All Church Sunday School
Consecration/Dedication Sunday (and
Budget)
Sunday, January 9,
2022
E. Stanley Jones, Growing Spiritually p. 319…
GC2 – Great
Commandment – Mark 12: 28-31
Great Commission – Matthew 28: 18-20
Daniel 12: 3-13…
Psalm 111: 1, 2… (#6210- A)…
Budget
Consecration Closing Prayer
I
was in the most effective church I’ve seen in America, the Hollywood
Presbyterian Church, a church which is organized for evangelism down to the
last man of its 6,500 members. In the youth hall up in front was this motto:
“To know Him, to help others to know Him.” This sums up the Christian faith, to
know Him ourselves as personal Saviour and Lord and to help others to know Him as
personal Saviour and Lord. These two constitute the alternate beats of the
Christian heart – the intake and the outgo, receptivity and response. And if
both sides are not in operation, the Christian heart ceases to beat. Then we
settle down to dead forms and dead attitudes and dead prayers – not prayers for the dead, but of the dead. “What do you do when you kneel in prayer as you enter
the pew?” was asked of a church member, and the reply came: “I count forty.”
Really the whole thing counted for nothing.
This
verse goes to the point: “Land, which absorbs the rain that often falls on it,
and bears plants that are useful to those for whom it is tilled, receives a
blessing from God” (Heb. 6:7, Moffatt). Here are the two things so vital to
Christian faith: receptivity – “absorbs the rain”; and response – “bears plants
that are useful.” This type receives a blessing from God. But if it only
receives and never produces, then a curse falls upon it.
E. Stanley Jones, Growing Spiritually
p. 319 (1953).