It seems today that our world has many moral problems that Christians are concerned about. Imagine the church could band together to solve those problems. For example, abortion is a moral plague on our country. Millions of innocent children have been killed in the name of convenience. So imagine that the church would focus all its energy and effort on eliminating this heinous practice. Imagine that it was completely successful. Would our world improve? Of course. Would it mean the world would go to heaven? No. There are many things we could focus on that would make our world a better place. Eliminating the drug problem, protecting the sanctity of marriage, restoring moral practices would all be wonderful improvements to our world, but they wouldn’t save anyone. If we focus ourselves into evangelizing the world, we could save souls, but the other effect of our efforts would be that these problems would also disappear. As we make disciples, the moral problems would disappear as people submit to the will of God. If we want to make the world a better place, we need to make the world true Christians.
Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
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