"I Just Don't Know Enough"
How often gospel preachers and other Christians hear those words from the lips of someone they are trying to persuade to obey the gospel. And in most cases the statement is false.
The apostles of the Lord went out among pagan people who had never even heard the name of Christ or of God. They preached one gospel sermon, and so simple was the scheme of redemption that these heathen people, by far the majority of whom could neither read nor write their own names, could understand and obey the word of the apostles.
Perhaps in the very fact of their simple, uncluttered paganism we have the answer. They had not been taught a lot of things about Christ that weren’t so; their minds were not cluttered and confused, bewildered and befuddled by the “theologies” of men. With them it was a simple choice between Christ and Paganism. It was not a choice between the relative importance of Christ’s commands — whether some of them were “essential” and some “non-essential.” It did not occur to them that any of his commands were non-essential. They were not bedevilled by the conflicting claims of parties and sects and schisms, each screaming its own excellence and anathematizing its fellows.
The honest soul who holds back from obeying the Lord today because he thinks he “doesn’t know enough,” should take a lesson from these early disciples. Come to the word of God with the same open mind, the same desire to learn that they brought to the apostles’ words and the truth of God is as brilliant and unmistakable in our day as it was in theirs. You will not be confused by claims of men; you will not read in God’s word of a single one of the modern “protestant” churches, any more than you will read of the Roman Catholic church. There is not one word in the Bible telling how one may become a member of any of these human organizations.
If a man will divest his mind of all thoughts of this church or that church, this creed or that creed, and simply open the Book and do what it teaches him, God will “add” that man to his church. He will not be confused; he will not be misled. If one knows that Christ is the Son of God, and that his word must be obeyed, one knows enough to imitate his obedience — an obedience that will bring him step by step into full fellowship in the family of God, and will bring him finally to heaven itself.
Several years ago, Paul Harvey reported on his noon news of a 73-year-old man who was pinned beneath his farm tractor for four days and nights in driving rain and a terrible storm. Concerned friends went to see about him just in time. He survived his ordeal, but did lose a leg below the knee.
