Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| How Christians Should Behave Themselves Among Heathens.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter VI.—How
Christians Should Behave Themselves Among Heathens.
If, moreover, it chance that we go to a place in which
there are no Christians, and it be important for us to stay there a few days,
let us be “wise as serpents, and harmless as
doves;”458
and let us
“not be as the foolish, but as the wise,”459
in all the self-restraint of the
fear of God, that God may be glorified in everything through our Lord
Jesus Christ, through our chaste and holy behaviour. For,
“whether we eat, or drink, or do anything else, let us do it as
for the glory of God.”460
Let “all
those who see us acknowledge that we are a blessed
seed,”461
“sons of the
living God,”462
in
everything—in all our words in shamefastness, in purity,
in humility, forasmuch as we do not copy the heathen in anything, nor
are as believers like other men, but in everything are
estranged from the wicked. And we “do not cast that which
is holy before dogs, nor pearls before swine;”463
but with all possible
self-restraint, and with all discretion, and with all fear of
God, and with earnestness of mind we praise God. For we do not
minister where heathens are drinking and blaspheming in their feasts
with words of impurity, because of their wickedness.464
| 464 Beelen joins
“because of their wickedness” with the words that
follow. | Therefore do we not sing
psalms to the heathens, nor do we read to them the Scriptures,
that we may not be like common singers, either those who play on
the lyre,465
or those who sing
with the voice, or like soothsayers, as many are, who follow
these practices and do these things, that they may sate themselves with
a paltry mouthful of bread, and who, for the sake of a sorry cup of
wine, go about “singing the songs of the Lord in the
strange land”466
of the heathen,
and doing what is not right. Do not so, my brethren; we beseech
you, my brethren, let not these deeds be done among you; but put away
those who choose thus to behave themselves with infamy and
disgrace. It is not proper, my brethren, that these things should
be so. But we beseech you, brethren in righteousness, that these
things be so done with you as with us, as for a pattern of
believers, and of those who shall believe. Let us be of the flock
of Christ, in all righteousness, and in all holy and unblemished
conduct, behaving ourselves with uprightness and sanctity, as is right
for believers, and observing those things which are praiseworthy, and
pure, and holy, and honourable, and noble; and do ye promote467
all those things which are
profitable. For ye are “our joy, and our crown,” and
our hope, and our life, “if so be that ye stand in the
Lord.”468
So be
it!469
E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
