Saturday, November 7, 2009

Refusing to Face The Truth

During the 1960's and 1970's, Jack Hyles pastored the First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, which was the world's largest Sunday School. I graduated from their college, and they were running 40,000 in Sunday School when I left.

His son David had an extremely large and successful youth ministry, but reports kept coming in of Dave's wide-spread immorality. Looking at David's strict obedience to the church's lengthy list of man-made rules, Jack didn't believe the charges. When he finally accepted that they were true, he tried to cover things up while he worked on getting David to repent. Finally, everything blew up in his face, and the scandal became public.

And then Jack preached one of the most important sermons in Christian history: "Logic Demands the King James Bible." A strict fundamentalist who had cracked under the strain of his son's wickedness, Jack rejected God's Word in favor of a man-made translation, but he did keep the man-made rules.

Did it work?

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