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You will perhaps find many ready enough to say smooth and pleasing things to your face, but I hope you will know how to value an admonition from a friend. You are engaging in an important service, honourable it is beyond expression, but it is full of difficulties and snares. If the Lord gives you liberty and acceptance you are liable to be exalted above measure. Your comfort and success eminently depend upon your being humble. And if the Lord loves you and has sent you, he will find ways and means to humble you. If he has put it into my heart to give you these hints, and if he enables you to receive them in a right spirit, and to make a right use of them, it may save you some trouble in future. I am sure I have no desire to grieve you. If you take this as I mean it, I shall be glad of a line from you at your leisure to tell me so. You are now putting on the harness, but what you may meet with from within and without before you put it off, is only known to the Lord. You have reason to p...

The usefulness of some is protracted, while others…are taken away early, that those who survive may see that the Lord can carry on His work without them. He who has the fulness of the Spirit will never lack instruments to carry on His work. He can raise them up as it were from the very stones. He can call the most unworthy persons, and bring them from the most unlikely places, to labour in His vineyard. Had it not been so, you would have never heard of me. From what a dung hill of sin and misery did he raise me, to place me among the princes of his people! Consider what I was, and where I was (in Africa) and you must acknowledge I am a singular instance of sovereignty and the riches of His mercy!   JOHN NEWTON  (Source: Wise Counsel, p370)  Newton makes a very good point that the Lord provides for His work. It's very easy for us to think that the work we do depends on us, when in fact everything depends on Him. It is humbling to know that God doesn't need any of us i...

This painful experience, along with my subsequent years in pastoral ministry, taught me never to assume every member of my church understands these foundational truths in the same way. A shared statement of faith, though extremely helpful, is not a guarantee that your entire congregation will always agree on doctrine, the ordinances, or church membership. Perhaps this assumption proved to be my biggest mistake. The words we use may not be received or understood as we intend them to be. Therefore, when our members ask questions, we must patiently answer them and slow down if necessary. When doctrine appears to lead to division, hold fast to the truth, but also resist the urge to see congregants as your “adversaries.” God loves them in Jesus and so must you.    JERI CHOI   (Source: 9 Marks )

Who does not see, when he reads the history of the Church of Christ, repeated proofs that the best of men can err? The early fathers were zealous according to their knowledge, and ready to die for Christ. But many of them countenanced monasticism, and nearly all sowed the seeds of  many superstitions. The Reformers were honoured instruments in the hand of God for reviving the cause of truth on earth. Yet hardly one of them can be named who did not make some great mistake. Martin Luther held pertinaciously the doctrine of consubstantiation. Melancthon was often timid and undecided. Calvin permitted Servetus to be burned. Cranmer recanted and fell away for a time from his first faith. Jewell subscribed to Popish doctrines  for fear of death. Hooper disturbed the Church of England by over scrupulosity about vestments. The Puritans, in after times, denounced toleration as Abaddon and Apollyon. Wesley and Toplady, last century, abused each other in the most shameful language. Irvin...