Quotable Monday

Is today's American Church more like the Early Church in the first few centuries......

Justin Martyr sketched Christian love this way: “We who used to value the acquisition of wealth and possessions more than anything else now bring what we have into a common fund and share it with anyone who needs it. We used to hate and destroy one another and refused to associate with people of another race or country. Now, because of Christ, we live together with such people and pray for our enemies.”

Clement, describing the person who has come to know God, wrote, “He impoverishes himself out of love, so that he is certain he may never overlook a brother in need, especially if he knows he can bear poverty better than his brother. He likewise considers the pain of another as his own pain. And if he suffers any hardship because of having given out of his own poverty, he does not complain.”

or like the English Church in the mid 1700's?.....

“It is worth dilating for a moment on George Whitefield and the state of the Christian faith in England in the middle of the eighteenth century. Since the time of the Puritans and the religious wars of the previous century, England had decidedly turned its back on any expressions of what we might call serious Christian belief. Having led to so much division and violence, religion was now in full-scale retreat. The churches of mid-eighteenth-century England all but abandoned orthodox, historical Christianity and now preached a tepid kind of moralism that seemed to present civility and the preservation of the status quo as the summum bonnum. And so, understandably, people looked less and less to the churches for the ultimate answers to their questions, and a fog of hopeless and brutal superstitious spiritualism crept over the land. The poor, as is ever the case, would suffer the most from these changes in Britain’s religious atmosphere.”

Excerpt From: Metaxas, Eric. “Amazing Grace.” HarperCollins. iBooks.