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THE KI NG' S BU-fftliE SS
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July, 1933
171 roun c/THE KING’STABLE . . . B y the E ditor
M. The Secret of Holy Living . uch has been said and written during the past month concerning the various ministries o f the Holy Spirit. The nineteen hundredth anniversary of Pentecost gave special occasion for this. To those who gather this month “ around the King’s table,” we present as the first course a paragraph on this subject from the late Charles Inwood, D.D., which, if eaten and digested, will nourish our souls. Speaking from the words of Ephesians 6:18, “ Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit,” Dr. Inwood said: Let me ask you to remember that there is no such thing as a once-for-all fullness. It is a continuous appro priation of a continuous supply from Jesus Christ Himself, a moment-by-moment Saviour for a moment-by-moment cleansing and a moment-by-moment filling. As I trust Him, He fills me with His Spirit. The moment I begin to believe, that moment I begin to receive, and so long as I keep believing, I keep receiving. Let us pray that our faith be active. The Spirit-taught believer will recognize in this para graph a proper emphasis on faith as the working principle of the Christian life. The constant operation of faith is the secret of abiding in Christ, which in turn leads to holy living and fruitful service. Freedom’s Holy Light T he civil and political liberty that America enjoys is easily traceable to the religious liberty on which human progress proceeds and human happiness depends. Our re ligious liberty is in turn traceable to the open Bible. It was this Book that freed the soul o f Martin Luther from the bondage of ecelesiasticism and enabled him to stand fast “ in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.” Apart from the Protestant Reformation, which began with Luther and has been preserved by noble men and women who knew the truth as it is in Christ, our beautiful hymn, “ America,” could never have been written. As we contem plate the future, we may well sing: This holy freedom fires the soul with genuine enthusi asm and produces the qualities that make for greatness. No one can dispute the influence that the open Bible has had upon our nation. The Declaration o f Independence, Statue o f Liberty, historical days, great statesmen, and heroic deeds are the outgrowth of the power o f that Book. As we turn to God on our national birthday, we have abundant cause for praise and prayer. Let praise be given for na tional as well as spiritual blessings, for things temporal and •for things eternal. Let prayer be made that divine power may be given to our President, that purity o f motive may prevail in our legislative halls, that justice may reign in our ¡courts o f law, that a more elevated tone may characterize our press, that the Lord’s Day may be preserved, and that the sense o f stewardship and mutual obligation may become a felt force in our national life. Long may our land be bright With freedom’s holy light.
Government and National Prosperity T he editor o f the Evangelical Christian, Dr. R. V . Bingham, who is also the general director of the Sudan Interior Mission, has an editorial in the June issue o f his magazine which we hope may be read by every thoughtful person interested in matters of government and national prosperity. After dealing with present conditions, Dr. Bingham points out two things which God provided when He gave to His ancient people, Israel, a perfect model of government and national rule. We quote: In the first place, He arranged for a Sabbatic year to cure all overproductions. Every seventh year was given up to rest—rest of man, rest of beast, and rest of the land. There could be no sowing and only the reaping of that which grew o f itself. The ploughed lands lay fallow. With the Sabbatic year there would be no need for Brazil to burn, millions of tons of coffee in order to bring up prices. There would be no need of proposals to stack up the bales of cotton and put a match to them in our United States. God’s law was a cure for overproduction. It would have silenced all our factory wheels, too, one year in seven, instead of trying to rush through with unbridled increase o f production for a quarter of a century of prosperity. Then, if we were a dictator, we would put our lips to the trumpet and blow the old silver trumpet o f jubilee. And what would it do? Why, in our rural districts, it would send back every farmer to an unencumbered farm. Every mortgage would have to run out. It would make the few selfish landlord farmers drop everything but their homesteads, and release for others the result o f their overgrasping in that direction. Our farmers would have their allotment and no more. But it would be free from every strangling mortgage. It was God’s way of announc ing the limitation o f wealth. But the old world yet awaits the first jubilee. It has revolution because it will not heed revelation. These are words in due season, and our national lead ers would do well to ponder them. The I. F. C . A . df I nusual interest is attached to the convention o f the 'M Independent Fundamental Churches o f America which is at the time of writing holding its annual gathering in Chicago, 111. The convention may be epoch-making. The report of the Foreign Missions Inquiry Commis sion embodied in the book, Rethinking Missions, has brought to the surface certain undercurrents o f religious thought that have been partially submerged for a quarter o f a century and have now gathered sufficient force to assert themselves. The missions report makes unmistak ably clear the radical difference between the two groups known as fundamentalists and modernists. A fundamental ist is an old-fashioned Christian who believes that the Bible is the Word o f God, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God incarnate, and that redemption from sin is provided only through His shed blood. A modernist is one who de nies all this and thereby negatives the Christian position. The book, Rethinking Missions, accentuates the modern view. It states that “ the relation between religions must take increasingly hereafter the form o f a common search for truth.” This o f itself is a surrender o f “ the grand [Continued on page 225]
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