1 Timothy 2:9-14 In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with modesty and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold… Such is the description and character of Christians in early days, such of all true Christians in every day. In no one point of view is the inconsistency of the Christian world more strikingly apparent: they would be thought to embrace the gospel of godliness without an idea of becoming godly. What should we think of a physician who had no interest in the science or practice of medicine? What of a husbandman who disliked and avoided the employments of the field? What of a soldier who declined all discipline and all obedience? But, to say the truth, and to do men justice, such instances in the natural world are extremely rare; it is only in the spiritual world, only where God, and the soul, and eternity are concerned, that we find men lost in apathy, and acting in contradiction to their pretended faith; and casting off the consideration of those liabilities and duties upon which they have openly entered. There are men, indeed, who, when charged with such palpable inconsistency, and feeling uneasy under the shame of it, at once deny that they do set up any profession at all; and make a sort of merit of saying that they do not pretend to any of the distinguished excellencies of the Christian character. But this flimsy pretext of honesty can avail them but little. Ii they pretend not to what the gospel requires, why pretend to the gospel at all? Nay, it is a melancholy fact that the generality of heathen in our Indian and other foreign possessions manifest a far more abiding sense of their various deities and idols than the generality of Christians do of the true and holy God. They fear the object of their worship, they respect it, they daily remember it. The wicked enemy, who drove man from paradise with a corrupted flesh into a corrupted world, still uses that flesh and that world as instruments of keeping up and increasing our estrangement from God. I have a message to deliver to-day to every soul that is in earnest in the great work of salvation; not to teach, but to remind you of what the truth really is: be it then understood, be it taken to heart, .that godliness is the great good, in the present life, to which Christ came to bring us, as the means of our final recovery and blessedness. (J. Slade, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; |
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