hen David Jarnes, our associate editor, ac cepted a call to be the associate editor of Signs of 'the Times, the search was on for a replacement. David spent eight years with Ministry and con tributed greatly to the scholarship of the journal.
We needed someone who had already demonstrated his ability to write and at the same time possessed the skill to com bine that writing with careful scholarship.
We decided to call Martin Weber, direc tor of prayer ministries for the It Is Written telecast. Martin began his work for the Seventh-day Adventist Church as a pastor in the Mountain View Conference. He then served as full-time evangelist in that conference, senior pastor of the Anaheim Adventist Church, director of ministry growth for the Voice of Prophecy radiobroadcast, and then at It Is Written.
Weber, 39, is a prolific author, having written the following books: Some Call It Heresy; Hurt, Healing, and Happy Again; My Tortured Conscience; and Adventist Hot Potatoes. And in addition to his duties with the prayer ministries, he has written many of the scripts for It Is Writ ten during the past seven years. He has also helped prepare the following books for telecast speaker George Vandeman: What I Like About. . . , Comrades in Christ, When God Made Rest, Showdown at Armageddon, Rise and Fall of Anti christ, Decade of Destiny, and The Overcomers.
His wife, Darlene, is a secretary. They have two teenagers, Steve, 15, and Christi, 14.
Martin comes to us not only as a gifted editor and writer but a speaker as well. He is often in demand to fill appointments around the world. However, we have "first serial rights" to him and he will make his greatest contribution through the pages of this journal. His great burden is to present Jesus Christ as the only hope of the world, and then Seventh-day Adventist Church doctrine in a crosscentered setting.
Too often we separate doctrine from Jesus and the cross. When we do that, doctrine becomes sterile and legalistic.
Doctrine is always for the purpose of revealing God, never for enslaving humans. And yet most of us can remem ber times when fights developed over doctrine to such an extent that Jesus Christ was lost sight of in the debate.
Doctrine has never saved a single person! Only Jesus Christ saves! How ever, we would be the poorer without doctrine because it helps us understand God. Those on opposite sides of theo logical debate view God through differ ent sets of spectacles. For example, those who place the moral influence theory of the atonement before that of substitution will have a different picture of God.
So doctrine is important but only as a frame for the great and magnificent truth that God entered this world as a sinless baby, lived a sinless life, died, and rose again, and now offers His perfect life and His death in place of our imperfect lives. We are granted eternal life not on the basis of receiving what we have done but on the basis of what Jesus has done.
To accept this salvation demands the same self-sacrifice from us that it did from God. Just as God was willing to surrender all of heaven for our good, so we too must surrender our whole self to His control.
That surrender is the greatest fight the individual has to make. There is always something we want to hold back. Some thing we want to keep control over. God says no! We are either surrendered or not.
And the walk in the Christian life is not so much overcoming sin as learning some hidden area of the life that needs to be surrendered to the Lordship of Christ.
Christ is our Saviour and our Lord. He saves us from sin not in sin. He imputes in a moment His perfect righteousness to ...... ,:, . us but takes a lifetime to impart His righteous ness to us. While we are saved only by His perfect righteousness imputed to us, we will not be saved if His righ teousness is not also being imparted to us.
A plant is either growmg or dying. A Chris tian who has been born again must con stantly be growing in grace.
Day by day we come to reflect His character more and more; increasingly revealing more and more His attributes, attitudes, and bearing. Daily we seek to become what He has said we already are in Him. Paradoxical? Yes. True? Yes.
Pray that the cross will become more and more central in your life and at Ministry.
