February-2019

In May, 2017, The Gospel Message published an article entitled “The Church & Our Sisters” in which I offered what I believe to be the Bible’s answers to the following two questions: (1) What does it mean to be “in church” (1 Corinthians 14:28, 35)? and (2) What is the role of our sisters “in church”?   In response to that article, as well as to public teaching on the subject before and since, several questions have consistently come up which deserve attention.  In this article, I’d like to take up just a couple of those (and, perhaps, in a future article, we can address others).

In Luke 15, Christ tells the parable about a man who goes to his father with a presumptuous request: to receive his inheritance now.  His father grants his requests, and in a short time the son leaves home and squanders his inheritance on, as the Bible describes it, prodigal living.  Just prior to the man making a change in his life and going back to his father, we find him penniless and feeding pigs.  He is even jealous of their food because it is better than what he is eating.  What brought him to this place, or started him on this path, can be traced back to that first decision:  he decided that he wanted what he felt like was his right now.  Had he never made that decision he probably would not have found himself in the company of swine, jealous of their food.