the upcoming bond issue.
the
Elders
Its
What You DoNot When You Do It
Ted Williams,
at age 42, slammed a home run in his last official time at bat.
Mickey Mantle,
age 20, hit 23 home runs his first full year in the major leagues.
Golda Meir
was 71 when she became Prime Minister of Israel.
William Pitt
II was 24 when he became Prime minister of Great Britain.
George Bernard
Shaw was 94 when one of his plays was first produced.
Mozart
was just seven when his first composition was published.
Now how about this?
Benjamin Franklin was a newspaper columnist at 16
and a framer of the United States Constitution when he was 81.
Youre never too
young or too old if youve got talent. Lets recognize
that age has little to do with ability.
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