Category Archives: Theology

Not the full story…

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John Wesley said, “God does nothing except in response to believing prayer.” There is some truth there but its not the full story. Creation took place before there ever was a prayer meeting. God made His plans long before anything else ever existed. God gave a people to His Son in eternity past who in time will come to Him (John 6:37) and He did so when no one asked Him to. God is not merely a responder, He is a master planner. He is found even by those who never sought Him (Romans 10:20). Lets always be people of prayer but let us be forever thankful that God is not limited to our prayer life before He can act in this world; otherwise we would be Sovereign and not Him.

Question: If God is Sovereign, why pray? Answer: It is BECAUSE God is Sovereign that we do pray. He is Lord of all and can change things, even putting it on our hearts to pray that He would do so.

The Earliest Testimony of the Church: Jesus Is God

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Jaroslav Pelikan:

The oldest surviving sermon of the Christian church after the New Testament opened with the words: “Brethren, we ought so to think of Jesus Christ as of God, as the judge of living and dead. And we ought not to belittle our salvation; for when we belittle him, we expect also to receive little.”

The oldest surviving account of the death of a Christian martyr contained the declaration: “It will be impossible for us to forsake Christ . . . or to worship any other. For him, being the Son of God, we adore, but the martyrs . . . we cherish.”

The oldest surviving pagan report about the church described Christians as gathering before sunrise and “singing a hymn to Christ as to [a] god.”

The oldest surviving liturgical prayer of the church was a prayer addressed to Christ: “Our Lord, come!”

Clearly it was the message of what the church believed and taught that “God” was an appropriate name for Jesus Christ.

—Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 173.

HT: JT