“Seek that ye may excel to the edifying of the Church.” (1 Cor. 14:12).
“Building up yourselves on your most holy faith” (Jude 20).
DURING the year before us we shall still make it our aim, if God permit, so to fill our pages that our title may truly describe our contents. We ask our readers to help together by their prayers that this end may be achieved.
When Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, gave all diligence to write of the common salvation, he found himself rather under the necessity of writing very searching words of warning concerning men, who had crept in unawares amongst the early Christians, and had proved themselves to be virtually apostate in character. Having very fully described these men and their dreadful work, he came, in verse 20 of his epistle, to the point of exhorting the true believers in view of the evil just described. What had he to say?
His first word of exhortation was this: “But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith.” We are not told to build up the faith. This is what the “advanced” (?) religious thinkers imagine they are doing. They forget or deny that the faith has been “once delivered unto the saints.” It was delivered unto them; they did not discover it by scientific investigations; and it was delivered unto them once for all. Consequently it lies as a mighty basis or foundation beneath our feet, and on it we are to build ourselves up.
How can we do this except we keep the faith continually before our souls? Where is the faith to be found, whole, entire and undiluted, save in the Holy Scriptures, and especially in the New Testament? Do you wonder then that we stick very closely to the Holy Scriptures — expounded, applied, illustrated, and enforced by way of exhortation?
We need, of course, more than this. We need that with which no magazine on earth can supply us. Jude proceeds to exhort us to “praying in the Holy Ghost.” How appropriately this follows, for the Holy Scriptures will not avail us apart from the Holy Ghost.
Not only are we to pray but also to keep ourselves “in the love of God,” for only as saturated in Divine love can we rightly meet the situation. We are to look for “the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life,” which mercy will be extended to us at His coming again. Further we are to work on behalf of others, having compassion and saving them out of the evil, while hating the evil itself. And all the while it is only God Himself who can keep us from falling ourselves. This however He will do and present us faultless in glory.
There is much then that we cannot do in this or any other magazine. We just desire to do what we can and to help in the spiritual upbuilding of all our readers. It lies at the foundation of things, for, as we have seen, it stands at the beginning of that sequence of exhortations that has reached us through the pen of Jude.
We hope to undertake this service in the spirit of those who are praying in the Holy Ghost, and again we entreat all our readers to pray in the Holy Ghost on our behalf.