Sermon: The Bitter Beauty of Faith
Sermon Series: The Book of Ruth: Keeping Faith
First Reading: Romans 4:1-8
Second Reading: Ruth 1

“What do we see, which they saw not? The Church throughout all nations. What do we not see, which these saw? Christ present in the flesh… Let what we have respectively seen help us. The sight of Christ helped them to believe the future Church; the sight of the Church helps us to believe that Christ has risen.”

-AUGUSTINE SERMONS

“Whatever may or may not have been the sins of our missionary predecessors,… the commission to disciple all nations stands at the center of the church’s mandate, and a church that forgets this, or marginalizes it, forfeits the right to the titles ‘catholic’ and ‘apostolic’… The truth is that the Gospel escapes domestication, retains its proper strangeness, its power to question us, only when we are faithful to its universal, supranational, supracultural nature… The contemporary embarrassment about the missionary movement of the [nineteenth] century is not, as we like to think, evidence that we have become more humble. It is, I fear, much more clearly evidence, of

a shift in belief. It is evidence that we are less ready to affirm the uniqueness, the centrality, the decisiveness of Jesus Christ as universal Lord and Savior, the Way by following whom the world is to find its true goal, the Truth by which every other claim to truth is to be tested, the Life in whom alone life in its fullness is to be found.”

-LESSLIE NEWBIGIN