“SOMETHING HAPPENS”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26916, 30 October 1948, Page 2

“SOMETHING HAPPENS”

TRUE RELIGION IS PERSONAL For the Dally Times by the Rev. Gardner Miller This is the age of conferences. Pick up your daily newspaper and notice how many columns are given to recording the doings of conferences all over the world. We are better informed to-day by the daily press of the current happenings in the world than our fathers and grandfathers were of matters that took place months before they were told of them. I understand that even in New Zealand the news of the First World War was both scanty and late. But now a thing has scarcely happened before we see it reported in print. In religious matters the same holds true. I have never known so many conferences being held regarding religion and its propagation through the churches as we have had lately. And many more are in the offing. It is very natural that such should be the case for modern discoveries and outlook have practically banished boundaries. Unfortunately these amazing modern advances do little to change human nature. We are entering the great social epoch of the race. I think it could be argued that this is the third great epoch since Christianity made its appearance. I am not very happy about it; indeed I view the future with a tinge of fear. Not that I am against any movement to.,find unity amidst our diversities in religious life and practice, but I am constrained within myself to think that in the urge for a common standpoint we are seriously endangering the common factor upon which Christianity emerged and upon which, in my judgment, it can alone exist.

To come to the point, there is the peril of forgetting that true religion is always personal and that great conferences seldom affect the rank and file of our churches. There is a division between ecclesiastics and the men and women in the pews. The Evangical Witness

Right from the very beginning of the Christian faith the emphasis was on the fact that something happened to the individual that made him a Christian. It would be wrong to say that this has been forgotten and that the great religious conferences have jettisoned the need for this personal experience. But there has been a shift of emphasis. To-day the stress is laid on union, on how to inoculate the social ilfe of the world with Christian ideals and principals, and thus to present a reasoned and cohesive alternative to what seems desperately like anarchy. It was not so with the great and mighty men of old. With them the note was that only changed men could bring about a changed world. I agree with them. I know that the great councils and conferences of old had to hammer out a reasoned belief in order to confront the enemies of the faith of their day. But there is no need for that to-day. What is needed now, and needed desperately, is a revival of the evangelical witness, Biblical preaching and a concerted movement of concerned men and women to go out into the highways and byways to invite wayfarers to meet Christ.

That this personal note runs and rings through all our Christian history is evident when you think of Augustine, Luther, Wesley, Booth and a hundred others, whose names are household words in the households of faith. These men gave themselves, literally, to the service of bringing men and women to Christ.

I can never forget that story of Wililam Booth laying his head on his study table and weeping because he could see no results of his preaching. His wife said to him: “William, let us make a new start. Let us give God all we have, and begin afresh, and then see what happens.” We know what happened. The Salvation Army happened. And something always happens when men and women keep nothing back in their concern and passion to win others for Christ. That evangelical witness needs to be recovered if this swiftly passing dispensation is not to go into eternity fruitless. The Preachers of To-day For this renewed evangelical witness the preachers of to-day must fearlessly take their place and let their voices be heard with that note or urgency that characterised Whitfield and Moody and Roberts and others. We have no pulpit giants to-day. Is it because world events have dwarfed the Men with the Book? I think of Alexander Whyte of Edinburgh; the last of the great pulpit puritans. How searching were his sermons, how personal! how self-revealing! One sermon of his I would give much to have heard. It was on Mary Magdalene. The congregation must have been electrified that Sunday morning when he hurled out the final paragraph. Here it is. “ Mary Magdalene! my sister, my forerunner into heaven till I come, and my representative there! But, remember, only till I come. Cease not to kiss His feet till I come, but give up thy place to me when I come. For whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little. Give place then; give place to me before His feet.” , . . We are living in the.twilight of the world; let our evangelical witness be a flaming torch.