Tag Archives: Church

The Church Is a Hospital Where Everyone Is Sick

Posted on by under Richard Sibbes

Grace, while we live here, is in souls which, because they are imperfectly renewed, dwell in bodies subject to several humours, and these will incline the soul sometimes to excess in one passion, sometimes to excess in another…. We must supply out of our love and mercy that which we see wanting in them. The church of Christ is a common hospital, wherein all are in some measure sick of some spiritual disease or other, so all have occasion to exercise the spirit of wisdom and meekness.

Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2011), 33-34.

Religion and Politics

Posted on by under Gary P. Stewart, Stephen P. Hoffman, Timothy P. Demy

Whatever a church’s relationship to its political environment in any given case, it can take two measures to avoid becoming politically acculturated. The first measure is to ensure that theology determines politics, and not politics theology…. The second measure is to retain a strong sense of mission.

Stephen P. Hoffman in Timothy P. Demy and Gary P. Stewart, Politics and Public Policy: A Christian Response, p. 60

The State of the Nation Depends upon the State of the Church

Posted on by under A. A. Hodge

If the Church languishes, the State cannot be in health; and if the State rebels against its Lord and King, the Church cannot enjoy His  favor. If the Holy Spirit is withdrawn from the Church, He is not present in the State; and if He, the only ‘Lord, the Giver of Life,’ be absent, then all order is impossible, and the elements of society lapse backward to primeval night and chaos … I charge you, citizens of the United States, afloat on your wide sea of politics, there is another King, one Jesus: the safety of the State can be secured only in the way of humble and whole-souled loyalty to His person and of obedience to His law.

A.A. Hodge (1823-1886)

A Reason a Non-believing World Is Not Convinced

Posted on by under Alfred Poirier

If the world is little convinced that Jesus is God’s Son, it is due less to any apologetic deficiency and more to the disunity and dysfunction of our life together as the family of God. The Church’s failure in peacemaking is due in large measure to our failure as members to believe and appropriate the biblical truth that the Church is God’s family. Biblical peacemaking will only become firmly rooted in the Church when we recover the meaning and practice of the Church as the family of God.

Alfred Poirier, The Peacemaking Pastor (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 91.

Going Backward in Order to Go Forward Better

Posted on by under Richard Sibbes

Christ’s work, both in the Church and in the hearts of Christians, often goes backward so that it may go forward better. As seed rots in the ground in the winter time, but after comes up better, and the harder the winter the more flourishing the spring, so we learn to stand by falls, and get strength by weakness discovered…. We take deeper root by shaking. And, as torches flame brighter by moving, thus it pleases Christ, out of His freedom, in this manner to maintain His government in us. Let us herein labour to exercise our faith, so that it may answer Christ’s way of dealing with us. When we are foiled, let us believe we shall overcome when we have fallen, let us believe we shall rise again.

Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2011), 95.