Baptist Courier

WHAT IS EXPECTED OF CHRISTIANS.

What does the church expect-what does the world expect? They both expect substantially the same things, for the reason that the standard by which the church judges Christians is the same by which the world judges them, namely, the profession which they (these Christians) have made and the obligations which they have assumed. Their profession is that they are sound in the faith and pure in their morals, but if they prove to be neither the one nor the other, the world will condemn them, and of course the church will condemn them.

(1.) They are expected to be sound in the faith, and to have a belief-especially on the great cardinal doctrines of religion-regulated by the standard of the Scriptures-the infallible rule. Neither the world nor the church allows them a license to go a careering over the wide spheres of speculation and conjecture making playthings of the solid truths of revelation, and avowing their belief in the veriest vagaries of skepticism. We mean to say that men who have taken upon them the Christian profession will be held up to the testimony which they have adopted. In the event of their falling away from that testimony or of their abandoning it, a thousand tongues will rise up in judgment against them from the better parts of the church and from the more discerning portion of the world.

(2.) It is expected of them that their practices will accord with their avowed principles-that there will be an abandonment of former habits-that on the score of an outward development there will be as radical a change as there is professed to be a change on the score of the heart or of the inward man. When a man confesses before the congregation of the Lord's people, and subscribes with his hand and sets to his seal that God is true, we expect an outward visible exemplification of that profession.

If he previously wrought the will of the Gentiles, and walked according to the course of this world, we promise ourselves the pleasure of seeing him put off the old man with his deeds and put on Christ, the new man, which is according to righteousness. Whereas he was once blind, he now sees, whereas he was once the servant of the evil one, he is now the servant of Christ.

Well, if he is not all this, we are disappointed. We expected him to be a just person, to be forgiving, charitable, to walk in truth and love before his house, to set a goodly example before the world, to move on a higher plane, to be spiritually minded, to keep his eyes away above these low and perishable surroundings and fix them on "the delectable mountains," on the hills of Zion. But if he is as prayerless as he ever was- cares just as little for the church as in former years-is as unforgiving and as relentless in his spites as before-if his general walk and conversation are of such character that the most discerning could not see wherein they differ from his former deportment, then we are disappointed, and are reduced to the necessity of doubting the genuineness of his conversion.