“Made Me Ashamed”

THE Word and Way, the “Missouri Baptist Journal,” of August 23, 1956, had a brief article in it entitled “She Sent Me Back to My Bible.” It was written by D. R. Bledsoe, a clergyman in Kansas City, Missouri, about his encounter with one of Jehovah’s witnesses.

“Many times we sit quite complacent and smug with our statement that we are Baptists and take all of the Bible. We must not be too satisfied that we are the only group who use the Bible. There are those who do so with sincerity and with much more fervor and dedication to their cause than we do.

“The Lord led me into one of our Sunday School homes recently where a ‘Jehovah’s Witness’ witness was propounding a ‘Bible Lesson’ to a searching young mother, a displaced Baptist. I’m sure the ‘Pastor’s Study’ sign in our front yard has protected me from such an encounter before but inasmuch as I was there the guns were turned on me. I pray I am not boasting when I say that I was and am quite confident in my systematic theology and scriptural understanding, but this 40-year-old Jehovah’s Witness housewife made me ashamed of my limited scriptural acumen . . .

“I learned very quickly that 90 percent of my ‘average’ church membership would stand refuted and fouled up in such an entanglement. I learned that my people had to be indoctrinated and that beyond devotional sermonettes.

“You will probably smile and maybe laugh out loud at my experience, but brother, all you need to bring you out of shock and shake you to your consciousness is a contact like I had and you’d be sent back to your Bible.” Truly the words of Isaiah 56:10 about Israel’s watchmen loving to slumber apply to the spiritual watchmen of Christendom!