Dr. Caner introduced the speaker, Dr. Stephen Rummage, pastor of Hickory Grove Baptist Church, Charlotte, NC. Dr. Rummage holds a master’s degree from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a doctorate from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
The music portion of the chapel program was led by TMC music major Heather Palmer, accompanied by two guitarists. Truett-McConnell president Dr. Emir Caner told the assembly first about the significance of January 21 in the Christian church: on January 21, 1525, the Free Church Movement was born in Zurich, Switzerland, calling for religious liberty and democracy. It was a momentous day in the history of the Christian church, especially the Protestant Reformation.
Dr. Rummage used as his text a passage from 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. The topic of his address was “Our Reason for Running the Race: God’s Purpose for Our Lives.”
He established first that, from this passage of Scripture, it is clear that the purpose of the Christian’s life is to glorify God. What does that mean? It means that every day must be lived to please God, that every aspect of life will be changed, that everything a Christian does is for the purpose of glorifying God.
Dr. Rummage spoke of three motivations mentioned in this passage of Scripture that Christians have for glorifying God in their lives:
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The Holy Spirit lives in each Christian, and the body of each Christian is the temple of the Holy Spirit.
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Each Christian belongs to—is possessed by—the Father in Heaven. “You are not your own” means that each day a Christian gets up with the question, “God, what do you want of me today?”
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Every person who belongs to God was bought with a price. That implies that a change of ownership took place, that the person no longer belongs to himself or herself but entirely to God. The price that bought each believer was the blood and life of Jesus Christ. God did not buy his people at bargain basement prices or the lowest price he could attain but paid the highest price he could pay—the very life of his only son.
The challenge to all of us, according to Dr. Rummage, is to remember that we dare not come to Christ and offer him any less than our lives and everything we have because he gave everything he had for us.
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