by T. Austin-Sparks
Date messages given unknown. Edited and supplied by the Golden Candlestick Trust.
The church of the firstborn is not a traditional thing. It is not a thing of creed, which has been taken up generation after generation, not a thing of adopted truth, however full and deep and true that truth may be. The succeeding generations do not become the church of the firstborn because they accept the truths which their fathers held, the truths into which they were introduced, perhaps by their natural birth and with which they have been associated by reason of their family relationships. That is not the church of the firstborn. The church of the firstborn is that which has come into a firsthand personal history with God, and all the rest does not count.
