Little light shines real bright

(new article tomorrow)

In a last letter to her imprisoned 33-year-old husband hours before he was executed, Mary Love, wife of the great 17th century Puritan preacher Christopher Love, wrote:

"Thou dost but leave earth for heaven and changest a prison for a palace. And if natural affections should begin to arise, I hope that the spirit of grace that is within thee will quell them, knowing that all things here below are but dung and dross in comparison of those things that are above. I know thou keepest thine eye fixed on the hope of glory, which makes thy feet trample on the loss of earth.

"My dear, I know God hath not only prepared glory for thee, and thee for it, but I am persuaded that He will sweeten the way for thee to come to the enjoyment of it. When thou art putting thy clothes on that morning, O think, 'I am now putting on my wedding garments to go to be married to my everlasting Redeemer.'

"When the messenger of death comes to thee, let him not seem dreadful to thee, but look on him as a messenger that brings thee tidings of eternal life. When thou goest up the scaffold, think (as thou saidst to me) that it is but thy fiery chariot to carry thee up to thy Father’s house."

"Remember that he was beheaded the next day all because he had a Bible!" reminded Richard Jordan in a sermon. "He took a Protestant Bible and went out and preached ‘justification by grace through faith plus nothing.’ No tradition, no works, no church, nothing—just 'Christ and Him alone.'

“The morning after he got that letter from his wife, the court gave him a legal document that said if he would just recant ‘faith alone in Jesus Christ’ they’d spare him. She wrote in her letter, ‘Don’t, I’ll see you in glory.’

“You can sit in an air-conditioned room tonight with a Bible in your hand and faith in your heart because of people like that! And it was people like that who produced this recovery of Pauline truth of justification. 

“In the First Great Awakening in the 1700s, men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield helped recover the truth of ‘justification by grace through faith alone plus nothing.’ The result of that Great Awakening was the American Revolution, by the way. When the pendulum swung back.

*****

“You know what’s going to happen this time around? The heart and the core of Pauline truth isn't going to be there. People are going to need us desperately like never before.

“A little light shines real bright in the darkness. I challenge you tonight to be a Philippian—to take your own life and identify yourself.

"Let me tell you something, your community, your nation, the church-at-large is going to need you in the next decade more than they’ve ever needed you before. We’re back in a position where ‘our time is at hand.’ And it’s time to fish or cut bait.

“When you understand the truth of the preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of the mystery, that gives you a sense of your place in things. It gives you a sense of your place in the world—you know you’re not Israel; you know who you are. You’re an ambassador for Christ, a member of the Body of Christ.

“It gives you a sense of your place in history. We’re not in the prophetic program; we’re in the mystery program. It gives you a sense of your place in the church—you’re members of the Body of Christ and you know who you really are. It gives you a sense of your place in the will of God.

“The dispensation of grace is an age of a remnant mentality. It’s not an age that’s pressed forward by corporate activity. It’s an age where the work of God is done through faithful men; through individuals in whom the truth lives and works, banding themselves together in local assemblies to go do the work of the ministry.

“It isn’t carried on in big organizations and religious movements. That’s why we don’t have an organization here, by the way.

*****

“When we were asked to leave the Berean Bible Society organization, there was a group of 10-12 men who met in my living room. One of them asked, ‘Well, what are we going to call the new organization?’ and I said, ‘Who wants to nominate me for the board of a new organization?’ The room was silent. You know why? The men in there understood.

“There’s an old saying, ‘In the seeds of the formation of a religious institution are the seeds of its own destruction,’ and I’ve been to meetings where they discuss, ‘Well, how do you stop that?’ but nobody ever gives the answer.

“The way you stop it is you don’t do it! You don’t build something that’s designed to self-destruct! People say, ‘Well, but, but, but . . .’ No buts about it, you just don’t do it!

“What do you do? You go do what God gave you to do. And you don’t try and improve on that. The dispensation of grace is going to come to a close. It might come to a close tonight or it may not come to pass for another 50-100 years. I don’t know.

“But the dispensation of grace always ends in total apostasy and today the church-at-large lives in an abject state of failure. You can’t read II Timothy and not see the church in ruin in the ‘last days.’ And every day today is one of the ‘last days.’

“But it’s going to be faithful men. Little ‘remnant mentality’ people who are going to be true to the faith, true to the doctrine, and keep going, and they’re not going to be out trying to build something that they’re not. They’re going to go out being who they are.

“Now, most of you folks here tonight are capable of being Philippians. Most of the church is stuck back in Corinthians or Galatians, though. Those two books, you can take and identify almost any Christian ministry today.

“Almost any Christian Believer you know is either a Galatian or a Corinthian. They’re either hung out under the legalistic strictures of Galatianism—mixing law and grace—or they’re over in the Charismatic mania of the flesh at Corinth.

*****

“By the way, there are two great theological groups that are at loggerheads—Armenianism and Calvinism. There’s the man-centered Corinthianism and the Moses-centered Galatianism.

“Most of you folks have grown beyond—you’ve come to understand the establishment truth in Romans about Calvary and you’ve gone on to the doctrinal truths in Ephesians. You’re an advanced breed, frankly. I count it in honor to know you in that way and I rejoice in that with you.

“The biggest problems the Philippians had, as I said earlier, wasn’t what they knew. They were mature believers. The understood Ephesian truth—advanced truth, mystery truth.

“Their problem was working together in unity and harmony of mind and purpose in defeating the satanic policy of evil that’s designed, not just to get you to defect from the doctrine, but designed to attack you and one another and sew discord and animosity among the brethren so you’re just as ineffective as if you didn’t know the doctrine.

*****

“When I moved to Chicago in 1979 (after a lifetime in Alabama) it was a shocking experience for me and my wife. If it hadn’t been for the folks in our assembly, my wife and family would have never made the transition.

“The people who brought us here had absolutely no idea or actually any concern about what was happening to my family, and if it hadn’t of been for the saints at the church doing what the church always does, and is designed to do and should do—

just naturally caring for one another—we would have been in a mess, but we weren’t.

“I began to fellowship with these folks and I began to ask about J.C. O’Hair. I worked with Pastor Stam. I met Charles Baker. Those three names...

“Mr. O’Hair was a visionary. I heard stories about things he had planned and was going to do. I talked with people who knew him but never heard those stories because those were ‘quiet’ stories. Those were stories he had in his mind and in his heart that he wanted to do but didn’t get done.

“He wanted to start a Bible institute. He wanted to tear down the old church building at the corner of Wilson and Sheridan and build a nine-story high-rise in its place that would have 600 students the first year.

" ‘Whoa, we can’t do that! That might be a success!’ A guy actually said, ‘He’ll do it too! We gotta stop him!’ and they did, for good or bad.

“Now, Mr. Stam was a pugilist—he’d get out and contend and fight for the faith. They’ll never be a better writer dispensationally than Stam.

“Mr. Baker was an academic. And those three men working together led the grace movement into existence as we know it. And there’s not a place in America and hardly around the world that knows some of the truth we rejoice in about right division that didn’t come from those men’s ministries.

“When I moved to Chicago, I realized things weren’t in such good a shape. I’d go to meetings like this and be the youngest man there. I traveled around the country and I’d find people were discouraged and down in the dumps and didn’t really understand what was happening.

“By the way, in 1870, six men met in a Chicago suburb; six pastors met in a suburb of Chicago. They came from six different places in the Midwest to study the pre-millennial Second Coming of Christ and decide if they thought that’s what the Bible taught.

“Those six men studied and came to the conclusion that there was a distinction between the Rapture and the Second Coming of Christ to the earth—one for the body, one for Israel.

“They said, ‘We’ll go home and we’ll study and a year later we’ll meet again.’ A year later, they rented a little room in Boston to meet. They went there to meet and the word got out and they began to have crowds of 100-150 people come to that little week of meetings. The next year, they scheduled another meeting and they had 500 people. The next year they had an even bigger meeting and it became known as the Bible Study Movement.

“It was out of that Bible Study Movement that the Scofield Reference Bible—

Dr. Scofield and those men were recovering truth and it was out of that that fundamentalism in the 20^th century got its teeth and strength to battle against the modernists and destroy them.

“It was out of that movement that J.C. O’Hair and the Grace Movement came and progressed on into truth. You and I stand in very much the same situation."