The Baptist Pillar © Brandon Bible Baptist Church 1992-Present www.baptistpillar.com
"...The church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth."
I Timothy 3:15
Missionaries, Get Back to the Bible
G. W. Hervey
Taken from, The Story of Baptist Missions, 1884
It is our conviction, therefore, that one cause why Baptist missionary labors have been so productive, is that our preaching as to doctrines, experience and duty has been so Biblical.
It would indeed be presumptuous, if not arrogant, to assert that our missionaries have never and nowhere communicated to the heathens anything but the mind of the Spirit. They do not pretend to be infallible. All that, they claim is that the Bible, and the Bible alone, is the foundation of their addresses to the mind, heart and conscience.
It is this faith in the Word of God, joined to a deep conviction of conscience, and a habitual obedience to this faith and this conviction, that must always and everywhere result in the nearest approach to a Biblical theology, as well theoretical as practical.
The bird that fixes its eye on the noonday sun will generally mount to a higher region than the bird that steers only for the top of a Norway pine. This is proverbially true.
And as the Bible was intended to be a revelation to all the families, tribes and nations of the earth, we may fairly conclude that it is, in respect of matter at least, most wisely adapted to thee capacity of the average man all the world over.
Under favorable conditions, therefore, those missionaries who are the most Biblical ought to be the most successful.
The Sun of Righteousness shines with the most wholesome and life-giving light, not when it is reflected from the snow-clad summit of metaphysics, not when it struggles through the smoke of fanaticism or the fog of rationalism, not when it has been discolored and darkened by the stained glass of tradition or development, but, when it shines upon the soul directly through the breezy and cloudless atmosphere of the Divine authority.