Name: No Little People
ISBN: 9781581345186

Francis A. Schaeffer

Sixteen sermons by Francis A. Schaeffer that take a realistic look at the frailty of human experience and the significance of our relationship to the infinite and personal God.

No Little People

rachel 🐚

While all religious and secular standards judge a person by his or her accomplishments toward the end of life, the God of the Bible gives value to the person from the beginning. 

We alone are persons, actors, and creators through the choices in our lives.

He saw a similar continuity between creation and redemption, between life now and after death and then after the resurrection. He said, The same meaning to life exists at this tick of the clock as in eternity." For truth is true to both God and man, in history now and later. There are no separate messages worlds or separate truths.

…as there are no little people in God's sight, so there are no little places. To be wholly committed to God in the place where God wants him—this is the creature glorified. 

Again, Jesus said, "But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is vour Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren" (Matthew 23:8). This does not mean there is to be no order in the church. It does mean that the basic relationship between Christians is not that of elder and people, or pastor and people, but that of brothers and sisters in Christ. This denotes that there is one Father in the family and that his offspring are equal. There are different jobs to be done, different offices to be filled, but we as Christians are equal before one Master. We are not to seek a great title; we are to have the places together as brethren.

First, we should seek the lowest place because there it is easier to be quiet before the face of the Lord. I did not say easy; in no place, no matter how small or humble, is it easy to be quiet before God. But it is certainly easier in some places than in others.

So in order to communicate to us that He is a personal God who acts into space-time history, God uses the image of the hand of God." […] He is telling us an overwhelming yet basic truth: that He, without physical hands, can equal and surpass in space-time history all that we men can do with physical hands.

God never looks at any Christian through rose colored glasses. God calls a person as he is and on the basis of what he can be as he lets Christ produce fruit through him.

Christian leadership does not relieve the call to Christian living.

The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Iesis Christ, individually or corporately, tending to do the Lords wotk in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.

*substitutionary atonement (sometimes called vicarious atonement) = Jesus died ‘for us;’ Jesus dying as a substitute for us

As we see the Lord Jesus dying on the cross, we who are Bible- believing Christians must fight for the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement

Thinking about Jesus as part of history not just a potential reality that religion has conjured up, as some non-Christians may see. 

Christ as part of our physical world holds weight when pitted against the notion of God simply being someone up in the sky who separates himself from our world. Instead, our God humbled himself before man by standing on the same ground that we do and dying to it.

Just as Christ was humbled in the external space-time world, in the hard stuff of history, not merely in someone's imagination, nor in some idealistic setting that makes His death a utopian statement withdrawn from life—so, too, a Christian should havea truly humble heart in the hard reality of the practical world. 

No Little People

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