NO COST RELIGION

After David had been told by God to build an altar and worship God on the threshing floor of Araunah, this Jebusite offered the king the threshing floor and everything necessary to worship God. David refused the offer with these words: “Nay, but I will verily buy it of thee at a price: neither will I offer burnt-offerings unto Jehovah my God which cost me nothing” (II Samuel 24:24).

Would that all Christians had the attitude of David. Instead, they often show the very opposite disposition. David realized that an offering which cost him nothing was worth exactly that to him—nothing. God has always demanded the best that each person has—not what somebody else has (Leviticus 22:21).

All we have has been given to us by God to use for His glory and in His service. We are but stewards of these things (1 Pet. 4:10). The Lord expects us to be good stewards, but giving what comes without cost to us is not practicing faithful stewardship. The measure of our devotion, reverence, and love for God is in direct proportion to how much we are willing to commit to the service of God, or how much we are willing to sacrifice (John 12:3ff). Those who take the easiest, cheapest way to serve God are, in reality, servants of self, not God.

There is to be nothing cheap about our religion. It is to be the best we have—the same attitude that characterized David. “I will not offer... unto Jehovah my God [that] which cost me nothing.”

Al Brown

“I Can’t vs. I Can”

Einstein could not speak until he was four years old, and did not read until he was seven.

Beethoven’s music teacher said about him, “As a composer, he is hopeless.”

When Thomas Edison was a young boy, his teachers said that he was so stupid he could never learn anything.

When F. W. Woolworth was 21, he got a job in a store, but was not allowed to wait on customers because he “didn’t have enough sense.”

Walt Disney was once fired by a newspaper editor because he was thought to have “no good ideas.”

Caruso was told by one music teacher, “You can’t sing. You have no voice at all.”

An editor told Louisa Mae Alcott that she was incapable of writing anything that would have popular appeal.

Author Unknown

The Right Attitude for Unity

Not only must one believe the right thing to have unity but one must also have the right attitude and disposition of heart to have unity. Having the truth is no justification for having a haughty disposition. We must have lowliness and meekness with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love.

Of Diotrephes, the beloved John wrote:

I wrote unto the church: but Diotrephes, who loveth to have the preeminence among them, receiveth us not. Wherefore, if I come, I will remember his deeds which he doeth, prating against us with malicious words: and not content therewith, neither doth he himself receive the brethren, and forbiddeth them that would, and casteth hem out of the church (III John 9-10).

The sin that John charges against Diotrephes is that he loves to have the preeminence. The word here employed by John is a very rare one and means “fond of being first.”

Years ago A. T. Robertson wrote an article on Diotrephes. He set him forth as “a church regulator,” “a short-horn deacon.” He of course, never knew all the results of the article. But one thing he did learn twenty-five subscribers to the paper in which the article appeared, asked that their subscription be cancelled immediately. They did this as a protest against the personal attack that they thought had been made upon them. These twentyfive men recognized themselves in the picture of Diotrephes which the writer had painted. The shoe fit; the hit dog howled; the guilty conscience saw its owner in such a setting.

The church does not need men like Diotrephes. We do not need men who seek to rally parties about them. We need people who will follow Jesus and preachers who point people to Jesus and not themselves. Men heard John the Baptist preach and they followed Jesus. This was great preaching. John was a great preacher. He was no Diotrephes. He said Jesus must increase but that he himself must decrease. He could gracefully grant the preeminence to Christ, where it belongs, in all things.

Paul did not want the brethren at Corinth divided into parties with each following their favorite preacher. That is the wrong attitude. The glory in the church is not to go to the preacher who plants or the preacher who waters but to God who gives the increase (I Corinthians 3:1-9). We should step out of selfishness and into the service of God. With the proper attitude among brethren all of the small things vanish away. 

J. Noel Meredith