For What it’s Worth…

This week as a staff team we were reading a small chapter from Charles Bridges’ book, The Christian Ministry, on “The Fear of Man”. Bridges speaks of the straightforward manner in which we should speak, and how our fear often keeps our mouths closed, or, causes us to disguise our words because of our fear of being thought ill of.
Bridges writes, “The offensive truth must be smoothed, disguised and intermixed, until it is attenuated into an insipid, pointless, and inoperative statement”.
Is our tendency to back off and not speak, or speak in such a way as to mute our words, when our conscience is telling us that the godly course is to ‘speak the truth in love’.
In answer, Bridges encourages a ‘holy but humble indifference to all consequences’, entrusting their response to the Lord. Will we pray that God will make us faithful?

“The heir of heaven serves his Lord to simply out of gratitude; he has no salvation to gain, no heaven to lose;… Now, out of love to the God who chose him, and who gave so great a prize for his redemption, he desires to lay out himself entirely to his Master’s service. Oh, you who are seeking salvation by the works of the law, what a miserable life yours must be!… You have it that if you diligently persevere in obedience, you may perhaps obtain eternal life, though, alas! none of you dare to pretend that you have attained it. You toil and toil and toil, but you never get that for which you toil after, and you never will, for, ‘by the works of the law there shall no flesh living be justified’…. The child of God works not for life, but from life; he does not work to be saved, he works because he is saved.” C.H.Spurgeon