Journal: Faith and Mission
Volume: FM 14:2 (Spring 1997)
Article: Taking Every Thought Captive to Christ
Author: James Parker III

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FM 14:2 (Spring 1997) p. 56

Taking Every Thought Captive to Christ

James Parker III

Director
The Trinity Institute Westminster Ave.
P.O. Box 100 Tehuacana, TX 76686

oday, I want us to look in the Word of God at 2 Corinthians the tenth chapter. If you’ll turn with me in your Bibles, I want to look at this chapter for a few minutes this morning. It’s really fun being with you today and speaking to you because most of the audiences I speak to-that are public audiences and not at the institute where I work-are secular audiences on secular university campuses, and normally eighty to ninety percent of the audience are not Christian. Most of the time there are evangelistic-type outreaches on these campuses. What will happen is that a campus group will sponsor me, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, or Campus Crusade, or some group like that, and I will come in, and they will advertise. They will rent a big hall at the university, and they’ll put out provocative and inflammatory advertising so people will show up-like, “Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation,” and usually it will provoke people. And so, the atheist-agnostic club will show up, the Unitarian-Universalist association, the New Age group, and the Muslim student association, and a few Christians will trickle in the back somewhere, supporting me by prayer somewhere in the corner, hidden somewhere-and turn them loose on me. There’s nothing that’s more exciting, though, than to do some Mars Hill encounters.

If you want to sharpen your knife, and you want to get some fire in you, you just try that-and don’t wait until you’re ready. If you wait until you’re ready, you will never, ever do it because you’ll never be ready, you just gear up, and go up, and go do it. And you’ll be amazed at what it will do for your own life and ministry. Perhaps you’ve found 2 Corinthians 10 by now; I realize for some of you it’s the first week of seminary so I wanted to give you plenty of time to find that. Now, I hope you brought your Bibles to chapel. As an Old Testament professor I had at Princeton one time did, we were in an Old Testament class, and he looked around and he wanted somebody to read; I think it was a course on “Key Words in the Old Testament,” Charles Fritsch, a great Qumran scholar, and he asked somebody to read a passage. Nobody in the class had a Bible with him. And he sort of grumbled and said, “Boys, bring your Bibles to class; it’s amazing the light the Bible will shed on the commentaries.” So you bring your Bibles; you use your Bible at seminary. Now, look at 2 Corinthians 10: I want to start in verse 2:

FM 14:2 (Spring 1997) p. 5...

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