Signs of the Times

with contributions from Paul Petrocokino, J. Lindsay Guthrie, Paul Scherer

Her Majesty the Queen of England in a message to the World Evangelical Alliance printed in the Daily Dispatch Manchester, England

That cherished inheritance which we call the British way of life has its source and inspiration in the great ideals of Christianity.

It is fitting indeed that we should take this opportunity of showing how the life of our nation has long been influenced by our faith and molded by the Bible.

I can truly say that the King and I long to see the Bible back where it ought to be as a guide and comfort to the homes and lives of our people.

From our own experience we know what the Bible can mean for personal life.

Paul Petrocokino in The Labour Leader Toronto, Ontario, Canada

A statesman recently attended a world assembly for Moral Re-Armament and was talking things over with a friend who had had many years' experience with MRA. The statesman told him of the problems he was facing in his country: of how his position and his ability to help his country were threatened by extremists in his own ranks who were agitating for him to take certain direct action which he knew to be wrong, and threatened also by intransigeance on the other side and a refusal to accede to even moderate proposals for reform—which naturally played into the extremists' hands. "What can I do?" he asked. His friend thought a little and said, "I really have nothing to offer you in the way of good advice, but I believe, if we are quiet for a little and ask God to show us. He will."

The result was that in spite of a major crisis developing shortly before his return, he was able to lay the foundation of a greater unity and stability in his country than had been known before in its political life. News keeps coming in of changes in members both of the extremist left and the intransigeant right that point to a new day for that nation.

God-guided statesmen are nothing new, but the point now is for it to be the normal thing, not the exceptional thing, for statesmen to listen to God. In his speech "Moral Re-Armament and National Defense," Frank Buchanan develops still further the thought of the guidance of God as the basis of wise statesmanship and national security. He says:"... The greatest men of our past knew that God-control was the only adequate program for a nation.

"It can come to our nation as men and women everywhere listen to God and obey, as they learn to plot their own course and their nation's course by the four compass points of MRA—honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. But everyone must listen, every man in every last place, in every last situation. Not the religious leaders alone, but the business leaders, the cultural leaders, the national leaders.

"A listening nation is a secure nation. The only true security is God's power working through the people who obey Him."

Rev. J. Lindsay Guthrie, M.A. in the Johnstone Advertiser Johnstone, Renfrewshire, Scotland

Remember, daydreams and temptations need an open door. They must cross the threshold of your mind before they can do harm.

How can you keep that threshold and how can you he surely and permanently guarded? To strain always, in a fever of "Thou shalt not" dictated by what we have learned as children and by convention, means danger. The moment we lose grip of this conscious guardian we are lost. But try this: fill your mind with good and noble thoughts and clean desires;... with great and true thoughts of God from the Gospels or with verses from the Psalms..., or with good and true thoughts from any source. Even in the hour of stress and strain we may find, as so many have done, that we have made a wall between ourselves and evil. Remember this, that what is suggested is not a mere repetition of phrases; what is suggested is that we should think of things lovely and of good report. And at the heart of all such things is God, God who is Lord of loveliness and peace and truth.

Dr. Paul Scherer in The Chaplain, Washington, D.C.

In the New Testament power is associated with something called love. Perhaps we should at least remember that!... That it is power is a proposition as capable of demonstration as anything else on this earth! Love is the source of all the decisive victories you've been able to win over yourself. You haven't won them because it was your duty to win them. You haven't won them in the name of reason. You've won them because some kind of love had done something to you! Not done a great deal perhaps, but all there was that was worth doing! You'll rule your home by love, if you do rule it. And whoever it is that will command the world, will command the world by it!... From the beginning, God set love to do this job; and for all the money we have been pouring out we can't pay anything else to do it!

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