Feb 26
“It is no good giving me a play like Hamlet or King Lear, and telling me to write a play like that. Shakespeare could do it — I can’t. And it is no good showing me a life like the life of Jesus and telling me to live a life like that. Jesus could do it — I can’t. But if the genius of Shakespeare could come and live in me, then I could write plays like this. And if the Spirit could come into me, then I could live a life like his.”
- William Temple
Feb 24
Upon being told that he would most likely be eaten by cannibals if he were to go to the New Hebrides John Paton replied:
you are advanced in years now, and your own prospect is soon to be laid in the grave, there to be eaten by worms; I confess to you, that if I can but live and die serving and honoring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by Cannibals or by worms; and in the Great Day my Resurrection body will rise as fair as yours in the likeness of our risen Redeemer.
Well the picture says it all doesn’t it? 
According to the Grace Baptist College website:
Greek study has been and will continue to be the downfall of Protestant Fundamentalism
Other colleges such as West Coast Baptist College which states to believe that the KJV is also the perfect preserved version for English people as well as the entire Sword of the Lord crowd won’t go that far, but it’s the next necessary step to take if you are going to take a “perfectly-preserved-English-version” position. How could it be ‘perfectly translated’ unless it was a work of inspiration by the Holy Spirit to ensure it to be perfect? Has man done anything other than the original manuscripts as perfectly? Nobody in their right mind would dare presume that. Yet the good folks at Grace Baptist College take it that far and the other KJVOnlyists don’t have the guts to take that next logically necessary step into utter lunacy. So props go out to the administration at Grace. Congratulations on following your craziness to its ultimate outcome.
What a sad mockery has been made of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in producing Christ-likeness. Many a church has taken over this purifying work by establishing a list of regulations to abide by. Even more insidious is the failure to identify lack of fruit as evidence of a branch not being connected to the vine. Arturo Azurdia handles these questions beautifully in a two part exposition of John 15:4-8. I highly commend it to you.
We find perfect Christian balance in Jesus Christ himself. We are complete in Him, because in Him all fulness dwells (Col 2:9-10). In Jesus we are holy. In Him we will be holy and live holy. We will be changed and different. We will obey His Word. We won’t be ruled by the flesh any more. But we also are free. We are free from the religion of human achievement. We don’t attain spirituality by keeping lists of rules. With live righteous lives in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
A group of false teachers in the Colossae region went around making people feel guilty because they didn’t keep a list of rules not found in Scripture. To them, even if you had received Christ, you weren’t saved if you didn’t keep their pet menu of rituals and regulations and routines. External standards are always tempting. Unconverted phonies can conform to them, so they don’t provide a suitable basis to judge someone’s conversion. Salvation is by grace through faith, but spiritual bullies desire to coerce others into their own criteria for spirituality, causing confusion and doubt to a church.
So Paul tells these churches at Colossae and Laodecia not to restrict themselves solely because of these false teachers that want them to cramp their lifestyles to earn their way to righteousness (v. 16). This contradicted the sufficiency they had in Christ (vv. 9, 10). He wasn’t, by the way, saying to them that they could do whatever they wanted. Colossians 2 isn’t the only passage in the Bible on liberty. There are huge chunks of text on this in Romans, 1 Corinthians, and Galatians as well. For instance, he wasn’t requiring them to jump through the salvation hoops of the Essenes, but in other passages he does tell the church to look out for the welfare of the weaker brother. They didn’t have liberty to sin, to be worldly, to be a stumbling block, to be a bad testimony, to let their good be evil spoken of, to disobey church leadership, or to cause disunity in the church. But he didn’t want them to be bullied by the onerous self-serving dicta of genuine legalists.