Category: Quote of the Day

Charles H. Spurgeon dared to say, “Many would unite church and stage, cards and prayer, dancing and sacraments. If we are powerless to stem this torrent, we can at least warn men of its existence and entreat them to stay out of it.” A. J. Gordon dared to say, “The notion having grown up that we must entertain men in order to win them to Christ, every invention for world-pleasing which human ingenuity can devise has been brought forward till the churches have been turned into play-houses and there is hardly a carnal amusement that can be named from billiards to dancing which does not find a nesting place in Christian sanctuaries. Is it then Pharisaism or pessimism….to predict that at the present fearful rate of progress, the close of this century may see the Protestant church as completely assimilated to nineteenth-century secularism as the Roman Catholic church was assimilated to fourth-century paganism?” We smile at that today, but we are not overstocked with Spurgeons and Gordons.

Augustine told us long ago how this marriage of the professing church and the world came about. “It seemed good to our leaders,” he declared, to favor the weakness of pagan converts so that heathen festivals were joined with Christian holy days “which they might celebrate with similar luxury though not with the same impiety.” The same strategy prevails to this day on the old argument that the end justifies the means. This, of course, bits into the program of a modernized Catholicism and an apostate Protestantism in the world church of the last days.

The daily devotions are from Pepper ‘n Salt by Vance Havner. Fleming H. Revell Company, 1966.

In one way or another, many of us are “living in the ‘woulds’.” Consider the things some would do if they could. Beyond all the evil that is actually done, think how much more harm would be wrought if men dared or were not prevented. We quote figures on crime and juvenile delinquency, but no one knows how many more would do the same things if they thought they could get away with it. The depravity of the human heart is far deeper than statistics reveal; it boils up in thought and intention and desire. He who looks upon a woman in lust has committed adultery already in his heart. He would hates brother is a murderer. This is “living in the ‘woulds.’ ”

It works the other way. Paul would have visited the Thessalonian believers, but Satan hindered him. Some would have gone to the mission field, but could not. It was in their hearts to go and in God’s sight they really went. “For if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not” (II Corinthians 8:12). What would you do if you could?

Of course, some could if they would. God had to overcome the reluctance of Moses and Jeremiah who were unduly modest and timid before their duty. We can do anything we ought to do. It is as wrong to underrate as to overrate ourselves when God calls us. To say that two and two make three is as wrong as to say two and two make five.

The daily devotions are from Pepper ‘n Salt by Vance Havner. Fleming H. Revell Company, 1966.