Zion Christian Church Quotes

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late. Let’s remember again the radical profession that we Christians make. We confess that Jesus is the world’s true king. We confess that Jesus is Lord...right now. The rightful ruler of the world is not some ancient Caesar, not some contemporary Commander in Chief, but Jesus Christ! Jesus is not going to be king someday, Jesus is King of Kings right now! Christ was crowned on the cross and God vindicated him as the world’s true king by raising him from the dead. This is what Christians confess, believe, and seek to live. We have no king but Jesus. And our king has nothing to do with violent power. Our king has no use for nuclear weapons. Why? Because you can’t love your neighbor with hydrogen bombs. Our king said his kingdom does not come from the world of war, which is why his servants do not fight. Jesus told Pontius Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my servants would be fighting.”[9] The kingdom from heaven that Jesus brings into the world does not come riding an M1 Abrams tank. In the kingdom of the Prince of Peace, we study war no more, we turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, we turn tanks into tractors and missile silos into grain silos. Our task is not to turn the world into a battlefield, our task is to turn the world into a garden. Our goal is not Armageddon, our goal is New Jerusalem. We’re marching to Zion, the beautiful city of God. Of course Governor Pilate doesn’t believe any of this.

Answering the ultra-literalists The fundamental error these ultra-literalists make is they fail to recognise how Jesus and the Apostles reinterpreted the Old Testament. Instead texts are made to speak about present and future events almost as if the New Testament were never written. The implicit assumption is that somehow Old and New Testament run at times parallel into the future, the former speaking of Israel and the latter of the church, almost independent of one another (see Figure 2.2).

This is the basis for the view that the church, made up of both Jews and Gentiles, is the successor of the promises originally made to Israel.

John 15 is the most significant passage in the New Testament for understanding the analogy of the vine and the relationship between Israel and the church. When Jesus says “I am the vine” he is making a very provocative statement. In the Old Testament, Israel is described as the vine (see for example, Jeremiah 11:16; Ezekiel 15:1-8; 17:1-10; Hosea 10:1-2; 14:6).

But Dhu Nuwas’s letter gave birth to a rumor that still lives. The kingdom of Himyar had long ago spread across the old territory once governed by the Sabeans, whose queen had journeyed north to see the great Israelite king Solomon in his capital of Jerusalem. And Dhu Nuwas was said to have sworn his oath to the Christians on the Ark. Perhaps the Ark of the Covenant, lost long ago, had in fact been taken down into Sabea by descendents of the queen, and Dhu Nuwas’s oath meant that he had the Ark in his possession; and perhaps Caleb, plundering the capital city of Himyar after his victory, took the Ark back across the Red Sea into Axum. It is still rumored to rest there, in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, in the ancient capital of the Axumites.

Active in the antislavery effort, helping enslaved persons, including Frederick Douglass, find safety in the North, the AME Zion Church also counted Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman as members. These abolitionists were believers who framed their powerful arguments for freedom and equality in the language of scripture and an uncorrupted Christianity.

J. C. Ryle[69] (1816-1900) wrote the following: “For many centuries there has prevailed in the Churches of Christ a strange, and to my mind, an unwarrantable mode of dealing with this word ‘Israel.’ It has been interpreted in many passages of the Psalms and Prophets as if it meant nothing more than Christian believers. Have promises been held out to Israel? Men have been told continually that they are addressed to Gentile saints. Have glorious things been described as laid up in store for Israel? Men have been incessantly told that they describe the victories and triumphs of the Gospel in Christian Churches. The proofs of these things are too many to require quotation. No man can read the immense majority of commentaries and popular hymns without seeing this system of interpretation to which I now refer. Against that system I have long protested, and I hope I shall always protest as long as I live.”[70] He continued saying: “The word ‘Israel’ is used nearly seven hundred times in the Bible. I can only discover three senses in which it is used. First, it is one of the names of Jacob, the father of the twelve tribes; a name specially given to him by God. Second, it is a name given to the ten tribes which separated from Judah and Benjamin in the days of Rehoboam and became a distinct kingdom. This kingdom is often called Israel in contradistinction to the kingdom of Judah. Thirdly and lastly, it is a name given to the whole Jewish nation, to all members of the twelve tribes which sprang from Jacob and were brought out of Egypt into the land of Canaan. This is by far the most common signification of the word in the Bible...That Israel, which God has scattered and will yet gather again, is the whole Jewish nation.

light of the fact that America is the home of the second largest number of descendants in the world of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God’s warnings to Zion to flee the Daughter of Babylon, along with the other seven warnings for Christians to flee, certainly appear to be His compassionate call on his people to avoid coming destruction and death. No other nation has as many Jewish residents as America. Though there are Catholics of Jewish heritage, the warnings addressed to Jews to flee from the Daughter of Babylon can’t really be made to apply to a denomination. On their face they are warnings to flee a nation, not a Church.

Mourning and weeping over the decay of religion, the decline of revival power, and the fearful inroads of worldliness in the Church are almost an unknown quantity. There is so much of so-called optimism that leaders have no eyes to see the breaking down of the walls of Zion and the low spiritual state of the Christians of the present day, and have less heart to mourn and cry about

In light of the fact that America is the home of the second largest number of descendants in the world of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God’s warnings to Zion to flee the Daughter of Babylon, along with the other seven warnings for Christians to flee, certainly appear to be His compassionate call on his people to avoid coming destruction and death. No other nation has as many Jewish  residents as America. Though there are Catholics of Jewish heritage, the warnings addressed to Jews to flee from the Daughter of Babylon can’t really be made to apply to a denomination. On their face they are warnings to flee a nation, not a Church.

Do We Need a Eulogy or a Birth Announcement? Like most African-Americans my age and older, I have been touched by the virtue and disturbed by the failures of the African-American church. I have had some of the richest times of celebration and praise in local black churches. And I’ve also experienced some of the most perplexing and discouraging situations in this same institution. It was an African-American preacher who vouched for me when I was facing criminal charges as a rising junior in high school, making all the difference in my future. And it was the membership of a black Baptist congregation that nearly poisoned my love for the church when, as a new Christian, I witnessed the “brawl” of my first church business meeting. The preaching of the church gave me biblical tropes and themes for building a sense of self in the world. But a low level of spiritual living among many African-American Christians tempted me to believe that everything in the Black Church was show-and-tell, a tragic comedy of self-delusion and religious hypocrisy. I left the Black Church of my youth and converted to Islam during college. I became zealous for Islam and a staunch critic of the Black Church. I welcomed much of the criticisms of radicals, Afrocentrists, and groups like the Nation of Islam. I cut my teeth on the writing and speaking of men like Molefi Kete Asante, Na’im Akbar, Wade Noble, and Louis Farrakhan. The institution that helped nurture me I now deem a real enemy to the progress of African-Americans, an opiate and a tool of white supremacy. I had experienced enough of the church’s weakness to reject her altogether. The immature and undiscerning rarely know how to handle the failures of its heroes, to evaluate with nuance and critical appreciation. That was true of me before the Lord saved me. In July 1995, sitting in an African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) church in the Washington, DC, area, a short, square, balding African-American preacher expounded the text of Exodus 32. With passion and insight, he detailed the idolatry of Israel and exposed the idolatry of my heart. As he pressed on, more and more I felt guilty for my sin, estranged from God, and deserving of God’s holy judgment. Then, from the text of Exodus 32, he preached Jesus Christ, the Son of God who takes away the sin of the world and reconciles sinners to God. He proclaimed the cross of Jesus Christ, where my sins had been nailed and the Son of God punished in my place. The preacher announced the resurrection of Christ, proving the Father accepted the Son’s sacrifice. Then the pastor called every sinner to repent and put their trust—not in themselves—but in Jesus Christ alone for righteousness, forgiveness, and eternal life. It was as if he addressed me alone though I sat in a congregation of eight thousand. That morning, under the preaching of the gospel from God’s Word, the Spirit gave me and my wife repentance and faith leading to eternal life. I was a dead man when I walked into that building. But I left a living man, revived by God’s Word and Spirit.

Black power is Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, or Gabriel Prosser planning a slave revolt. It is slaves poisoning masters, and Frederick Douglass delivering an abolitionist address. This is the history that black theology must take seriously before it can begin to speak about God and black humanity. Like black power, black theology is not new either. It came into being when the black clergy realized that killing slave masters was doing the work of God. It began when the black clergy refused to accept the racist white church as consistent with the gospel of God. The organizing of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Christian Methodist Church, the Baptist churches, and many other black churches is a visible manifestation of black theology. The participation of black churches in the black liberation struggle from the eighteenth to the twentieth century is a tribute to the endurance of black theology.

But it was not just the Christian community that paid homage in their churches that day. Among the Jewish community, especially of London, Prince Albert was mourned in an atmosphere of profound melancholy. The Jews, who had much to thank the Prince for his impartiality on religious matters, marked the occasion with special services in synagogues, several of them draped in black. Sermons on the dead Prince were delivered at London’s historic Sephardi synagogue (the Bevis Marks in the City) and the two Ashkenazi congregations (the Great and the Hambro synagogues). At the West London synagogue every seat was filled long before the service and the roads leading up to it were jammed with vehicles. Here the congregation heard a sermon by Dr Marks taking as its text the words of Jeremiah IX:19: ‘A voice of lamentation is heard from Zion. How are we bereaved!’ And at his own privately built synagogue on his estate in Ramsgate, the philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore and his wife attended a special service where the reading desk was covered with black cloth, ‘the only symbol of mourning we ever had in our synagogue’. All in all, as one British Jew later reported to a friend in South Africa, there had been ‘not a dry eye in the synagogues’; prayers for Prince Albert had continued all day. ‘The people mourned for him as much as for Hezekiah; and, indeed, he deserved it a great deal better’ was his somewhat unorthodox conclusion.

Revival is not going to come merely by attending Conferences or Conventions, though that may contribute to it. When "Zion travailed she brought forth children," Oh, may God bring us there, may God lead us through to the place of absolute surrender. I shall never forget that dear saint of God, Dr. Inwood, cry at the 1924 Keswick Convention, "Christian men and women, self-renunciation is the cardinal ethic of the Christian Church." Is it not true, too often our very best moments of yielding and consecration are mingled with the destructive element of self-preservation? A full and complete surrender is the price of blessing, but that also is the price of revival.

No Rome, no Reich, no Zion, above the human.