Fidelity to the Truths vs Maintaining Christian Unity in the Church
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What happens when the pole of "fidelity to the truth" is emphasized and the pole of "maintaining the unity in the Church" is ignored?
Now I grew up in a church, I don't know what you are going to say, thinking about your background; but in my case, in my background, I grew up in a church in which the first pole (fidelity to the truth), was considered much more often, talked about much more often, emphasized much more often, the second pole (the maintaining of unity).
Indeed, schism, church division was so far down the list in our order of transgressions, something akin to driving 60 miles per hour in a 55 miles an hour zone that we didn't imagine, we actually couldn't imagine, that we were openly defying God's word and breaking His commandments when we separated from one another again and again and again, over issues that were not important enough to justify Christians dividing from one another.
And the result, in our circles, and in many circles like them, was too often a proud censorious, schismatic spirit. When you are constantly saying that this group of Christians are wrong, you are effectively saying, "I am right". And when you keep on saying, "You are wrong and I am right" often enough, you eventually become a proud person.
I can say that about my Church and about my tradition because it is mine; and because a great many of our people, looking back on our history, now are ashamed of it and realize that we made capital mistakes.
We weren't the first; in fact, when I read that prayer to you from John 17, didn't it occur to you to think that that was the prayer that the Father hasn't really heard and answered very completely? Even though He was praying it on the night of His betrayal, the history of the Church ever since has been a history of division, of disagreements leading to separations.
Shortly after the Lord Jesus prayed His prayer, his brand new church was divided by differences of opinion between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians based on their spirit for culture. They were used to things being a certain way. The Jewish Christians, they had been the Christians for two thousand years and now into the church were coming all of these Gentiles who were doing things in a different way and they resented it. They wanted the Gentiles to do what they, the Jews, have always done and to be Christians like they've always been Christians. This was done in utter disregard to the truth that the Apostles had taught them very clearly in which they had affirmed that it was not required of the Gentiles that they become Jews in order to become followers of Jesus Christ.
And then, one division over another, and some times, not even over doctrinal differences. I think one of the extra-ordinary passages in the entire Bible is that final paragraph of verse 15 that tells us about the argument that got to a point between Paul and Barnabas that it became impossible for the two men to work together any longer.
How in the world could that have happened? Paul? And Barnabas? Barnabas the son of encouragement and Paul, the Apostle Paul, the champion of unity? They fell out over John Mark. They couldn't agree whether or not he could be taken along.
I don't know who was at fault in that dispute and I rejoice to think that it was finally overcome and the two men made up again. But if Paul and Barnabas can be divided from one another over something like that, how great a thing it must be, to keep us all one in the Church of God.
There are all sorts of differences through the Apostolic age and then after that, think of all the other differences: from attending temple dinners and then into the 2nd Century, already disputes over the spiritual gifts.
What to do with those who lapsed out of cowardice during persecution? Should we take them back if they repent, or should we not take them back? Two churches were formed over that question. Everyone thought that he was being faithful to the truth; but again and again and again, a new sect was formed, a new group of Christians begun meeting apart from the Christians they had met with before, and the Church got broken up into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces.
These Christians, and multitudes of others like then since, cared mightly about purity of doctrine and defending the faith. But they didn't care nearly as much about the commands that had been issued to us to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace!
Those are not easy things to do at one and the same time. It is hard to keep almost opposite convictions in your heart at one and the same time and to live out both of them at one and the same time. But that's our calling!
In my church history, we divided over wine. Whether Christians could drink wine or smoke Cigarettes or a Cigar. And we divided over eschatology whether we could be post-millennialists or amillennialists or pre-millennialists.
Most people in the world who know the Lord Jesus Christ and love His word and are walking with Him, couldn't tell you what pre-millennialism is or what amillennialism or post-millennialism is; but we managed to divide a church over those questions.
And then we also divided over questions concerning "The proper method of apologetics". Everyone was for defending the faith. But different people had different opinions about the best way to do it. And we divided over that too!
A clearer example that illustrates the imbalance arises when one pole of Biblical truth is preferred to another that seems to compete with it
Let me give you a clearer example of the imbalance that results when one pole of Biblical truth or in this particular case, biblical law, is preferred to another that seems to compete with it or be opposite to it; or from failing to see that God intended for us to care deeply about two very different things at one and the same time.
Some of you may know the name A. W. Pink. You may be familiar with this man's writings but you don't know anything about his life story. There is a biography of Pink published by Banner of Truth and it is a great read. I would encourage you to read it if you can get a copy of this book.
Pink was a very influential Christian in the first half of the 20th Century. He was born in England in 1886, the son of a Christian home, though not converted himself until his teens. He studied briefly at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and then began preaching and pastoring in the United States while still a very young man. He was 20 years of age and a very brilliant the man.
When he was still in his early 20's, A.W. Pink wrote his famous book "The Sovereignty of God" which has perhaps convinced more Christians of that Biblical doctrine than any other book written in the modern period indeed; perhaps more than any other book ever written.
Earlier on, he had also begun what was to become his life's work, the monthly magazine "Studies in the Scriptures" of which he was the Editor and the only contributor from its inception in 1922 to its completion one year after his death in 1952.
Most of the Pink books that you may have seen or read, are simply the publication of material that first appeared in the Studies in this Scripture magazine. After several years in the United States and then two years in Australia, A. W. Pink returned to England where he found few pulpits open to him because of his emphasis on the sovereignty of God and his emphasis on the authority of God's law.
He returned to the United States later where, again, he spent most of his time without any public ministry and in virtual isolation. He returned finally to England and again moved to Stornoway in the Scottish Hebrides where he and his wife lived out the last 12 years of his life: again finding himself unable to associate with any church.
At one point in the 1930's, Pink wrote to a friend, "It is now 17 years since my wife and I partook of the Lord's Supper"! How in the world could that happen, that a man could not find a church in which to celebrate the Lord's Supper when his Saviour commanded him to do that? How could a man reach a point where he thought it right, for him not to have enjoyed fellowship with Lord and the people of God at the Lord's table for 17 years?
We feel it keenly, and God means us and all His people to feel the awful character of the times in which we are living when the departure from the true faith is almost universal.
Now Pink was a great man and he was a sterling Christians in some ways. He was a master student of the Bible. By the time he had been a Christian 25 years, he had read the Bible through 50 times. Pink has a special importance for us who are champions of God's grace because of his writings.
But the fact is, Pink's life was terribly one-sided. He had chosen only one pole: fidelity to the truth, and he had wrapped his arms around it and he ignored every other obligation so plainly and clearly taught in the word of God. Everything for him, was standing for the truth. There was nothing in his life regarding the unity of the people of God. The love that should bind us all together, the tolerance of even the silly and stupid mistakes that Christians make all the time in regard to the teaching of the Bible.
And the proof of that is: during those last 12 years of his life, he and his wife lived just streets away from one of the finest pulpits in Great Britain in that time, that of Kenneth Macrae, whose diaries were edited and published some years ago.
Kenneth Macrae was Christian preaching at its very best, but it wasn't good enough for A. W. Pink!
Now that was an extreme example. There will be very few people like that. But it illustrates the point. You cannot be a faithful Christian, by being particularly faithful at one point, while ignoring other points of equal emphasis in the word of God.
You cannot be a faithful Christian by your loyalty to one pole when the other pole is neglected and forgotten. The devil is happy to ruin us by our zeal for one thing, if by our neglect of the other thing, we bring reproach upon the Lord and upon his Church and upon the testimony of his people.
The Chuch can be toppled just as easily by folks within it pushing hard on one wall, just as it can be toppled by folks outside of it pulling the walls down. But remember the Lord's prayer: "That the world may know that you sent me". The world is not going to be impressed by a squabbling church. They squabble. When we squabble, we are just like them. When we can't handle our disagreements in love and peace, we are just like them. When there is fighting and bickering amongst ourselves as Christians, nothing that the world sees is going to make them think that the Father has sent His Son into the world for the world's salvation.
The spirit of the Pharisee and Pharisee, which I think I came close to being in the tradition in which I was raised, had taught and my denomination in which I was raised, not to show any tolerance for other Christians who did not pronounce our Shibbolleths (c.f. Judges 12:4-6). The Pharisee is just as dangerous to the church as the Sadducee, the liberal who now no longer believes the supernatural faith of the word of God.
Tolerance in a machine, is the allowable deviation from the true. Too little or too much is equally dangerous. Too little: and a machine finally gets too hot and it ceases; too much: it shakes itself apart.
The great work on this subject of Christian unity in the face of disagreements and differences of opinions was written by a 17th Century Scott by the names of James Durham and his book was entitled "Concerning Scandal".
And he starts by saying that although the fault may lie in any particular situation more with one side or the other, yet neither side is seldom free of the responsibility for the division, for the separation.
And then in a very noble passage, Durham says, "Never did men run to quench a fire in a city lest all be destroyed, with more deligence than men ought to bestir themselves to quench this in the church. Never did mariners use more speed to stop a leek in a sheep lest all should be drowned that ministers especially and all Christian people should hasten to stop this beginning of the breaking in of these waters of strife, lest thereby the whole church be overwhelmed."
It was a great gift of God to me, when I began to encounter Christians more faithful, more attractive in their Christianity who didn't represent and didn't necessarily share my own narrow tradition of separatist, fundamentalist Presbyterianism.
And then over the years, I was, I believe, by the Spirit of God, drawn to men whom by their writings, became my heroes and whose thinking profoundly shaped my own. And one of the chief of these was the Scottish pastor who died in 1921, Alexander Whyte. You may be familiar with his Bible Characters or some of his other books (almost all of them are simply collections of sermons that his Church in St George's in Edinburgh).
Now Whyte was a Free Church minister and that denomination had been born in a great schism, a great division: the disruption of 1843. But Dr. Whyte was only a boy when all of that happened; and in the maturity of his ministry, he came to have a very great fear of schism and of what he called "The inevitable sins of temper" that accompany disputes and arguments in the church.
Whyte was an expert on sin. If you want to preach on sin, if you want to write about sin, if you want to get a good idea yourself of how insidious sin is and how much of it there is in your heart and life: you can't do better than read the books of Alexander Whyte.
He was an expert on sin and he once said that he wanted to be an expert on sin. Whyte saw Christian division as almost always a sin in itself and always as an occasion of sin. He spoke strongly against the spirit of division and that was a great help and a great corrective to me and this emphasis lent great power and force to his writing and his preaching as I read it.
But if I can fault alexander Whyte for anything, it was that he made exactly the same mistake A. W. Pink made; he just made it at the other pole. He refused to go to war when the church's loyalty to the word of God was at stake.
When a young scholar by the names of William Robertson Smith begun to introduce German ideas about the Bible which really undermined the authority of the Bible as the infallible word of God (when Robertson Smith begun to introduce those ideas into the Free Church Seminary teaching, the teaching of young ministers for the Church), Alexander Whyte rose in his defence. He credited William Robertson Smith with being a better Christian than he was.
A great Virtue of Alexander Whyte, in general, is that he thought the best of people; but not here. He was certain that the church was going to remain steadfast in its loyalty to the word of God even if some people were teaching new theories from Germany.
We had a famous evangelist in the United States. He was first a baseball player before he was converted and became a preacher by the names of Billy Sunday. He once said in a sermon (this is back in the 1920's after the German ideas had thoroughly infected British and American churches) -- He said that "If you turned hell upside down,, you would find 'Made in Germany' written on the bottom"
Alexander Whyte was certain that his church would never forsake the word of God. He had an absolute confidence that there was no danger from this new thinking, and he lent his very considerable prestige to the side that wished not to make an issue of these things.
Interestingly, Alexander Whyte never embraced these new theories. He never lost or surrendered his confidence in the infallibility of the word of God; but in his zeal for unity, he paved the way for others to do so and made it possible for them to do it while they were ministers and elders in his own church, and Professors in his own Seminary.
In an extraordinarily a short period of time, a church that had been the champion of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, lost touch with that gospel and didn't believe it any longer.
Years later, as an old man at the end of his life and at the end of his work, Alexander Whyte can be found mourning the situation in his church and wondering aloud, "What happened? Where did the old faith go? Where did that commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ go in our church." But to the end, he seemed utterly unaware that he had made a major contribution to the rise of naked unbelief in the Free Church because he was unwilling to fight for the truth and to defend it at the moment when it was under attack.
Now you see what the Lord teaches us to be, what the church's own welfare and that of the world requires us to be is A.W. Pink and Alexander Whyte, at the same time. And what an adornment of both truths and both virtues it would be to have unity worked for and loved and protected and guarded by the very one who is insisting on the Churches loyalty to the truth of God! And to have theological purity loved and fought for by the very person who loves every Christian, who is so careful never to speak or act in a way that would unnecessarily divide Christ's body.
Page 5 ⇦ Previous | Next ⇨ Page 7
What happens when the pole of "fidelity to the truth" is emphasized and the pole of "maintaining the unity in the Church" is ignored?
Now I grew up in a church, I don't know what you are going to say, thinking about your background; but in my case, in my background, I grew up in a church in which the first pole (fidelity to the truth), was considered much more often, talked about much more often, emphasized much more often, the second pole (the maintaining of unity).
Indeed, schism, church division was so far down the list in our order of transgressions, something akin to driving 60 miles per hour in a 55 miles an hour zone that we didn't imagine, we actually couldn't imagine, that we were openly defying God's word and breaking His commandments when we separated from one another again and again and again, over issues that were not important enough to justify Christians dividing from one another.
And the result, in our circles, and in many circles like them, was too often a proud censorious, schismatic spirit. When you are constantly saying that this group of Christians are wrong, you are effectively saying, "I am right". And when you keep on saying, "You are wrong and I am right" often enough, you eventually become a proud person.
I can say that about my Church and about my tradition because it is mine; and because a great many of our people, looking back on our history, now are ashamed of it and realize that we made capital mistakes.
We weren't the first; in fact, when I read that prayer to you from John 17, didn't it occur to you to think that that was the prayer that the Father hasn't really heard and answered very completely? Even though He was praying it on the night of His betrayal, the history of the Church ever since has been a history of division, of disagreements leading to separations.
Shortly after the Lord Jesus prayed His prayer, his brand new church was divided by differences of opinion between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians based on their spirit for culture. They were used to things being a certain way. The Jewish Christians, they had been the Christians for two thousand years and now into the church were coming all of these Gentiles who were doing things in a different way and they resented it. They wanted the Gentiles to do what they, the Jews, have always done and to be Christians like they've always been Christians. This was done in utter disregard to the truth that the Apostles had taught them very clearly in which they had affirmed that it was not required of the Gentiles that they become Jews in order to become followers of Jesus Christ.
And then, one division over another, and some times, not even over doctrinal differences. I think one of the extra-ordinary passages in the entire Bible is that final paragraph of verse 15 that tells us about the argument that got to a point between Paul and Barnabas that it became impossible for the two men to work together any longer.
How in the world could that have happened? Paul? And Barnabas? Barnabas the son of encouragement and Paul, the Apostle Paul, the champion of unity? They fell out over John Mark. They couldn't agree whether or not he could be taken along.
I don't know who was at fault in that dispute and I rejoice to think that it was finally overcome and the two men made up again. But if Paul and Barnabas can be divided from one another over something like that, how great a thing it must be, to keep us all one in the Church of God.
There are all sorts of differences through the Apostolic age and then after that, think of all the other differences: from attending temple dinners and then into the 2nd Century, already disputes over the spiritual gifts.
What to do with those who lapsed out of cowardice during persecution? Should we take them back if they repent, or should we not take them back? Two churches were formed over that question. Everyone thought that he was being faithful to the truth; but again and again and again, a new sect was formed, a new group of Christians begun meeting apart from the Christians they had met with before, and the Church got broken up into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces.
These Christians, and multitudes of others like then since, cared mightly about purity of doctrine and defending the faith. But they didn't care nearly as much about the commands that had been issued to us to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace!
Those are not easy things to do at one and the same time. It is hard to keep almost opposite convictions in your heart at one and the same time and to live out both of them at one and the same time. But that's our calling!
In my church history, we divided over wine. Whether Christians could drink wine or smoke Cigarettes or a Cigar. And we divided over eschatology whether we could be post-millennialists or amillennialists or pre-millennialists.
Most people in the world who know the Lord Jesus Christ and love His word and are walking with Him, couldn't tell you what pre-millennialism is or what amillennialism or post-millennialism is; but we managed to divide a church over those questions.
And then we also divided over questions concerning "The proper method of apologetics". Everyone was for defending the faith. But different people had different opinions about the best way to do it. And we divided over that too!
A clearer example that illustrates the imbalance arises when one pole of Biblical truth is preferred to another that seems to compete with it
Let me give you a clearer example of the imbalance that results when one pole of Biblical truth or in this particular case, biblical law, is preferred to another that seems to compete with it or be opposite to it; or from failing to see that God intended for us to care deeply about two very different things at one and the same time.
Some of you may know the name A. W. Pink. You may be familiar with this man's writings but you don't know anything about his life story. There is a biography of Pink published by Banner of Truth and it is a great read. I would encourage you to read it if you can get a copy of this book.
Pink was a very influential Christian in the first half of the 20th Century. He was born in England in 1886, the son of a Christian home, though not converted himself until his teens. He studied briefly at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and then began preaching and pastoring in the United States while still a very young man. He was 20 years of age and a very brilliant the man.
When he was still in his early 20's, A.W. Pink wrote his famous book "The Sovereignty of God" which has perhaps convinced more Christians of that Biblical doctrine than any other book written in the modern period indeed; perhaps more than any other book ever written.
Earlier on, he had also begun what was to become his life's work, the monthly magazine "Studies in the Scriptures" of which he was the Editor and the only contributor from its inception in 1922 to its completion one year after his death in 1952.
Most of the Pink books that you may have seen or read, are simply the publication of material that first appeared in the Studies in this Scripture magazine. After several years in the United States and then two years in Australia, A. W. Pink returned to England where he found few pulpits open to him because of his emphasis on the sovereignty of God and his emphasis on the authority of God's law.
He returned to the United States later where, again, he spent most of his time without any public ministry and in virtual isolation. He returned finally to England and again moved to Stornoway in the Scottish Hebrides where he and his wife lived out the last 12 years of his life: again finding himself unable to associate with any church.
At one point in the 1930's, Pink wrote to a friend, "It is now 17 years since my wife and I partook of the Lord's Supper"! How in the world could that happen, that a man could not find a church in which to celebrate the Lord's Supper when his Saviour commanded him to do that? How could a man reach a point where he thought it right, for him not to have enjoyed fellowship with Lord and the people of God at the Lord's table for 17 years?
We feel it keenly, and God means us and all His people to feel the awful character of the times in which we are living when the departure from the true faith is almost universal.
Now Pink was a great man and he was a sterling Christians in some ways. He was a master student of the Bible. By the time he had been a Christian 25 years, he had read the Bible through 50 times. Pink has a special importance for us who are champions of God's grace because of his writings.
But the fact is, Pink's life was terribly one-sided. He had chosen only one pole: fidelity to the truth, and he had wrapped his arms around it and he ignored every other obligation so plainly and clearly taught in the word of God. Everything for him, was standing for the truth. There was nothing in his life regarding the unity of the people of God. The love that should bind us all together, the tolerance of even the silly and stupid mistakes that Christians make all the time in regard to the teaching of the Bible.
And the proof of that is: during those last 12 years of his life, he and his wife lived just streets away from one of the finest pulpits in Great Britain in that time, that of Kenneth Macrae, whose diaries were edited and published some years ago.
Kenneth Macrae was Christian preaching at its very best, but it wasn't good enough for A. W. Pink!
Now that was an extreme example. There will be very few people like that. But it illustrates the point. You cannot be a faithful Christian, by being particularly faithful at one point, while ignoring other points of equal emphasis in the word of God.
You cannot be a faithful Christian by your loyalty to one pole when the other pole is neglected and forgotten. The devil is happy to ruin us by our zeal for one thing, if by our neglect of the other thing, we bring reproach upon the Lord and upon his Church and upon the testimony of his people.
The Chuch can be toppled just as easily by folks within it pushing hard on one wall, just as it can be toppled by folks outside of it pulling the walls down. But remember the Lord's prayer: "That the world may know that you sent me". The world is not going to be impressed by a squabbling church. They squabble. When we squabble, we are just like them. When we can't handle our disagreements in love and peace, we are just like them. When there is fighting and bickering amongst ourselves as Christians, nothing that the world sees is going to make them think that the Father has sent His Son into the world for the world's salvation.
The spirit of the Pharisee and Pharisee, which I think I came close to being in the tradition in which I was raised, had taught and my denomination in which I was raised, not to show any tolerance for other Christians who did not pronounce our Shibbolleths (c.f. Judges 12:4-6). The Pharisee is just as dangerous to the church as the Sadducee, the liberal who now no longer believes the supernatural faith of the word of God.
Tolerance in a machine, is the allowable deviation from the true. Too little or too much is equally dangerous. Too little: and a machine finally gets too hot and it ceases; too much: it shakes itself apart.
The great work on this subject of Christian unity in the face of disagreements and differences of opinions was written by a 17th Century Scott by the names of James Durham and his book was entitled "Concerning Scandal".
And he starts by saying that although the fault may lie in any particular situation more with one side or the other, yet neither side is seldom free of the responsibility for the division, for the separation.
And then in a very noble passage, Durham says, "Never did men run to quench a fire in a city lest all be destroyed, with more deligence than men ought to bestir themselves to quench this in the church. Never did mariners use more speed to stop a leek in a sheep lest all should be drowned that ministers especially and all Christian people should hasten to stop this beginning of the breaking in of these waters of strife, lest thereby the whole church be overwhelmed."
It was a great gift of God to me, when I began to encounter Christians more faithful, more attractive in their Christianity who didn't represent and didn't necessarily share my own narrow tradition of separatist, fundamentalist Presbyterianism.
And then over the years, I was, I believe, by the Spirit of God, drawn to men whom by their writings, became my heroes and whose thinking profoundly shaped my own. And one of the chief of these was the Scottish pastor who died in 1921, Alexander Whyte. You may be familiar with his Bible Characters or some of his other books (almost all of them are simply collections of sermons that his Church in St George's in Edinburgh).
Now Whyte was a Free Church minister and that denomination had been born in a great schism, a great division: the disruption of 1843. But Dr. Whyte was only a boy when all of that happened; and in the maturity of his ministry, he came to have a very great fear of schism and of what he called "The inevitable sins of temper" that accompany disputes and arguments in the church.
Whyte was an expert on sin. If you want to preach on sin, if you want to write about sin, if you want to get a good idea yourself of how insidious sin is and how much of it there is in your heart and life: you can't do better than read the books of Alexander Whyte.
He was an expert on sin and he once said that he wanted to be an expert on sin. Whyte saw Christian division as almost always a sin in itself and always as an occasion of sin. He spoke strongly against the spirit of division and that was a great help and a great corrective to me and this emphasis lent great power and force to his writing and his preaching as I read it.
But if I can fault alexander Whyte for anything, it was that he made exactly the same mistake A. W. Pink made; he just made it at the other pole. He refused to go to war when the church's loyalty to the word of God was at stake.
When a young scholar by the names of William Robertson Smith begun to introduce German ideas about the Bible which really undermined the authority of the Bible as the infallible word of God (when Robertson Smith begun to introduce those ideas into the Free Church Seminary teaching, the teaching of young ministers for the Church), Alexander Whyte rose in his defence. He credited William Robertson Smith with being a better Christian than he was.
A great Virtue of Alexander Whyte, in general, is that he thought the best of people; but not here. He was certain that the church was going to remain steadfast in its loyalty to the word of God even if some people were teaching new theories from Germany.
We had a famous evangelist in the United States. He was first a baseball player before he was converted and became a preacher by the names of Billy Sunday. He once said in a sermon (this is back in the 1920's after the German ideas had thoroughly infected British and American churches) -- He said that "If you turned hell upside down,, you would find 'Made in Germany' written on the bottom"
Alexander Whyte was certain that his church would never forsake the word of God. He had an absolute confidence that there was no danger from this new thinking, and he lent his very considerable prestige to the side that wished not to make an issue of these things.
Interestingly, Alexander Whyte never embraced these new theories. He never lost or surrendered his confidence in the infallibility of the word of God; but in his zeal for unity, he paved the way for others to do so and made it possible for them to do it while they were ministers and elders in his own church, and Professors in his own Seminary.
In an extraordinarily a short period of time, a church that had been the champion of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, lost touch with that gospel and didn't believe it any longer.
Years later, as an old man at the end of his life and at the end of his work, Alexander Whyte can be found mourning the situation in his church and wondering aloud, "What happened? Where did the old faith go? Where did that commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ go in our church." But to the end, he seemed utterly unaware that he had made a major contribution to the rise of naked unbelief in the Free Church because he was unwilling to fight for the truth and to defend it at the moment when it was under attack.
Now you see what the Lord teaches us to be, what the church's own welfare and that of the world requires us to be is A.W. Pink and Alexander Whyte, at the same time. And what an adornment of both truths and both virtues it would be to have unity worked for and loved and protected and guarded by the very one who is insisting on the Churches loyalty to the truth of God! And to have theological purity loved and fought for by the very person who loves every Christian, who is so careful never to speak or act in a way that would unnecessarily divide Christ's body.
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