From Dave’s Laptop March 22, 2010
Next Sunday will be very special! Not only is it Palm Sunday; not only will we baptize Mary Beverly; but Dr. Daniel Vestal, Coordinator of the National CBF and the author of our It’s Time! materials, will also be with us.
The adults will meet together with Dr. Vestal in Rosser Hall during the Bible Study hour, followed by his preaching in both services, and then we’ll eat lunch together and hear from him once more.
As we prepare for Dr. Vestal’s time with us, I thought it might be good for us to reflect on some of the things it means to be “a missional church.” These thoughts are from various sources, especially www.friendofmissional.org.
• The missional church is a collection of committed believers acting in concert to fulfill the Great Commission of Jesus Christ.
• The missional church is one where people are stretching into what it means to be on mission for the Kingdom of God as their primary identity and vocation.
• The missional church knows that they must be a cross-cultural people and must adopt a missionary stance in relation to their community.
• The missional church will be engaged with the culture (in the world) without being absorbed by the culture (not of the world).
• The missional church is evangelistic and faithfully proclaims the gospel through word and deed. How we embody the gospel in our community is as important as what we say.
• The missional church understands the power of the gospel and does not lose confidence in it.
• The missional church aligns all its activities around the Great Commission.
• The missional church seeks to put its neighbors’ good ahead of their own.
• The missional church is prayer-filled, Bible-centered, virtuous, compassionate, integrated, and spiritually powerful.
• The missional church practices hospitality that brings “outsiders” inside the love of God.
• The missional church is totally reliant on God in all it does. It moves beyond superficial faith to supernatural living.
• The missional church is desperately dependent on prayer.
• The missional church is orthodox in its view of the gospel and scripture, but culturally relevant in its methods and practice so that it can engage the world view of the hearers.
• The missional church feeds deeply on the scriptures throughout the week.
• The missional church is a community where all members are involved in learning “the way of Jesus.” Growth toward spiritual maturity is expected.
• The missional church helps people discover and develop their spiritual gifts.
• The missional church is a healing community where people carry each other’s’ burdens and restore each other gently.
• The missional church is not just about how many people come to our church services, but about how many people our church serves.
• The missional church is not just about how many people attend our ministries, but about how many people have we equipped for ministry.
• The missional church is not just about how many people minister inside the church, but about how many minister outside the church.
• The missional church is not just about helping people become more whole themselves, but about helping people bring more wholeness to their world (i.e., justice, healing, relief).
• The missional church is not just about how many ministries we start, but about how many ministries we help.
• The missional church is not just about how many unbelievers we bring into the community of faith, but about how many believers we help experience healthy community.
• The missional church is not just about counting the resources that God gives us to steward, but about counting how many good stewards are we developing for the sake of those not yet in the Kingdom.
• The missional church is not just about how much peace we bring to individuals, but about how much peace we bring to our world.
• The missional church is not just about how unified our local church is, but about how unified the Church is in our neighborhood, city and world.
• The missional church is not just about how much we immerse ourselves in the text, but about how faithfully we live in the Story of God.
• The missional church is not just about being concerned about how our country is doing, but about being concerned for the welfare of other countries.
• The missional church is not just about how many people we bring into the kingdom, but about how much of the kingdom we bring to the earth.
• See you Sunday!
Dave
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Four Fragile Freedoms
“Four Fragile Freedoms”
Acts 16:16-34
If I were to ask you why you’re a Baptist or why you attend this particular Baptist church, I suspect that you might offer a wide variety of reasons. My good friend, Dwight Moody, has suggested that “the church of Jesus Christ is like an orchestra. Each church and denomination plays its part. Catholics exemplify order, continuity, and loyalty. Presbyterians teach us about the sovereignty of God and the centrality of Scripture. Methodists brought to us new emphasis on revivals and spiritual disciplines. Pentecostals reintroduced healing to the modern church and embody what it means for the church to be a counter-culture to the prevailing secularism of our day. . . .
So what part do Baptists play in the orchestra? Everybody has some opinion about Baptists, and there are so many different kinds of Baptists that nearly every opinion has some truth about it! One of the reasons there are so many varieties of Baptists is that Baptists are passionately committed to the concept of freedom. Today’s emphasis in It’s Time! is It’s Time . . . to Rediscover the Baptist Heritage & to Renew the Baptist Witness, and it’s the idea of freedom that I want to highlight about our heritage this morning.
Dr. Walter Shurden of Mercer University, an historian of Baptists and their ways, has distilled Baptist distinctives into what he called “four fragile freedoms.” Those four freedoms form the skeleton for this message, and I’ve attached a question to each of them that may help us to drill down into their meaning. The four freedoms and their attendant questions go like this:
Religious Freedom: What will be your Commitment?
Church Freedom: Who will be your Community?
Bible Freedom: What will be your Authority?
Soul Freedom: Who will be your Guide?
First, Religious Freedom: What will be your Commitment? It may surprise you to know that religious freedom was not established on our own shores when the Pilgrims landed here. The Pilgrims came to the New World to find religious freedom for themselves, but they did not extend this freedom to others. Ten of our original thirteen colonies had some form of an established state church, as they had had in Europe. Anyone who wanted to preach or to lead a church in the New World had to have a license from the established church, and if they did not, they were often fined, or flogged, or imprisoned.
It was in this way that the Puritans drove Roger Williams out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and into the wilderness, where in 1636 he founded what would become the colony of Rhode Island, the first colony in the New World where religious liberty was guaranteed for every person. In 1639, Roger Williams founded the First Baptist Church of Providence, which was the first Baptist church in the New World.
Between the years of 1767 and 1778, forty-two Baptist ministers were imprisoned right here in Virginia for preaching without a license from the state church. Growing out of this persecution, John Leland, a Virginia Baptist minister, was the driving force behind the First Amendment to the Constitution, the sixteen most influential words ever written in support of religious liberty: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Rivers of ink have been spilled in explanation of these sixteen words, but the principles involved are simply stated: Church and State shall be separate—not hostile toward each other, but separate—and Religious Freedom shall be afforded to every person within the bounds of this Republic. Religious Freedom means that persons in these United States have genuine freedom to worship God as their consciences direct them. Religious Freedom equally means that persons have the right not to be a part of any religious body at all, if that is their choice.
We do well to remember that Religious Freedom in this country has been purchased primarily through the sacrificial commitment of Baptists, and authentic Baptists—free and faithful Baptists—continue to defend it—for themselves, and for everyone else. So what did Baptists want to do with this freedom? That question brings us to the second freedom Baptists hold dear: Church Freedom, and its attendant question, “Who will be your Community?”
As the years accumulate, I think that you’ll find that there are really only three questions that matter in life. The first of these questions is “How can my life have significance—to mean something, to have mattered—when all is said and done?” The second question is “How can I develop relationships—a durable community—to sustain me on the journey of life?” (I’ll come to the third, and most important question, at the end.)
The Good News is that Jesus Christ gives us answers to both of these questions, and His answers are the only ones that really work. When Jesus began to teach, He gathered a dozen men around Him—not academics or church folks, but ordinary working men—and He began to show them how to become a different kind of community than the world had ever known.
Jesus’ disciples chose to follow Him, and such choice is at the root of what it means to be Baptist. Dr. Fisher Humphreys of Samford University described the very first Baptist congregation this way:
Though believer’s baptism was practiced first by Anabaptists, it was a dramatic moment in the history of the Christian church when a group of English women and men in Amsterdam, under the leadership of John Smyth, renounced the baptism which they had received as infants as no baptism at all, and submitted to baptism as adult believers. In the winter of 1608 or 1609 Smyth baptized first himself and then the members of his congregation, thereby forming the first Baptist church.
The significant thing about this event was that these believers, by studying the pages of the New Testament, concluded that Jesus’ call to follow Him and to enter into the community He created was and is a commitment that must be voluntarily and intelligently undertaken. Having been baptized into the state church as children, those first Baptists began the practice known as “believer’s baptism,” which continues to distinguish Baptists from most other faith communities. Believer’s baptism means that Baptist churches baptize and count as their members only persons who have freely chosen to commit their lives to living in the Way of Jesus.
This commitment has had a broad effect. Church historian Martin Marty—a Lutheran—
has written about the “baptistification” of American religion, “by which he means the widespread acceptance among Americans of the idea that the only genuine religion is one that one accepts for oneself.”
Now if you have any experience with churches at all, including any Baptist church we could name, you know that churches are filled with very ordinary people whose lives are imperfect and whose attitudes are frequently flawed. And you may very well have said to yourself, “What’s up with that? Who needs it?” Those are very good questions.
It’s quite true that churches are full of very ordinary, sinful people. But in our better moments, we’re also people who are doing our very best to become more and more like the kind of community that Jesus calls us to be. Our churches are composed of persons who know in our hearts that it really is possible to build community on the foundation of repentance and forgiveness, just as Jesus taught. We in the churches give our best—though imperfect—efforts to building such community, and we invite others to freely join us on this journey.
The third freedom I want to consider with you is Bible Freedom: “What will be your Authority?” As you continue your life’s journey toward significance and community, how will you find your path? What will provide guidance along the way?
I once had a very nice magnetic compass to help me find my way on geographic journeys.
My compass broke, but I’m sure you know that a magnetic compass points to magnetic North. This GPS receiver is an instrument that helps me find my way by pointing to true North. Back in the day when I was an engineering officer on destroyers during the Viet Nam war, submariners bragged that their new GPS equipment could locate a submarine within 350 feet. Now, nearly forty years later, this receiver gives my position to within six feet!
Now while geographic location—where my body is—is frequently very important, it’s not nearly so important as knowing my spiritual location—where my life is. This Bible also shows direction and location. It shows me where my life is . . . and how to get from where I am to Jesus.
Because the Bible is so important in this way, Baptists have always been “people of the Book,” and Baptists have given themselves to making the Bible freely available to anyone who wants one. William Tyndale, an Anabaptist (forerunners of Baptists), was hanged and his body was burned in England in 1536 because he dared to translate the Bible into the language of the people so that even a plowboy could have one.
Sometimes, though, such Bible Freedom has led to freedom from the Bible rather than freedom for the Bible. Dr. Bill Tuck, a beloved former Pastor of this congregation, put it this way:
Although the Bible is still popular and continues to be a national best seller, it is not authoritative for many, because it is unread and not understood by most people. . . . How is the Bible used by most people who purchase it? It is filled with newspaper clippings of weddings or funerals; roses are pressed in it; and pictures of children, grandchildren, or other relatives are kept there. It lies on a table like a magic talisman, signifying that this family is religious.”
Does that sound familiar? I don’t know what your own experience with the Bible has been, but I encourage you to make an honest inquiry into the truth of the Bible a part of your life this year. As Linus said to Charlie Brown, “I have begun to unfold the mysteries of the Bible.” “Really!” Charlie Brown said. “How?” “I’ve started to read it!” Linus replied. Because of Bible Freedom, you’re able to do that, too.
Don’t let someone else do your Bible study for you. Get a copy of a modern edition of the Bible, and read the New Testament. It’s only about 350 pages long. But I warn you, the exploration will not be without risk. You will be changed.
Finally, I want to look with you at Soul Freedom: “Who will be your Guide?” Soul Freedom is the anchoring freedom that has caused Baptists to fight for Religious Freedom, Church Freedom, and Bible Freedom. I’ve already mentioned the Baptist commitment to personal religious experience. The great Danish philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard, contended that religion without vital personal experience is lifeless and dead, “just about as genuine as tea made from a bit of paper which once lay in a drawer beside another bit of paper which had once been used to wrap up a few dried tea leaves from which tea had already been made three times.”
I suspect that many, if not most of us, have known persons who claimed to follow Jesus but whose lives gave little evidence of a commitment to follow Him. Unfortunately, there are quite a few folk who “talk the talk” but don’t “walk the walk.” As evangelist Sam Jones said in a revival meeting in Owensboro, Kentucky, “You can be a good church member in Owensboro and not amount to much.”
Such insipid churchgoing is not the goal of Soul Freedom. Soul Freedom intends to make possible Jesus followers whose lives are prayer-filled, Bible-centered, virtuous, compassionate, integrated, and spiritually powerful!
The question that goes with Soul Freedom is “Who will be your Guide?” For Christians, there is no Guide but Jesus of Nazareth, the fullness of the eternal God disclosed in human flesh; and it is only in obedience to Him as the Guide for Life that we find genuine Soul Freedom and real spiritual power.
There are many today who try to avoid obeying Jesus by writing Him off as a “great moral teacher.” After saying this, such folk congratulate themselves on being very “open minded,” “intellectual,” and “inclusive”; and, after “tipping their hats” to Jesus in this way, they then feel free to ignore Him as they go about their lives. The truth of the matter is, though, that an intellectually honest approach to the question of who Jesus is absolutely excludes the position they have chosen. Thinking of Jesus as a “great moral teacher” is not one of the options available. Why not?
The religious leaders in Jerusalem killed Jesus for many reasons, but one reason was primary. Jesus was killed because He claimed to be God. Even a cursory reading of the four Gospels confirms beyond a doubt that Jesus said He was God.
Now there are three—and only three—possibilities if a person claims to be God. The most likely option is that the person is mentally ill. Our psychiatric hospitals have many patients who think that they are God. When I worked for a semester as a chaplain in Central State Hospital near Louisville, Kentucky, I talked with a number of them.
The next most likely option is that a person who claims to be God knows this to be a lie, but uses this claim to gain power and influence over persons who can be persuaded that it is true. History is full of charismatic cultic leaders who destroyed entire communities through their evil influence.
The only other choice—the only other choice—is that a man who claims to be God is who He says He is. “Great moral teachers” have many things to teach us, but they don’t claim to be God. I challenge you to examine the evidence for yourselves and to decide whether the Jesus you meet in the Bible is crazy, whether He is a manipulative liar, or whether He is in fact God.
Baptists give themselves passionately to the causes of Religious Freedom, Church Freedom, Bible Freedom, and Soul Freedom so that you will have the opportunity to decide for yourself the answer to the only question that will matter when all is said and done: as Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do YOU say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15).
With every other Baptist, I pray that your journey’s end will lead you to the Cross.
Acts 16:16-34
If I were to ask you why you’re a Baptist or why you attend this particular Baptist church, I suspect that you might offer a wide variety of reasons. My good friend, Dwight Moody, has suggested that “the church of Jesus Christ is like an orchestra. Each church and denomination plays its part. Catholics exemplify order, continuity, and loyalty. Presbyterians teach us about the sovereignty of God and the centrality of Scripture. Methodists brought to us new emphasis on revivals and spiritual disciplines. Pentecostals reintroduced healing to the modern church and embody what it means for the church to be a counter-culture to the prevailing secularism of our day. . . .
So what part do Baptists play in the orchestra? Everybody has some opinion about Baptists, and there are so many different kinds of Baptists that nearly every opinion has some truth about it! One of the reasons there are so many varieties of Baptists is that Baptists are passionately committed to the concept of freedom. Today’s emphasis in It’s Time! is It’s Time . . . to Rediscover the Baptist Heritage & to Renew the Baptist Witness, and it’s the idea of freedom that I want to highlight about our heritage this morning.
Dr. Walter Shurden of Mercer University, an historian of Baptists and their ways, has distilled Baptist distinctives into what he called “four fragile freedoms.” Those four freedoms form the skeleton for this message, and I’ve attached a question to each of them that may help us to drill down into their meaning. The four freedoms and their attendant questions go like this:
Religious Freedom: What will be your Commitment?
Church Freedom: Who will be your Community?
Bible Freedom: What will be your Authority?
Soul Freedom: Who will be your Guide?
First, Religious Freedom: What will be your Commitment? It may surprise you to know that religious freedom was not established on our own shores when the Pilgrims landed here. The Pilgrims came to the New World to find religious freedom for themselves, but they did not extend this freedom to others. Ten of our original thirteen colonies had some form of an established state church, as they had had in Europe. Anyone who wanted to preach or to lead a church in the New World had to have a license from the established church, and if they did not, they were often fined, or flogged, or imprisoned.
It was in this way that the Puritans drove Roger Williams out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and into the wilderness, where in 1636 he founded what would become the colony of Rhode Island, the first colony in the New World where religious liberty was guaranteed for every person. In 1639, Roger Williams founded the First Baptist Church of Providence, which was the first Baptist church in the New World.
Between the years of 1767 and 1778, forty-two Baptist ministers were imprisoned right here in Virginia for preaching without a license from the state church. Growing out of this persecution, John Leland, a Virginia Baptist minister, was the driving force behind the First Amendment to the Constitution, the sixteen most influential words ever written in support of religious liberty: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Rivers of ink have been spilled in explanation of these sixteen words, but the principles involved are simply stated: Church and State shall be separate—not hostile toward each other, but separate—and Religious Freedom shall be afforded to every person within the bounds of this Republic. Religious Freedom means that persons in these United States have genuine freedom to worship God as their consciences direct them. Religious Freedom equally means that persons have the right not to be a part of any religious body at all, if that is their choice.
We do well to remember that Religious Freedom in this country has been purchased primarily through the sacrificial commitment of Baptists, and authentic Baptists—free and faithful Baptists—continue to defend it—for themselves, and for everyone else. So what did Baptists want to do with this freedom? That question brings us to the second freedom Baptists hold dear: Church Freedom, and its attendant question, “Who will be your Community?”
As the years accumulate, I think that you’ll find that there are really only three questions that matter in life. The first of these questions is “How can my life have significance—to mean something, to have mattered—when all is said and done?” The second question is “How can I develop relationships—a durable community—to sustain me on the journey of life?” (I’ll come to the third, and most important question, at the end.)
The Good News is that Jesus Christ gives us answers to both of these questions, and His answers are the only ones that really work. When Jesus began to teach, He gathered a dozen men around Him—not academics or church folks, but ordinary working men—and He began to show them how to become a different kind of community than the world had ever known.
Jesus’ disciples chose to follow Him, and such choice is at the root of what it means to be Baptist. Dr. Fisher Humphreys of Samford University described the very first Baptist congregation this way:
Though believer’s baptism was practiced first by Anabaptists, it was a dramatic moment in the history of the Christian church when a group of English women and men in Amsterdam, under the leadership of John Smyth, renounced the baptism which they had received as infants as no baptism at all, and submitted to baptism as adult believers. In the winter of 1608 or 1609 Smyth baptized first himself and then the members of his congregation, thereby forming the first Baptist church.
The significant thing about this event was that these believers, by studying the pages of the New Testament, concluded that Jesus’ call to follow Him and to enter into the community He created was and is a commitment that must be voluntarily and intelligently undertaken. Having been baptized into the state church as children, those first Baptists began the practice known as “believer’s baptism,” which continues to distinguish Baptists from most other faith communities. Believer’s baptism means that Baptist churches baptize and count as their members only persons who have freely chosen to commit their lives to living in the Way of Jesus.
This commitment has had a broad effect. Church historian Martin Marty—a Lutheran—
has written about the “baptistification” of American religion, “by which he means the widespread acceptance among Americans of the idea that the only genuine religion is one that one accepts for oneself.”
Now if you have any experience with churches at all, including any Baptist church we could name, you know that churches are filled with very ordinary people whose lives are imperfect and whose attitudes are frequently flawed. And you may very well have said to yourself, “What’s up with that? Who needs it?” Those are very good questions.
It’s quite true that churches are full of very ordinary, sinful people. But in our better moments, we’re also people who are doing our very best to become more and more like the kind of community that Jesus calls us to be. Our churches are composed of persons who know in our hearts that it really is possible to build community on the foundation of repentance and forgiveness, just as Jesus taught. We in the churches give our best—though imperfect—efforts to building such community, and we invite others to freely join us on this journey.
The third freedom I want to consider with you is Bible Freedom: “What will be your Authority?” As you continue your life’s journey toward significance and community, how will you find your path? What will provide guidance along the way?
I once had a very nice magnetic compass to help me find my way on geographic journeys.
My compass broke, but I’m sure you know that a magnetic compass points to magnetic North. This GPS receiver is an instrument that helps me find my way by pointing to true North. Back in the day when I was an engineering officer on destroyers during the Viet Nam war, submariners bragged that their new GPS equipment could locate a submarine within 350 feet. Now, nearly forty years later, this receiver gives my position to within six feet!
Now while geographic location—where my body is—is frequently very important, it’s not nearly so important as knowing my spiritual location—where my life is. This Bible also shows direction and location. It shows me where my life is . . . and how to get from where I am to Jesus.
Because the Bible is so important in this way, Baptists have always been “people of the Book,” and Baptists have given themselves to making the Bible freely available to anyone who wants one. William Tyndale, an Anabaptist (forerunners of Baptists), was hanged and his body was burned in England in 1536 because he dared to translate the Bible into the language of the people so that even a plowboy could have one.
Sometimes, though, such Bible Freedom has led to freedom from the Bible rather than freedom for the Bible. Dr. Bill Tuck, a beloved former Pastor of this congregation, put it this way:
Although the Bible is still popular and continues to be a national best seller, it is not authoritative for many, because it is unread and not understood by most people. . . . How is the Bible used by most people who purchase it? It is filled with newspaper clippings of weddings or funerals; roses are pressed in it; and pictures of children, grandchildren, or other relatives are kept there. It lies on a table like a magic talisman, signifying that this family is religious.”
Does that sound familiar? I don’t know what your own experience with the Bible has been, but I encourage you to make an honest inquiry into the truth of the Bible a part of your life this year. As Linus said to Charlie Brown, “I have begun to unfold the mysteries of the Bible.” “Really!” Charlie Brown said. “How?” “I’ve started to read it!” Linus replied. Because of Bible Freedom, you’re able to do that, too.
Don’t let someone else do your Bible study for you. Get a copy of a modern edition of the Bible, and read the New Testament. It’s only about 350 pages long. But I warn you, the exploration will not be without risk. You will be changed.
Finally, I want to look with you at Soul Freedom: “Who will be your Guide?” Soul Freedom is the anchoring freedom that has caused Baptists to fight for Religious Freedom, Church Freedom, and Bible Freedom. I’ve already mentioned the Baptist commitment to personal religious experience. The great Danish philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard, contended that religion without vital personal experience is lifeless and dead, “just about as genuine as tea made from a bit of paper which once lay in a drawer beside another bit of paper which had once been used to wrap up a few dried tea leaves from which tea had already been made three times.”
I suspect that many, if not most of us, have known persons who claimed to follow Jesus but whose lives gave little evidence of a commitment to follow Him. Unfortunately, there are quite a few folk who “talk the talk” but don’t “walk the walk.” As evangelist Sam Jones said in a revival meeting in Owensboro, Kentucky, “You can be a good church member in Owensboro and not amount to much.”
Such insipid churchgoing is not the goal of Soul Freedom. Soul Freedom intends to make possible Jesus followers whose lives are prayer-filled, Bible-centered, virtuous, compassionate, integrated, and spiritually powerful!
The question that goes with Soul Freedom is “Who will be your Guide?” For Christians, there is no Guide but Jesus of Nazareth, the fullness of the eternal God disclosed in human flesh; and it is only in obedience to Him as the Guide for Life that we find genuine Soul Freedom and real spiritual power.
There are many today who try to avoid obeying Jesus by writing Him off as a “great moral teacher.” After saying this, such folk congratulate themselves on being very “open minded,” “intellectual,” and “inclusive”; and, after “tipping their hats” to Jesus in this way, they then feel free to ignore Him as they go about their lives. The truth of the matter is, though, that an intellectually honest approach to the question of who Jesus is absolutely excludes the position they have chosen. Thinking of Jesus as a “great moral teacher” is not one of the options available. Why not?
The religious leaders in Jerusalem killed Jesus for many reasons, but one reason was primary. Jesus was killed because He claimed to be God. Even a cursory reading of the four Gospels confirms beyond a doubt that Jesus said He was God.
Now there are three—and only three—possibilities if a person claims to be God. The most likely option is that the person is mentally ill. Our psychiatric hospitals have many patients who think that they are God. When I worked for a semester as a chaplain in Central State Hospital near Louisville, Kentucky, I talked with a number of them.
The next most likely option is that a person who claims to be God knows this to be a lie, but uses this claim to gain power and influence over persons who can be persuaded that it is true. History is full of charismatic cultic leaders who destroyed entire communities through their evil influence.
The only other choice—the only other choice—is that a man who claims to be God is who He says He is. “Great moral teachers” have many things to teach us, but they don’t claim to be God. I challenge you to examine the evidence for yourselves and to decide whether the Jesus you meet in the Bible is crazy, whether He is a manipulative liar, or whether He is in fact God.
Baptists give themselves passionately to the causes of Religious Freedom, Church Freedom, Bible Freedom, and Soul Freedom so that you will have the opportunity to decide for yourself the answer to the only question that will matter when all is said and done: as Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do YOU say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15).
With every other Baptist, I pray that your journey’s end will lead you to the Cross.
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