OUT OF THE BOX

It was a week or two before the beginning of my senior year at Loris High School. Rev Willie Shepard was pastor at Buck Creek Baptist Church where my family attended in 1966. After my experience with Jesus on the housetop, I went to Pastor Shepard’s home to tell him about it. I told him how Jesus had supernaturally revealed Himself to me and confirmed His call on my life. The pastor was excited, especially that I had accepted God’s call to the ministry. He had known it for a long time and had actually told me two years earlier that he felt the Lord was calling me to preach. Others had thought so too. When I was a little kid, Miss Molly, an elderly lady in our community used to tell me, “You’re our little preacher boy. Your great grandfather, William Hickman Long, used to pray for God to raise up a preacher in the family, and you’re it.” He was born in 1836. His prayer “closet” was a tree that had fallen over in the edge of the woods behind his house. The horizontal trunk of that tree w

  GRACE AND FAITH VS  WORK, OBEDIENCE, REPENTANCE   A CHALLENGE FROM FRIENDS I had four separate conversations with friends that caused me to have concern with some of the doctrinal trends that have been developing in the church over recent years.   One friend was telling me that, under the New Covenant, Christians do not have to repent. Grace has brought forgiveness and a believer does not have to “repent” of sins.   A second friend was telling me that the terms “obey” and “obedience” were part of the Old Testament Law, and therefore, not appropriate for the New Testament Christian.   A third friend expressed concern over my sermon entitled “The Blessing is on the Other Side of Obedience” and that this message undermined faith.   On a fourth occasion a friend expressed a mild disapproval at my teaching on “travail and labor in Intercession.” His implication was that travail seemed to suggest “works” rather than faith.   The error in my friends’ approaches is that their positions reste