1 Corinthians 4:2
Moreover, it is required in steward, that a man be found faithful.
Paul and his message were forsaken back in his lifetime and have been ever since! Again, for newcomers, we'll give a quick resume of what happened to Paul's teaching. It is true that most people in Asia had forsaken Paul's message (2 Tim. 1:15). When Paul speaks of all Asia, he is not speaking of the few believers who kept faithful to the revelation of The Mystery. After Paul was dead and gone, these people were known as Paulicians (Lightfoot's early volumes give information on these.) They persisted through many years until, finally, the Eastern Catholic Church hunted them down. They were determined to kill them off. They then fled to the mountains of Europe, and there, the Roman Catholic Church was doing its best to exterminate them along with any others that believed: the followers of Erasmes, the followers of Huss, Henry Bullinger, and, of course, Martin Luther. We will only name a few of the men of that time. The Paulicians were of the same doctrine, heart, and mind as the groups who, at that time, stayed aloof from the Roman Church and kept the faith! Among those were the Waldensees, the Albigenses, the Montanists, and your Paulicians made four. And Martin Luther came along just about the right time with his reformation that stopped the movement that was getting rid of these folks and killing them off. God timed it just right.
That will give you a little history so you'll know what has been going on in the past with the faithful and the faithless. It's comforting to know that there were faithful men and women throughout the dark ages.
The truth was recovered concerning The Mystery by a man named C. H. Macintosh, the man who founded the Plymouth Brethren Church. Yet that church has never accepted the teaching, sorry to say. Well, we can tell you this: that the Lutheran Church named after Martin Luther has never caught up with his teaching, never! Just one doctrine is enough to show that, and that is the doctrine concerning the immortality of the soul. They've never caught up with Luther on that, as he didn't believe in the immortality of the soul, and that's to be found in his Ninety-Five Theses now in the British Museum.
We would like to remind you of these things to encourage you to stand for the truth. We've had heroes in the past, men who have given their lives, both their service in their life and ending quite often in death because of their faith. Many martyrs! We have a book here in the library, Fox's Book of Martyrs. It's just a good idea to remind ourselves sometimes of the faithful men of the past. And they kept the faith to the death, and there's going to be a lot of crowns. Now, they may not have been perfect in their doctrine, as we're blessed to know today, but they stood for The Truth that they knew it. And that's what is required to be a faithful steward. Faithful with whatever happens to be put in our hands. We today do not know all The Truth. In the immensity of God's Perfect Truth, we know but a grain of sand on a beach, but what we do know in the rightly divided Word of God.
