What does it look like to be a Christian and belong to a church? To answer this question, we look to Scripture and how it has transformed people's loves over the centuries. In this video, Sinclair Ferguson urges us to read about our history and sing the great hymns of the past.
Transcript
I often say to people if you want to learn the story of the church, the easiest way to answer the question, "How can I see how knowing it will help me?" is to do it first of all by reading Christian biographies. I think one of the things you see is the great sacrifices that Christians have made in the past. I was thinking recently, that when I was a teenager, sacrifice was a word often used in sermons and nowadays the word I hear most often is satisfaction. We often say to people if you go to another country you'll see your own nation through different eyes. The same is true of the Christian life and the Christian church. We see the style of life Christians were living that encourages us, I think, to understand what Scripture teaches us about what it means to be a Christian believer in the world, and also what it means to belong to the Christian church. So I think it's very helpful for us. And then singing the hymns. The great hymns of the church in the past were written by people who were very acute in their understanding of Scripture. We often learn how to think about the gospel and the Christian life in what we sing. So to go back to the Psalms that the Christian Church sang almost exclusively for the first 1,600 years, and to go back to the great hymns, nourish our faith in our understanding of the gospel.
