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About the Book


"The Act of Marriage" by Tim LaHaye is a Christian guidebook on marriage and sexuality, offering advice on building a strong, fulfilling relationship with one's spouse. LaHaye explores topics such as communication, intimacy, and sexual satisfaction within the context of marriage, providing practical tips and biblical guidance for couples looking to strengthen their bond and cultivate a healthy sexual relationship.

John A. Broadus

John A. Broadus John Broadus, Southern’s second president, was born on January 24, 1827 in Culpeper County, Virginia. After undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Virginia, he joined the university’s faculty as an assistant professor of classics. There, he displayed unusual facility in his post. He served simultaneously as pastor of the Charlottesville Baptist Church. In this period, Broadus won the heart of Maria Harrison, daughter of renowned classics professor Gessner Harrison. Married on November 18, 1850, the Broaduses had three daughters (Eliza, Annie, and Maria) together before Maria passed away on October 21, 1857 at twenty-six years of age. On January 4, 1859, Broadus married Charlotte Eleanor Sinclair, who gave birth to several additional children. The 1858 Education Convention elected Broadus to the seminary’s first faculty. Broadus declined the position because he had close ties to school and family in Charlottesville. For months, Boyce and Manly doggedly urged him to reconsider. After much thought, and not a little anguish, Broadus accepted. From the time he began teaching, Broadus showed a lifelong affection for instructing and mentoring students. Prior to the seminary’s closing in the Civil War period, Broadus drew a single student to his homiletics class. Rather than canceling the class, Broadus lectured to his lone pupil week after week, honing the content that later became the book The Preparation and Delivery of Sermons. The text’s durability was remarkable. Over half a century later, several seminaries used it in homiletics classes. When Southern suspended courses in 1862, Broadus served as a chaplain to Confederate soldiers. He returned to Southern at the war’s end and resumed his teaching post. His talents gained renown. Over Broadus’s career, the University of Chicago, Vassar University, Brown University, Georgetown College, and Crozer Theological Seminary each wooed the professor as a potential president. Large and wealthy churches invited him to be their pastor. Broadus declined these overtures. The greatest need and his greatest influence were at the seminary he loved. In 1889 trustees elected Broadus president of the seminary to succeed Boyce. He guided the school for six peaceful years. Broadus contributed much to the fields in which he taught. In addition to his landmark text on preaching, the scholar labored over his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew for twenty years before publishing it. With such depth of thought, he excelled at preaching. University of Chicago professor W. C. Wilkinson once remarked of Broadus that he had “every natural endowment, every acquired accomplishment to have become, had he been only a preacher, a preacher hardly second to any in the world.” (1) By his plain exposition and conversational delivery, Broadus changed the character of SBC preaching, a shift seen in the current day. Broadus’s life is notable on a variety of fronts. While a pastor in Virginia, Broadus baptized Lottie Moon, who became Southern Baptist’s most famous overseas missionary. In the Civil War, Broadus preached before Confederate general Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals, earning a standing invitation from Lee to preach for him. J. D. Rockefeller went further than Lee—he offered Broadus a hefty salary to become his pastor in New York City, an offer Broadus turned down. In 1886, on the 250th anniversary of Harvard University, the school conferred an honorary degree on Broadus due to his national academic reputation. In 1889, Yale University invited the professor to New Haven to deliver the Lyman Beecher Lectures on preaching. Broadus was the only Southern Baptist to address the Ivy League school in a series of talks. Together with Basil Manly, Jr., he founded the monthly Sunday School newspaper, Kind Words in 1866, a title that was eventually adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Home Mission Board. As a preacher, professor, and leader, Broadus looms large in Southern’s history and in the history of the SBC. He was an active churchman at Louisville’s Walnut Street Baptist Church. Broadus passed away on March 16, 1895. (1) William Mueller, A History of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 67. Sources: William Mueller, A History of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Nashville, TN: Broadman, 1959.

Are You a Friend to the Poor

God’s heart is for the least of these: the suffering, lost, and lonely. "Do you know the name of a poor person?" a young man in his twenties who was sharing about his experiences as a missionary in Moldova posed the question to me in church. His phrase was tricky because if he'd said, "Do you care about the poor?" I might have tossed it in that drawer where you keep all the stuff you've heard a million times and are supposed to ponder but probably won't do much with. When he asked if I knew the name of a poor person he exposed a glaring gap in my Christianity: Whose name did I know? Not whose face had I passed on 21st Street on my way to grab coffee; not what homeless man had I handed a dollar for the paper he peddles at the stoplight; not what anonymous tsunami victim had received an online donation I'd made. Whose name did I know? I was left to consider this very important question because if I didn't know the name of a poor person, I didn't really know a poor person. (This is one of the biggest problems with going to church — the possibility of getting all convicted and stuff.) I always knew that if God's heart was for anything it was for the least of these: the suffering, sick, needy, uneducated, foreigner, lost, lonely — this much was clear. And it's true that these were people I cared about, prayed for, and on whose behalf I tithed, but how many of them called me friend? Who had my phone number, been to dinner at my house, or sat beside me at church? Without condemnation, I had to recognize that I was someone who cared for the poor mostly from a distance but who had yet to intimately involve herself. My first step: Learn a name. In the Law of Moses God commanded the Israelites to leave their extra sheaves, olives, and grapes for the alien, fatherless, and widow — for all the people who didn't have what the Israelites had and who didn't have the means to get what they had. At the end of this recurring command the Lord gave His people an intriguing reason for why He required this, "Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. That is why I command you to do this" (Deut. 24:22, NIV). Didn't God want them to leave their excess food for the poor and outsider because these people were hungry, because they needed community, because they couldn't provide for themselves, because He loved them? Wasn't that why? Oh I'm sure those were all reasons, but I believe God first had to deal with that sneaky mind-set, the one that tries to trick us into thinking that when we step over a stalk of wheat to leave it for the poor we're doing something really noble, plain over-the-top gracious. That we're going above and beyond by giving away what is rightfully "ours." The Lord was staving off this kind of thinking by saying, "Hold your fancy horses. Remember you used to be slaves too! Don't forget to tap into what that felt like." The Israelites were no strangers to poverty, oppression, or powerlessness as ones who had once been enslaved in Egypt. It was only because of God's deliverance they were now free, only because of His goodness they were blessed with flourishing fields and bursting branches. By remembering their once low estate, they were poised to welcome the foreigner, fatherless, and widow, not out of self-righteousness, guilt, or duty, but out of the love God had shown them. Last night I served dinner to an Iraqi couple and their 2-year-old daughter, a family some of my friends and I have gotten to know. I'd hoped that chicken, broccoli, and couscous were safe selections to serve these well-dressed Middle Easterners, though I sensed I may have been pushing it with the hot apple cider. I was going for the American autumn experience, and judging by their first and only sip, this went over moderately. As we settled around the table I asked them why they'd left Baghdad to come to America. The husband replied, "Because there are less car bombings here," and then he broke out into hysterical laughter. (Safwat's a sanguine.) His wife was less buoyant, confiding that the war had been devastating and that they'd fled here as refugees hoping to find jobs but so far without any success. My eyes welled up as she spoke because her suffering was not that of a nameless Iraqi, but it belonged to her, a real-life woman with a name, Rida. As the adults carried on, Rubaa fingered the icing on her cupcake and tapped her shoes on the hardwood floors, just like any other baby girl in a bright red dress who wanted the room to be enchanted with her — some things are the same everywhere. When it was time for them to leave, Safwat shook my hand, Rubaa blew me a kiss at her mother's urging, and Rida kissed my right cheek, left cheek, and then back to my right cheek again (it's that third one I always forget). As we said our good-byes I realized what a privilege it was to know their names, because knowing their names meant I was getting to know their stories. And knowing their stories reminded me in deeply spiritual and emotional places that I, too, was once a foreigner outside of God's kingdom, but because of Christ, I am now a daughter. Kelly Minter

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