George
MacDonald Speaks on Practical Faith
Excerpts
from Wisdom to Live By,
A
new anthology of selections from
all
the works of George MacDonald
GOD
HIMSELF is man's birthplace. God is the self that makes the soul
able to say, I too, am.
GOD'S
LOVE is ever in front of his forgiveness. God's love is the prime
mover, ever seeking to perfect his forgiveness.
DOES
IT SEEM INCON-SISTENT with the character of God that in order
that sin should become impossible he should allow sin to come
into the world? Is it not possible that, in order that his creatures
should choose the good and refuse the evil, in order that they
might become such with their whole nature infinitely enlarged,
as to turn from sin with a perfect repugnance of the will, he
should allow them to fall? Why would he not, in order that, from
being sweet childish children they should become noble, childlike
men and women, let them try to walk alone?
GOD
IS TENDER-just like the prodigal's father-only with this difference,
that God has millions of prodigals, and never gets tired of going
out to meet them and welcome them back, every one as if he were
the only prodigal son He had ever had. There's a Father indeed!
THE
ONLY POSSIBILITY of believing in a God seems to me in finding
an idea of God large enough, grand enough, pure enough, lovely
enough to be fit to believe in.
THE
MOST MYSTERIOUS of all vital movements, a generation, a transition-how
initiated, God only knows-is that of being reborn from above.
The change is in the man himself; the birth is that of the will.
It is the man's own highest action, therefore all God's.
THIS
IS and has been the Father's work from the beginning-to bring
us into the home of his heart. This is our destiny.
TO
BECOME God's true sons and daughters are we created; it is the
one end of our being.
WHERE
A MAN would make a machine or a picture or a book, God makes the
man that makes the book or the picture or the machine. Would God
give us a drama? He makes a Shakespeare. Or would he construct
a drama more immediately his own? He begins with the building
of the stage itself, and that stage is a world-a universe of worlds.
FATHERHOOD
is the last height of the human stair whence our understanding
can see God afar off.
HOW
INDIGNANT would many be at the mere suggestion that they are,
after all, only idolaters, worshipping The Church instead
of the Lord Christ.
TO
HIM WHO OBEYS, and thus opens the doors of his heart to receive
the eternal gift, God gives the Spirit of his Son, the Spirit
of himself.
A
FAITH can have no existence except in obedience-faith is
obe-dience. To do what Jesus wishes is to put forth faith
in him.
TO
FULFILL THE VERY NECESSITIES of our being we must be God's children
in brain and heart, in body and soul and spirit, in obedience
and hope and gladness and love. Then only is our creation fulfilled-then
only shall we be what we were made for, and what we are troubled
on all sides that we may become.
IT
IS HIS CHILDLIKENESS that makes him our God and Father. The perfection
of his relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our
defects, all our evils. For our childhood is born of his Fatherhood.
JESUS
CHRIST has a right to our absolute obedience.
IT
IS MY BELIEF that the main obstacle to the growth of the kingdom
is first the unbelief of believers, and next the way they lay
down the law. Before they have learned the rudiments of the truth
themselves, they begin to lay the grievous burden of their dullness
and their ill-conceived notions of holy things upon the mind and
consciences of their neighbors, trying to keep them from growing
any more than themselves.
HE
WHO FOLLOWS the opportunities for helpfulness that are given him
will find that his acquaintance widens and grows quickly. His
heart will be full of concern for humanity, and his hands will
eagerly help. Such care will be death to one's own cares, such
help balm to one's own wounds.
OBEDIENCE
IS THE ROAD TO ALL THINGS. It is the only way to grow able to
trust him.
IT
WOULD BE BETTER for a man to hold the most obnoxious untruths
and opinions, if at the same time he lived in the faith
of the son of God, than for him to hold every formula of belief
perfectly true, and yet know nothing of a daily life and walk
with God.
FOOLISH
IS THE MAN, and there are many such men, who would set the world
right by waging war on the evils around him, while he neglects
that integral part of the world where lies his business, his first
business-namely, his own character and conduct.
The
Creation in Christ
An
excerpt from Unspoken Sermons, Third Series,
by
George MacDonald. Edited by Michael Phillips.
All
things were made by him, and without him
was
not anything made that was made.
In
him was life, and the life was the light of men.
-John 1:3-4
It seems to me that any thinking lover of the gospel, and especially
one accustomed to the effort of communicating ideas with clarity,
can hardly have failed to feel something of a dissatisfaction
with the close of the third verse of the opening chapter of John's
gospel as the Authorized Version presents it to English readers.
It seems to me in its feebleness, unlike, and rhetorically unworthy
of the rest.
Perhaps it is no worse than redundant, and therefore unnecessary.
But that is no satisfaction to the man who would find, if possible,
perfection in the words of the beloved disciple who was nearer
the Lord than any other. The phrase that was made seems,
from its uselessness, weak even to foolishness after what precedes
it: "All things were made by him, and without him was not anything
made that was made."
My hope was great, therefore, when in reading the Greek I saw
that the shifting of a period would rid me of the surplus words.
If by such a change any precious result of meaning should follow,
the change would not merely be justifiable-seeing that mere points
of ink on ancient texts are of no authority with anyone accustomed
to the vagaries of scribes, editors, and printers-but one for
which to give thanks to God.
Indeed, I found the change unfolded such a truth as to show the
rhetoric itself in accordance with the highest thought of the
apostle. I was so glad of the sudden new meaning that it added
little to my satisfaction to discover the change actually supported
by the best original manuscripts and versions. Furthermore, I
learned that the passage had been a cause of much disputation
in light of the two possible renditions. And the ground of argument
on the side of the common reading of 1611 seemed to me worse than
worthless.
Let us then look at the passage as I think it ought to be translated.
Then let us seek the meaning for the sake of which it was written.
This meaning is by no means solely dependent for its revelation
on this single passage. Indeed, its truth belongs to the very
truth as it exists in Jesus. But if I am right in the interpretation
which suggested itself the moment I saw the probable rhetorical
relation of the words, then we find that truth magnificently expressed
here by the apostle, and differently from anywhere else.
I will now set down the passage recast into two sentences distinct
from the above, with the separating period differently placed:
"All things were made through him, and without him was made not
one thing. That which was made in him was life, and the life was
the light of men."
Note the antithesis of the through and the in:
"All things were made through him...That which was made
in him..."
In this grand assertion seems to me to lie, more than merely shadowed,
the germ of creation and redemption-of all the divine in its relation
to all the human.
In attempting to set forth what I find in it, I write with no
desire to provoke controversy, which I loathe, but with some hope
of presenting to the minds of those capable of seeing it the glory
of the truth of the Father and the Son, as spoken by this first
of seers in the grand fashion of his insight. I am as indifferent
to a reputation for orthodoxy as I despise the championship of
novelty. To the untrue, the truth itself must seem unsound, for
the light that is in them is darkness.
I believe, then, that Jesus Christ is the eternal son of the eternal
father. I believe that from the first beginnings of all things
Jesus is the son, because God is the father. This statement is
imperfect and unfit because it is an attempt of human thought
to represent that which it cannot grasp, yet which it believes
so strongly that it must try to utter it even in speech that cannot
be right.
I believe therefore that the Father is the greater, and that if
the Father had not been, the Son could not have been.
I will apply no logic to this thesis, nor would I even now state
the above but for the sake of what is to follow. The true heart
will remember the inadequacy of our speech, and our thought also
when it turns to the things that lie near the unknown roots of
our existence. In saying what I do, I only say what Paul implies
when he speaks of the Lord giving up the kingdom to his father,
that God may be all in all.
I worship the Son as the human God, the divine, the only perfect
Man. He derives his being and power from the Father, and is equal
with him as a son is both the equal and at the same time the subject
of his father. Yet he makes himself the equal of his father
only in what is most precious in the Godhead, namely Love.
This is indeed the essence of that statement of John the evangelist
which I am now considering. It is a higher thing than the making
of the worlds and the things in them, which making he did by the
power of the Father not by a self-existent power in himself. For
this reason, the apostle, to whom the Lord must have said things
he did not say to the rest, or who was better able to receive
what he said to them all-says, "All things were made" not by,
but "through him."
We must not wonder things away into nonentity, but try to present
them to ourselves after what fashion we are able-even though these
attempts will be but shadows of full heavenly truth. For our very
beings and understandings and consciousnesses, though but shadows
in regard to any perfection either of outline or operation, are
yet shadows of his being, his understanding, his
consciousness. He has cast those shadows. They are no more originally
our own than his power of creation is ours.
In our shadow-speech then, following with my shadow-understanding
as best I can the words of the evangelist, I say:
The Father, in bringing out of the unseen the things that are
seen, made essential use of the Son. All that exists, therefore,
was created through him. What may be the difference between
the part in creation of the Father and the part of the Son, who
can understand? Perhaps we may one day come to see into it a little.
For I dare hope that, through our own willed sonship, we too shall
come far nearer ourselves to creating. The word creation
applied to the loftiest success of human genius, seems to me a
mockery of a humanity which is in itself still in the process
of creation.
Let us read the text again.
"All things were made through him, and without him was
made not one thing. That which was made in him was life."
Do you begin to see it? The power by which he created the worlds
was given him by his father. But he had in himself a yet greater
power than this. Something else was made, not through
but in him. He brought something into being by himself,
not by virtue of the father working through him. In this other
thing he creates in his own grand way-self-generated from within
his own being-as did the Father. And John tells us exactly what
this other thing was.
"That which was made in him was life."
What does this mean? What is the life the apostle is speaking
of? Many forms of life have come to being through the Son.
But those are results, not forms of the life that was brought
to existence in him. He could not have been employed by
the Father in creating, except in virtue of the life that was
in him.
As to what the life of God is to himself, all we can only know
is that we cannot know it. Even that, however, is not absolute
ignorance. For no one can see that, from its very nature, he cannot
understand a thing without therein approaching that thing in a
genuine manner. As to what the life of God is in relation to us,
we know that it is the causing life of everything that we call
life-of everything that is. In knowing this, we know something
of that life by the very forms of its force.
But there are two great mysteries that lie absolutely beyond us.
I presume that, in fact, the two actually make but one mystery.
It is a mystery that must be a mystery to us for ever, not because
God will not explain it, but because God himself could not make
us understand it if he tried to explain.
The one interminable mystery is first, how he can be self-existent,
and next, how he can make other beings exist. Self-existence and
creation no man will ever understand.
Again, regarding the matter from the side of the creature-the
cause of his being precedes that being. He can therefore have
no knowledge of his own creation. Neither could he understand
that which he can do nothing like. If we could make ourselves,
we should understand our creation, but to do that we must be God.
And this, of all ideas, seems to me the most dismal and hopeless-that
I, with the self-dissatisfied and painfully limited consciousness
I possess, could in any way have caused myself.
Nevertheless, if I be a child of God, I must be like him,
like him even in the matter of this creative energy by which we
exist but which we cannot understand. There must be something
in me that corresponds in its childish way to the eternal power
in him.
But I am forestalling.
The question now is: What was that life, the thing made in
the Son-made by him inside himself, not outside him-made not through
but in him-the life that was his own, as God's is his own?
It was, I answer, that act in him that corresponded in him, as
the son, to the self-existence of his father.
Now what is the deepest in God...his power?
No, for power could not make him what we mean when we say God.
As powerful as it might be, evil could, of course, never create
one atom. But let us understand very plainly that a being whose
essence was only power would be such a negation of the divine
that no righteous worship could be offered him. It would be possible
only to fear him. Such a being, even if he were righteous in judgment,
yet could not be God. The God himself whom we love could not be
righteous were he not something deeper and better still than we
generally mean by the word. But alas, how little can language
say without seeming to say something wrong!
In one word, God is Love.
Love is the deepest depth, the essence of his nature. Love is
at the root of all his being. It is not merely that he could not
be God if he had made no creatures to whom to be God. But love
is the heart and hand of his creation. It is his right to create,
and his power to create as well. The love that foresees creation
is itself the power to create. Neither could he be righteous-that
is, fair to his creatures-but that his love created them. His
perfection is his love. All his divine rights rest upon his love.
Ah, he is not the great monarch! The simplest peasant loving his
cow is more divine than any monarch whose monarchy is his glory.
If God would not punish sin, or if he did it for anything but
love, he would not be the father of Jesus Christ, the God who
works as Jesus works.
What then, I ask again, is in Christ correspondent to the creative
power of God? It must be something that comes also of love. And
in the Son the love must express itself to that which already
exists, namely God. Because of that eternal love which has no
beginning, the Father must have the Son. God could not love, could
not be love, without making things to love: Jesus has God to love.
The love of the Son is responsive to the love of the Father.
¨
THE
CREATION IN CHRIST will continue in the next issue.
Why
Reality Drifts Toward Dogma
A historical perspective as it concerns
the
orthodox prophetic outlook
There
are times in the history of the church when debate over a "specific"
doctrinal or theological issue opens the door to more "general"
principles and truths. The specific discussion prompts
and stimulates larger issues to become clarified. The results
of such new focus are unpredictable and take God's people in new
directions. As a result, the Church is forever changed.
Sometimes for the better. But not always.
The Church is a dynamic, fluid, incomplete, growing, and extremely
human entity, not a perfect one. Thinking Christians of all ages
have looked back at the two thousand year history of the Church
and said, "This was a positive development in our witness that
furthered the cause of Christ..." while also admitting, "That
was not such a good development...it may have set our witness
back a few generations, if not centuries." The crusades are the
classic and oft quoted example of the latter.
There is clearly much debate over which is which. Was the missionary
fer-vor that accompa-nied the 19th cen-tury colonialism of the
west a posi-tive or a negative influence? Was the lasting impact
of the charismatic movement of the 1960s and 1970s positive or
nega-tive? With the advent of modern telecommunications as a tool
for spreading the gospel, what has been the long-range impact
of televangelism on the Church and how it is viewed by the world?
And has the obsession with prophecy over the final three decades
of the 20th century added to or detracted from an accurate awareness
of how God works in human life and in human history?
Obviously, it depends on whom you ask.
The point is: The Church is constantly changing, adapting to shifts
in culture, modifying its approach, rethinking its doctrines,
widening its scope. In general this is a healthy tendency. The
Church has to grow, and growth means change. Growth also
means recognizing where we have had it wrong, and making adjustments-whether
it be in doctrine, in theology, in response to the world, or in
response to one another-so as to get it right.
Change is part of growth.
We have adjusted our approach to missions. Adjustments have come
to the charismatic wings of Protestantism and Catholicism. Most
would agree that the excesses of televangelism need some tempering.
I have not seen, however, an inquiry of significant scope directed
toward the veracity of our general prophetic outlook and what
it indicates about our view of God and the Bible. I would say
that our obsession with prophecy has detracted from an
accurate awareness of how God works-shocking though that statement
will be for many-creating a spiritual culture so immersed in an
erroneous view of the future, singling our evangelical selves
out as the only ones with the whole truth no less than the "elect"
of Calvinism, such that we are thus less equipped to grasp
God's higher purposes in our individual lives and in the Church
as a whole.
ARE
WE IMMUNE TO ERROR IN OUR TIME?
There is nothing so odious about admitting we've got something
wrong. That's how growth occurs. The quickest way toward truth
is to say, "I need more truth."
When Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Thesis upon Indulgences
to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg in October of 1517,
he was attempting to address two primary "specific" issues in
the church-the system of indulgences, and the doctrine of justification
by faith. But the debate sparked a revolution within the Church
of far more sweeping scope that changed Christendom for-ever.
Indeed, his actions opened the door to a dis-cussion of the very
nature of how God relates himself to man. The specific
discussion was of huge general import. By saying, "We have
had it wrong on these two points," Luther led the Church
into an explosive reformation of needed growth and change.
I believe that the Church of Jesus Christ, as it was in 1517,
is at just such a critical crossroads in these opening years of
the third millennium since its Lord walked the earth. It is a
crossroads when a revised general picture of God's work
is required.
A new overarching perspective of what God wants and is trying
to accomplish on the earth through his people, and by what means,
is required in our time. I believe God is anxiously waiting to
illuminate this new perspective and bring the needed change to
the Church that will accompany it. This refocusing period of adjustment
may in time represent so significant a turning point in the development
of the Church that Christians of the future will look back on
this era of focus and debate as a "Second Reformation."
One specific door which I believe may help open the way into this
larger picture, this new focus of God's work, this wonderful new
phase in the Church's effectiveness, will be a fresh debate about
the second coming of Jesus Christ. I am speaking of a discussion
energized by new ideas and interpretations-indeed, an altogether
new paradigm by which we scripturally approach the subject of
the parousia. And, once established, this new paradigm will give
us fresh light to illuminate some of the Bible's high and important
themes that cannot be seen any other way. Till now some of these
high and important truths have remained unclear and unfocused
by the obscuring fogs of the old paradigm-by a view of the second
coming that may not be right at all.
LOOKING BEYOND ONE’S
OWN DOCTRINAL CULTURE
Now a monumentally important principle- grasped by few, probably
admitted by fewer-is that to grow in truth requires recognition
that we do not possess full truth and need more
truth.
Put more simply: To grow requires the recognition that we can
be wrong. It is the very unusual pastor or theologian who can
make such an admission about long cherished doctrines. Most cannot.
We are shortsighted. Steeped and immersed in the doctrines and
traditions that surround us by our spiritual culture and environment,
we make assumptions that are not necessarily accurate. The believers
of Luther's day cannot all be written off as stupid, unenlightened,
unspiritually responsive people. There were good, obedient, prayerful,
Godly men and women alive then too, just as there have been in
every era. And yet these good, obedient, prayerful, Godly men
and women believed that God worked through the system of indulgences
then prevalent in the Church. They were too immersed in the tradition
and doctrine of the time to be able to see beyond it.
That's an easy enough example for most of us to see. You and I
are not culturally immersed in a spiritual environment
where indulgences are the norm, so we can easily see beyond that
particular doctrinal deficiency which bound the Church at a particular
time in history. What is not so easy to see is that we are
immersed in a spiritual culture that produces blind spots of its
own. Surrounded by that culture, we accept the teachings and doctrines
of our own spiritual teachers, priests, and pastors without asking
if there is more truth to be had out beyond the borders of the
accepted theology that we have been fed all our lives.
Escaping the pitfalls of one's own doctrinal culture has been
the Achilles heel of the Church since the apostolic age. We can't
discern our own limitations any more than we can smell our own
bad breath. Objective self-analysis has never been one of the
Church's strong points.
Are we really so very different than the people of Luther's day?
We see the short-sightedness of their ideas about God's
work. But we cannot see the shortsightedness of our own.
That's why a fresh debate is needed, just as it was needed in
1517. We've got to look up and out and beyond the blind spots
and doctrinal errors embedded and ingrained and produced by the
spiritual culture of our own times. We are not so unique as we
self-righteously like to think. We are faced with the same need
as Christians of all eras. We are not immune to the same pitfalls.
A KNEE JERK RESPONSE TO
THE UNFAMILIAR
Some of you are probably squirming in your chairs. The especially
theological among you will perhaps have begun to feel threatened
by some of my words already. One of the remarkable and puzzling
traits of the ordinary religious mind is its stubborn and argumentative
inflexibility in the face of unfamiliar ideas. All my life I have
found this tendency to be remarkable and bewildering. One would
suppose that spiritual men and women would be more open
to ideas than the average person of the world. But in fact, just
the opposite is the case. Try as I might, I simply cannot understand
this frustrating and, in my view, unChristlike phenomenon.
We reject what goes against the familiar. The response that springs
to mind when confronted with a new idea isn't, "Wow, what if it's
true?" but, "It's unfamiliar, therefore I don't like it and reject
it without looking into it further."
Sadly, that's the kind of people we are. We dismiss the new because
we have been so saturated with the traditions of our various orthodoxies.
As spiritual men and women, we are conditioned to argue against
in automatic knee-jerk fashion anything contrary to what we have
been taught. Our spiritual leaders have schooled us in this response
by their example. It is how they respond to ideas outside their
scope of reference too. We have watched them so long that we think
it's the right thing to do. It is absolutely foreign to the knee-jerk
mentality to respond to new ideas with, "Hmm...you make a fascinating
point...I had not considered that before...perhaps I have not
seen this issue as clearly as I thought I had."
When you have raised thorny questions or made probing suggestions
about some controversial point to your pastor or Bible study leader,
how often have you heard such words?
How often has your pastor said, "You might be right, I might be
wrong."
On the other hand, how many times do you see touchy questions
responded to with ready-made answers-push a button and out comes
a pre-programmed response. Our teachers and leaders and pastors
and priests are positively full of answers. One cannot help occasionally
wondering if they ask enough questions.
The dilemma before us really reduces to: What if the familiar
doctrine is wrong? How ought we to respond? Should we respond
with ready-made, push-button, knee jerk answers...or with openness
to explore what might be God's deeper intent, mysteries hidden
away in places that formula answers cannot penetrate? We mustn't
forget the indulgences.
FEAR OF NEW IDEAS
The very suggestion of "new ideas" will no doubt have prompted
some to put this magazine aside before now. Among them will be
certain pastors, leaders, teachers, and priests who will warn
their people, "Do not read that man's words." Others, however,
may have long felt an undefined queasiness in their spiritual
gut prompted by the inadequacy of the standard Lindsayian doctrine
of the end times. These may be excited by new possibilities. Those
pastors, leaders, teachers, and priests among this latter group
will be those not satisfied with formula responses who will challenge
their hearers with some important questions and principles seldom
raised among their traditional thinking colleagues
It is to this second group I write. There may not be many of you.
In all times and in all ages the "accepted" doctrine, sanctioned,
endorsed, and promoted by the theological hierarchy of the Church,
is a doctrine from which people are afraid to swerve.
Today the Church, being far from homogeneous, has many such hierarchies-Catholic,
mainline Protestant, Evangelical, and others-each promoting its
own accepted doctrines. But they are all alike in that the leaders
of these hierarchies teach their people to fear inquiry by calling
diverse doctrines "dangerous," and attaching the dreaded label
"heresy" to the most far-reaching of them. In our time, one of
the most scathing critiques that can be leveled by evangelicals
against ideas they find threatening is to call them liberal.
From the other side of the spectrum, no more damning charge can
be fired than by calling an idea fundamentalist in nature.
By a huge variety of subtle labels and tactics are believing men
and women injected with fear toward any ideas other than what
their own spiritual mentors deem appropriate. Most Church leaders,
pastors, teachers, evangelists, and priests, therefore, do not
encourage their listeners to think. To do so might undermine the
dependence of the people on their own words of wisdom given out
from week to week. Thus, teachings of doctrine and theology must
never originate in the pew, they must only originate from the
pulpit, whence springs all truth.
The specifics vary greatly, but in certain ways we are not so
very unlike that Church of 1517 before Martin Luther exploded
it apart. We still look to our priesthood gurus to dispense doctrine
for us, and we fear to think beyond the doctrinal boundaries they
establish.
Can you be one of the few capable of looking beyond those boundaries,
beyond the old paradigm, beyond the cultural milieu of our own
time?
I do not intend, either now or in future issues, to tell you what
I think you ought to believe concerning prophecy. I will instead
challenge you to think, to employ your logic and common sense
to get at the truth of the scriptures, in order to ask yourselves
if the model so thoroughly popularized into the general culture
with Left Behind, really holds water. Prophecy itself
is not really the point anyway, but the larger issue of how one
approaches truth.
We are not going to try to come up with a different and equally
flawed prophetic timetable. But we need to be asking some questions
to determine whether perhaps the entire system needs an overhaul.
It is not a new interpretation of Revelation we need, but a new
approach to truth itself that employs new covenant principles
rather than the Old Testament mentality that invisibly undergirds
much of tradition-bound, old paradigm thinking.
COURAGE TO START A REVOLUTION
Those thinkers among you-both you who sit in the pew and you who
occupy the pulpit-may be few. But you know who you are. You may
not be many in number, but it is out of your courage to seek larger
truth from God that the Second Reformation may well be born.
It takes courage to start a revolution...usually the courage of
one. Can you be that one? Can you summon the humility to look
beyond the familiar of what you have always believed? Can you
summon the courageous humility to seek truth from God rather than
from what those steeped in the culture of traditional but possibly
erroneous thinking say you are supposed to believe?
Martin Luther began his exploration of the larger scope of God's
work alone too. But fresh ideas that ring with truth-however unfamiliar
they may be at first hearing-cannot be stopped. Luther opened
the door in his time, and the groundswell grew until it was a
flood.
So too, you few humble courageous souls who determine to explore
God's larger purposes may face criticism and condemnation just
as he did. Yet from your ranks the groundswell of new truth may
grow in our time, as it did in Luther's, as one shares that truth
with another, here a courageous pastor willing to put his future
on the line, there a stout hearted Bible student eager to probe
the larger intent of the Scriptures, until...the dike breaks and
new truth from God breaks upon the Church.
So take heart, you who are still with me. God's Spirit is speaking.
We must quiet our hearts and hear his Voice. The future of the
Church may be at stake. We have to hear him aright. .
Dear
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LEBEN is primarily a means for us to keep in touch
with our readers in a more personal and regular way. We will also
use it as a forum to communicate ideas that do not fit into the
format of a book. It contains articles as well as serialized selections
of a few of Michael Phillips and George MacDonald's shorter works
and MacDonald's sermons.
If you cannot afford the annual subscription cost
of $20, we are hopeful that extra donations by others will enable
us to provide you issues at no cost. We offer pastors one year
free subscription in exchange for your help in aiding us to boost
initial circulation so that LEBEN will be able to continue. If
you would like additional copies of this subscription form for
others, please let us know.
Thank you for your interest.
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PLEASE MAKE CHECKS PAYABLE TO SUNRISE BOOKS. ALL PRICES INCLUDE
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is $5 for a single issue, which will be deducted from the first
year's rate if I decide to subscribe.
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I would like to receive LEBEN but cannot afford it.
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Leben
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original material ©
THE LEBENSHAUS INSTITUTE
P.O. Box 7003
Eureka, CA 95502
$20 (or donation) per year, issued quarterly
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