An Apologetic:
The Nineteenth Day of the November
“Reasons Why Baptists Ought to Teach Their Distinctive Views”
There is yet another reason —one full of solemn sweetness: To teach our distinctive views is not only a duty to ourselves, to our fellow-Christians, and to the unbelieving world, but it is a duty we owe to Christ; it is a matter of simple loyalty to him. Under the most solemn circumstances he uttered the express injunction. He met the eleven disciples by appointment on a mountain in Galilee; probably the more than five hundred of whom Paul speaks were present also: "And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All authority is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and disciple all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." The things of which we have been speaking are not, we freely grant, the most important of religious truths and duties, but they are a part of the all things which Jesus commanded; what shall hinder us, what could excuse us, from observing them ourselves and teaching them to others? The Roman soldier who had taken the sacramentum did not then go to picking and choosing among the orders of his general: shall the baptized believer pick and choose which commands of Christ he will obey and which neglect and which alter? And observe, I did not quote it all: Go, disciple, baptizing them, "teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." Shall we neglect to teach as he required, and then claim the promise of his presence and help and blessing?
[1] John A. Broadus, The Duty of Baptists to Teach their Distinctive Views, a booklet by the American Baptist Publication Society, 1880.
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