“How shall your elect be kept from Satan’s deceptions except by abiding in the truth and walking in the power of the Holy Spirit? Oh, revive your church in this respect, we pray! Give to those who know you a more intense faith in the eternal truths, burning into us by experience the things which we do know; may they be beyond all question to us. And may we never be ashamed to glory in the good old way, the way the fathers trod, the way which leads to heaven and to God.

Amen” (Charles Spurgeon).

As C. S. Lewis once said, all that is not eternal is eternally out of date. All these precious truths that we hold so dear and read in the Bible are eternal truths from the very beginning. We do well to adhere to the faith of our fathers — to the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who looked forward to the Messiah as we now look back to Jesus.

When we try to update Christianity to fit with the times and current thinking, we go astray. We end up with what the Apostle Paul calls “another gospel” different from the one that he preached about Jesus. When we try to progress beyond what orthodox doctrines we have learned from the Bible, we end up with a different faith in a different Jesus that has no power at all to save or transform anybody or anything.

“I love to tell the story;
  For those who know it best
Seem hungering and thirsting
  To hear it like the rest.
And when, in scenes of glory,
  I sing the new, new song,
’Twill be the old, old story,
  That I have loved so long.”
Arabella Katherine Hanke (1834-1911)/ William Gustavus Fischer (1835-1912).