All Articles For Church Membership In His Fear

In our last article we called attention to the work of the gathering of the church. Just to establish the connection we remind you that we emphasized the following fundamental truths concerning this gathering of the church. In the first place, this act of gathering the Church is the great wonderwork of God in history, so that the church and its establishment is strictly a divine work, not merely a human organization or society or even a mere “religious movement”. In the second place, we emphasized that the church is the gathering of those who are called to be saints,...

 The Church In The World. In our last article we called attention to the Reformed and Scriptural conception of the holy catholic Church. We did this, not because it was our intention to discuss dogmatically the idea of the church, as such. That does not belong in the territory of this rubric. We must remember that the chief question before us, at present is: what is the significance of church membership in the fear of the Lord? And it was with a view to that question that it became necessary to briefly call attention to the fundamentals of the Christian...

The important question that is before us, as we have seen, is: what does it mean that I am guided by the fear of the Lord, both as objective standard and as subjective principle, in my church affiliation? That question is not an easy one to answer for many reasons, chief of which is the undeniable fact that we are surrounded in our day by a multitude of churches, so that the believer is forced to answer the question: where is the church? Time was, of course, when in an outward sense, at least, the believer did not have to...

Both the main topic, upon which we propose to write a few articles, and our sub-topic for this issue could, of course, have been formulated in question form. And yet the introduction of a question mark would have changed the formulation somewhat. To ask, “Is Church Membership a Matter of the Fear of the Lord?” and to write on that question, is not quite the same as writing on the topic “Church Membership in His Fear.” The former leaves the matter open to doubt, and such a formulation would require a demonstration. The latter formulation, however, proceeds from the assumption...