“Send bread now, brethren, and afterward the Bibles and preachers,” David Lipscomb (1866).
I’ve often heard and said that people won’t care what you say until they know you care. I think the following small blurb by Lipscomb reflects that principle.
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David Lipscomb, “Fellowship,” Gospel Advocate 9 (June 1867) 476.
[After listing a number of gifts from Texas, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee, Lipscomb writes:] Bro. J. K. Rogers, the efficient Principal of the Christian Female College, Columbia, MO., says: “I still have in my hands an amount of money for the South. Had I better send Bibles or Bread?” Our response is, as highly as we appreciate the Bible, and its necessity to the temporal and spiritual well-being of man, a loaf of bread to-day, in the name of Christ, would do more in opening the hearts of our Southern people to the reception of the gospel than any number of Bibles, tracts or preachers? Send bread now, brethren, and afterward the Bibles and preachers.”
In the past century, in the East Harlem Protestant Parish, Bill Webber used to say, “Demonstration precedes proclamation.” A century earlier, DL knew the same truth in the yet to be Reconstructed South. Mercy opens hearts that preaching alone will close.
God’s Peace to you.
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