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WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD
WORLD HEADQUARTERS
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
HERBERT W. ARMSTRONG
President and Pastor
May 14, 1974
Dear Brethren in God's Church:
New light on marriage and divorce has been announced!
The CHURCH OF GOD GROWS in grace and the KNOWLEDGE of our Lord
and Saviour Jesus Christ!
Forty-seven years ago, I received the shock of my life. It
must have compared to the shock experienced by Saul of Tarsus, when
God blinded him and struck him down as he approached Damascus. He
had believed the new Message announced by Jesus of Nazareth to be
completely FALSE. To be shown, suddenly, that he had been
persecuting the very Son of the Living God, believing the OPPOSITE
of God's TRUTH, was the shock of his life.
Likewise, when God called me and opened my eyes to see in the
Bible that "Christianity" was not teaching the TRUTH revealed in
the WORD OF GOD, but in most basic areas precisely the opposite, I
was simply dumbfounded!
If what I knew as CHRISTIANITY was virtually the antithesis of
the teaching Jesus Christ gave to His Church, where was that true
Church which Jesus said would never cease to exist? WHERE? He
said the gates of the grave would never prevail against it. He
said He would never leave nor forsake it.
But WHERE was the true Church Christ founded with and through
the original Apostles? It had to exist. Jesus said the gates of
the grave would never prevail against it. He said He would never
leave nor forsake it!
I knew this: it had to be a church accepting and proclaiming
BIBLICAL TRUTH. It had to be a church teaching repentance of SIN.
And since sin is the transgression of God's spiritual Law, it had
to be a Sabbath-keeping church. It had to be a church still kept
in the name of God the Father. It had to be a church proclaiming
to all the world the Gospel of the KINGDOM OF GOD.
One thing more especially impressed me. The individual
Christian must be constantly GROWING in grace and the knowledge of
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (II Pet. 3:18). The Church is
merely the sum total of its individual members, collectively.
Therefore, especially since we live in a world in which ALL NATIONS
have been DECEIVED by Satan -- a world in which the churches of
"Christianity" teach doctrines and follow customs diametrically
OPPOSITE to the pure teaching of the WORD OF GOD, the true Church
of God MUST be a Church which is constantly GROWING in truth and
confessing and correcting ERROR.