From the Editor
Wow, this has been a very busy few months since the last issue! During the whole month of January and one week in February I was at Faith Builders in Guys Mills, PA. They had asked me to teach a 5-week course on Anabaptist History. It was a lot of fun, but it was also very challenging. Five days a week, 90 minutes a day for five weeks was quite a stretch. However, just like it often is, it’s the teacher that learns the most. Digging into Anabaptist history and having to present it to a group of students allowed me the time to process and categorize the different groups of Anabaptists like I have never done before.
But it did something else for me: reading all those stories of courageous men and women of the faith made me feel pretty sheepish when comparing myself to them. It made me remember a sermon that Bro. Denny Kenaston preached at the White Horse, PA tent meeting a few years ago entitled “Reviving the Righteous Root of Anabaptism.” At the beginning of these sermons he confessed that after reading and studying the history of these people, he had to admit, “I’m not an Anabaptist … but I want to be.” I know how he feels. Our life seems so soft and selfish compared to theirs.
Another sermon that I thought about while poring over all this church history was one by Leonard Ravenhill. Ravenhill was famous for his study of revival history. His famous book “Why Revival Tarries” is still a classic among revival history books. It is one of my personal favorites. But after that book became famous, churches started asking Ravenhill to come and preach about revival history. He believed that revival history was edifying, but eventually when all he did was talk about the past, a “holy dissatisfaction” rose up in him.
At one sermon he exclaimed, “I’m sick and tired of (only) reading about church history; let’s make (some) by the grace of God!” At another time he preached, “I’m tired of writing about revival. I’m tired of reading about revival. There are more lost people in the world tonight than ever in the history of the world. And God wants some men who are really drunk, intoxicated with the Spirit of God, who have a love life with the Lord Jesus, that He can ask anything of you and you’ll do it.”
Well, it’s our time now, and even though these days are admittedly complex, we know that this is the age that God has put us in. In some ways these times are harder than the days of the martyrs. If we are not completely careful, our black-(red)-and-white Bible turns a kaleidoscope of different shades of grey. The world is so crafty, and Satan so cunning. If not for Jesus, the Captain of our souls, we would all be lost.
At the end of the day, after studying these men and women, I’m encouraged. I realize that I have even a greater cloud of witnesses cheering me on than I knew I had before. I pray that God would find me faithful. Nevertheless, I’m with Ravenhill: “I’m sick and tired of only reading about church history—let’s make some!
In this issue of The Heartbeat of the Remnant we reverse the trend of last issue: we are long on short articles and short on long ones. We explore the controversial topic of how science relates to religion in two ways: creation science and occult activities. A challenging chapter from a book about our everyday choices fills the book review section, while we introduce our readers to a new hymnal in the song section.
But perhaps the most interesting to some of our readers will be our response to some challenging letters we have received. We try to explain why we say what we do and why we sometimes take a “strong” stand on controversial issues. While we have no desire to be of a proud “we have this all figured out” attitude, neither can we—as a small part of God’s remnant in the 21st century—afford to sit around all day discussing whether God’s instruction manual really means what it simply says. Let us be up and doing!
It is our desire that this issue of The Heartbeat of the Remnant will stir you (and us!) to rise up and make some church history worth writing about! ~Bro. Dean
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