Category: Devotion of the Day

“Strengthen They Stakes

Lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes.
Isaiah 54:2

If we are going to lengthen our cords we had better strengthen our stakes. The church today is intent on expanding borders and taking in more territory. That is good if along with it we strengthen what we have. Otherwise, we gain width at the expense of depth and become shallow. The Christian and the church need an intensive as well as an extensive ministry. Vast ingatherings of believers bring peril if we do not teach, indoctrinate, build up in the faith. To use A.J. Gordon’s illustration, the average church is often life a congested lung with only a few cells doing the breathing. There is usually a faithful nucleus surrounded by a mass of nominal Christians.

While we extend the borders of our tent, we had better check the center pole. We must fix the point of our compass properly before we describe our circles. We are in tremendous need of a ministry to strengthen our stakes that we may go further as we go deeper.

Back to Antioch

The disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.
Acts 11:26

In this modern Babel we would do well to get back to Antioch again. Well might some “Jesus man” call us back to Christ Himself and the glorious privilege of being “just Christians.”

The traveler has been lost in the baggage. We are so cluttered with all the things that go with the Christian life that we can hardly identify the Christian. We become so identified with a fragment of the truth or a segment of the church that it is hard for people to think of us as representatives of Christ Himself.

Through the ages men have risen who sought to recapture the simplicity of New Testament Christianity. But the simple soon becomes complex, and they end with another denomination, the very thing they started out to get away from. There is a man, a movement, a machine, and a monument!

No, the solution does not lie in that direction. A man may continue in the same set-up, but he can transcend it and even restore to it the luster it once had by being a real New Testament Christian first of all.