SUPREME TEST

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 July 1941, Page 2

SUPREME TEST

OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH BIBLE ITS OWN BEST DEFENCE. ADDRESS BY REV. J. DAVIE. “The Bible is its own. best defence,” said the Rev. John Davie, in a sermon at Knox Church on Sunday on “The Vital Test of Christianity Throughout the Ages.” Going on to declare that the Bible stood the test of adverse criticism without the need of anyone championing its cause, Mr Davie said that though much of its writing pre-dated the coming of Christ, it continued to be the fundamental basts of the faith. as shown in the Testaments, Old and New. Throughout, its pages there were limned the lives of great men and true leaders. Though God created the world and man chose to go his own way, still God ordained that man should live according to His way. The first four books of the New Testament, Mr Davie observed, portrayed the life and death of the person who had been promised since the beginning and showed that the acts of the Holy Spirit, operating on the lives cf Christ’s disciples, formed the fundamental basis of Christianity and that the workers in that cause were preeminently the great influence on the life of the world. Again, said Mr Davies, people wished to know if the predictions of the Old Testament were truly fulfilled in the New, for if some were perhaps partly] disproved by clever critics, people were apt to lose faith. Just as, in the Supreme Court, the advocates prepared the evidence, while twelve ' ordinary men determined the verdict, so it was the ordinary people in the world whose faith was the test and proof of the truth of the Bible. And as a tree stood the stress of weather, by its network of roots, so was the Bible held firm by 7 the common people, whose faith stabilised, belief in God and Christianity. Some might lose faith, but this would not prevent Christianity going forward from strength to strength. “There is,” Mr Davie added, “nothing in literature to equal the influence of the Bible. The lives of good Christian people actually form the supreme test of Christianity, but unfortunately there is an urgent need of discipline and education in life and of people putting their whole being into life. Too many enter life and are takers of Godd’s goodness, whereaspeople must be givers of the real values of life and not takers only.” In concluding, Air Davie referred to the historical fact of so many great and good men having risen in the nations of the world, right down to the present day. It was, he said, not by accident, that Christianity was ranged on the side of certain great nations who were followers of the name of Jesus Christ. In these days of severe testing of men cf goodwill, there was a clarion call to the church to be faithful, for if it failed, God’s cause would fail. “The supreme joy for us all who profess Christianity,” he said, “should be to do our utmost at all times for the cause for which Christ died, ’