Msg#1610 Be A Well Studied Soldier
What The Bible Says
Good Samaritan’s Penny Pulpit by Pastor Ed Rice
These essays flow out of what I preach on Sundays; this week my favorite Missionary preached and then his son preached in our pm service. Therein my grandson preached our need to study, sacrifice, serve and soldier. As a school teacher I loved the Apostle Paul’s demeanor when he said, “Study to be quiet and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands” (1Thes 4:11). The classroom aside, Paul calls our business the commandments, our walk, and our “lack of nothing” (vr.12). Studying to be quiet and to do our own business implies a diligence in keeping the main thing the main thing. If ever that was important it is in this ugly election year. God trumps politics, people need the Lord. Paul describes our sacrifice as only a reasonable service (Rom 12:1-2). Keeping it so ensures one “not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think” (vr. 3). Writing to the churches of Galatia Paul asserts, “For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ” (Gal 1:10). There is little uglier than fighting and gloating in the servant’s quarters; yet Christians do it. Even the disciples fought about who would be greatest. Selflessness, not greatness, is to be a servants aspiration. Study, sacrifice, and servant-hood, culminate in the character of a soldier. “Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier” (2Tim 2:3-4). Not every fifteen year old can ascribe this outline, but every Christian is to ascribe to it as a way of life.
An Essay for week #10 Mar 6, 16
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