I think it was old Brother Marshall Keeble who made the point that, if you wanted to grow Texas watermelons in Tennessee, you didn’t have to stretch the watermelon vine all the way from Texas to Tennessee in order to grow Texas watermelons. All you had to do was plant the seed! You know, you take the seed from Texas, plant it over in Tennessee, or New Mexico, or wherever, and that’s what you’ve got—Texas watermelons!

And, that’s the way it is with the Lord’s church. And so, what we’re seeing here, what we’re looking at in the way of a Restoration Movement, are some individuals…. And I think that it’s very interesting to note that this was taking place in a variety of different places among men, among individuals, who were not connected. These simultaneous efforts that were underway in various locations, spread out geographically, are rather fascinating. After hundreds of years of denominationalism and apostasy, changing the doctrines of the Bible, changing the church that the Lord established that we read about in the New Testament, to be something that was not even able to be recognized, and then here we see in this latter part of the 18^th Century and into the 19^th Century that there are some individuals who are having some problems with that. And they begin, some of them in their own way and in their own areas, their own parts of this nation, at least, to make some changes. So, these thoughts, these ideas, this desire to go back to the Word of God, were something that was alive in the minds and the hearts and the spirits of several individuals in different places. And, wherever they were—this side of the ocean, or the other side of the ocean—whether in Ohio, or in West Virginia, or in Kentucky—it didn’t make any difference, because of the nature of the Lord’s church. And so, what we’re seeing here is not the, shall we say, the re-establishing of the church that had gone out of existence, not at all. We are seeing attempts to restore what was already established in the Day of Pentecost—restoring New Testament Christianity.

When I’m talking to folks sometimes, I like to use the analogy of baseball (well, you could use whatever sport that you like in this analogy). Baseball is played using an Official Rule Book. And what makes baseball truly baseball is the fact that those rules are followed: the field is set up in a particular way; the bases are 90 feet apart; there’s a pitcher’s mound that is elevated to a certain height and is 60 feet from home plate; the field is a diamond shape; there are 9 players on the field; you use a ball of a certain circumference and it is made of certain materials; and you play the game with certain rules in effect.

When you play that game of baseball, and you play it according to those rules, then you’re playing baseball. But, if that were to be stopped, OR, if someone were to take that game and pollute it—change the shape of the ball to an oblong shape made out of pig skin; change the dimensions of the field; you know, whatever…change whatever—you would no longer be playing baseball, would you? You’d be playing, oh, maybe, a form of baseball, maybe something that you could identify, maybe a few things about the game that you could remember.

But, you know what I’m saying. What would happen, even if we went on for generations doing this perverted form of what used to be baseball—what would happen 50 years, or 100 years, or 1,000 years, in the future if you were to reinstitute that game following that rule book? You set those bases up 90 feet apart in the shape of a diamond, and the pitcher’s mount is 60 feet from home plate, and you change the ball back to that exact weight and diameter that’s called for in the Rule Book, and you had 3 outs, and you scored…..you know. What would happen? I submit to you that you’d have baseball—you’d have exactly what you had 50 years before, or 100 years before, or 1,000 years before—you’d have exactly the same game, you see, because it was set up as was originally intended—according to the Rule Book—according to the official “law” of baseball!

And so, what we see here are some individuals who are going back to the Rule Book—the Rule Book being the Bible, the Word of God. Hey!! I’ve not a novel idea: Let’s throw out all of the catechisms; let’s throw out all of the manuals that have been developed; let’s get rid of all of the titles and all of the organizations; and let’s just go back to the Rule Book. Well, what would we have? Who would you have? Would you have Campbellites? No, they didn’t invent it; they didn’t make it what it is. They just simply began looking back. And, O, by the way, if we do a more detailed study of the Restoration Movement, we’ll see that they didn’t just wake up one morning—Barton W. Stone, or Thomas, or Alexander, or “Raccoon” John Smith, or any other of these pioneers in the Restoration Movement—they just didn’t wake up one morning and have it all together, you know. They just didn’t wake up and have down [in their minds] a complete understanding from the Scriptures about the five steps for salvation, or that the music offered to God in worship is a capella singing, or what the organization of the church is to be, according to the Scriptures. No, restoring the New Testament pattern was something that took time, and took effort, in order to get from where they were to where we are now in the Lord’s church.

I just want for us to be clear on that—that we are looking here at restoring New Testament Christianity. And the way it is being restored is by going back TO the Scriptures. And that could have been done in any age, and in any place, as it continues to be done even today. I think that’s important for us to remember.

Along that line, there’s no better analogy—my baseball analogy is probably fairly lame, but there’s no better analogy than the analogy that we see in the Scriptures about the very nature of things, as God created them. All the way back to the book of Genesis—Genesis, chapter 1, verses 11 and 12—the things that God created, He created them in the way that they would produce one kind according to its kind [“Then God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth’; and it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.”].