(From a message preached at Together for the Gospel in 2008)

The world’s only hope is the Gospel. It is therefore critical that we understand the nature of our message and the foundations of our Gospel. That’s what prompted me to address the subject of total depravity—fallen humanity’s unwillingness and inability to love God, obey Him, or please Him in any way. This is a major Gospel theme.
In John 5:39-40 our Lord says, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life.” He was saying that those who search the Scriptures with a view toward eternal life—Scriptures which bear unstinting testimony to Christ as Savior and Lord—are nonetheless unwilling to come to Him. Why? Because of their depravity.

Depravity the Most Despised Doctrine

Jesus also said, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (John 6:44, emphasis added). He is presenting here the doctrine of human unwillingness and inability, which is perhaps the most thoroughly despised doctrine in all the Bible. The idea that sinners are completely helpless to redeem themselves (or even make any contribution to their redemption from sin and divine judgment) is a distinctively Christian doctrine, contrary to all non-Christian views of man or humankind.
All the major religions in the world apart from biblical Christianity are based on the notion that righteousness is gained by good works. At their core is the idea that people can be good enough either to merit the favor of some deity or at least to enjoy a happy afterlife. Therefore, in one way or another, all false systems of religion teach that redemption hinges on human ability, human works, human willpower, self- atonement, or the supposed basic goodness of humanity. Naturally, then, all of them are compelled in one sense or another to deny the totality of mankind’s depravity.
One of the inevitable features of universal human fallenness is self- deception about one’s true condition, based on the dominating reality of human pride. Practically every sinner is convinced (to some degree) that he is fundamentally good—or at the very least, that he isn’t quite as bad as someone else. Of course, most people are apt to admit, casually, that they’re not perfect. A few might even acknowledge that they actually sin against God. But hardly any will admit that they are truly evil. They have no ability to see any evil in their good, and they especially tend not to acknowledge any evil in their religion. They therefore cannot admit—even to themselves—that they are incurably evil, hostile to God, and utterly incapable of any true good.
People will go to almost any length to try to obscure or paper over their depravity. Many even invoke the name of the one true God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and claim to love Him, while in reality they detest Him. They may have a genuine but sentimental affection for some god of their own making, suited to their own preferences— and often they will even call that imaginary god by the name of the true God—but they actually hate and cannot love the God of both the Old and New Testaments. Their refusal to acknowledge the true extent of their own wickedness is proof of their unbelief.
In fact, no sin could possibly be more heinous than such a refusal to love God as He truly is. It entails a breach of both the first and second commandments—starting with a failure to love the Lord our God with a whole heart and have no other gods before Him, and then compounding the error by worshiping one’s own imaginary image instead of bowing to the true God of Scripture. The tendency to invent false gods and insist they are the true God—the sin of idolatry—is another universal trait of fallen humanity, and it is one more vivid proof of how utterly depraved the human heart really is.
Even when people have flagrant sins that are exposed in undeniable ways, or when they are otherwise compelled to confess some specific And notice: that’s the biblical appraisal of the good things we do—our righteous deeds, not our most sinful ones.
I am deeply concerned, because many evangelical spokesmen today seem to hate the truth of total depravity. They often bend over backward to avoid it. You’ll sometimes hear preachers simply echoing evil in their lives, they still will usually steadfastly deny that they are so thoroughly evil as to be unable to redeem themselves (or at least contribute something of merit to their redemption). Even the most grotesque sinners often blithely imagine that God will never actually judge them or hold them eternally accountable for their sins. They’ll often insist they really aren’t so bad after all.
Conversely, the godliest people are invariably those who are most aware of their own depravity. The most humble and spiritually minded saints are actually more conscious of the sin in their hearts and lives— and more ready to confess it—than some of the most wicked evildoers the world has ever seen. John Bunyan, for example, author of the classic The Pilgrim’s Progress, said in his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, “The best prayer I ever prayed had enough sin in it to damn the whole world.” The prophet Isaiah, using unusually strong language in Hebrew, wrote, “All our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment” (Isaiah 64:6). Isaiah was describing a kind of defilement so vile it’s not normally mentioned in polite society—an uncleanness so thoroughly defiling and so permanently staining that garments contaminated in such a way needed to be destroyed rather than being laundered worldly notions about self-esteem and positive thinking, as if those were biblical and spiritual ideas. Nothing could be further from the truth. The view that people are fundamentally good actually betrays a hatred of the God of Scripture—because such a message deceives sinners about their sinfulness, and it hides the true God behind a benign, domesticated god of some worldly psychologist’s making.

In fact, depravity is often most minimized in the very contexts when it should be proclaimed with the utmost clarity. Remember, the notion that man has enough goodness in him to contribute in some way to his salvation is one of the foundational errors of all false religion. Of all the errors that need to be most clearly refuted today, at the head of the list is the popular notion that the sinners’ real problem is low self- esteem—so his perspective of himself simply needs to be pumped up. In major segments of evangelicalism, that idea has been adopted, baptized, and blessed with spiritual-sounding benedictions. It has even become the basis of manipulative church-growth strategies.
This is no minor problem. Those who reject, despise, minimize, or ignore the doctrine of depravity have done as much to impede the advance of the Gospel as open enemies of the Cross. (That is not to say they’re all not Christians, but it is to say they’re profoundly confused at best.) To grasp the truth of human depravity is to begin understanding all the other doctrinal components of salvation. One you grasp the significance of human depravity, all the other major principles of grace and redemption soon become obvious. Most of all, if you see the reality of depravity, you must then see that true Gospel ministry transcends all forms of manipulation and is purely a divine work. The doctrine of human depravity therefore honors God completely like no other truth, because it leaves absolutely no honor for man in regard to salvation.

The Biblical Truth Regarding Human Depravity

When the Bible speaks about the condition of the sinner, what does it say?
The terminology is stark. The Bible often employs the language of death; sometimes darkness, blindness, hardness, slavery, incurable sickness, and alienation. The Holy Scriptures are clear that depravity is a condition that affects the entire body, mind, emotions, desires, motives, will, and behavior. It is a condition of total, helpless bondage. No sinner unaided by God can ever overcome it.
Despite that obvious truth, pragmatism dominates the professing church. Theology has been replaced by or subverted by methodology. Throughout history, denominations have been established and defined in terms of doctrine, but today the stress is on style and technique. Much of current evangelical strategy merely aims only to identify what people most desire, and then tells them Jesus will give it to them if they would but choose Him. God is portrayed as sitting in heaven, wringing His hands and loving everyone intensely, yet frustrated when people won’t come to Him for the things they desire. Few seem to consider that what the unconverted sinner actually desires is the last thing God wants to give him—and what the gospel actually says about fallen humanity is the last thing sinners want to hear.
Some very familiar texts deal with this. Let’s start with Ephesians 2: “You were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest” (vv. 1-3). The prepositional phrase “by nature” in verse 3 can also be translated “by birth.”
We have inherited a corrupt nature from Adam. Paul’s epistle to the Romans is clear that “through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned” (5:12). First Corinthians 15 is rightly called the Resurrection Chapter, and here is a clue why: “Since by a man came death, by a man came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” (vv. 21-22). We have all literally inherited death; and death epitomizes the corruption Adam’s sin passed to his progeny. We are sinners by nature from birth. That explains why you don’t have to teach children to disobey; that comes naturally to all of us.
The human condition is a profound state of depravity, driven by “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life” (1 John 2:16).
If anything is to change us, it must be the grace of God. That is why Ephesians 2:4-5 is such good news: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved).” This is a divine miracle in which God makes the dead alive!
Ephesians 4:18 describes unbelievers as “being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart.” It is a condition from which the sinner cannot recover on his own. Colossians 2:13 declares, “When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive.” God commands, and life comes. This is analogous to the resurrection of Lazarus, who was dead for four days before the Lord called him to walk out of his tomb. There was no residual spark of life in Lazarus that contributed to his resurrection. Without the living Christ, he was as helpless as any other corpse. We are a race of Lazaruses, dependent upon the grace of God for new life.
This is foundational truth. It’s also a truth that permeates Scripture— including some familiar texts you may never have associated with the doctrine of depravity. John 1:12-13 declares, “As many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of … the will of man, but of God.” No one is born a child of God, but must become one. That is precisely what Jesus tried to explain to Nicodemus: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Nicodemus picks up on Jesus’ word picture and asks, “How can a man be born again when he is old?” He understands that man has no capability to bring birth to himself, but the truth that he was fallen and in need of a new birth was as hard for Nicodemus as it is for you and me. (In fact, Nicodemus was a Pharisee, and the doctrine of depravity was especially odious to Pharisees, because they had more personally invested in trying to earn divine favor through good works than anyone.) So Jesus responded, “Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit”— a reference to Ezekiel 36:25-27 about spiritual cleansing and regeneration—“he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit,” so the flesh cannot produce spiritual life. “Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’”
Nicodemus, however, was both amazed and confused, saying, “How can these things be?”
Now, notice what Jesus doesn’t say: He doesn’t say, “Here are four steps,” or , “Pray this prayer after me.” But what He does say in verse 8 is absolutely shocking to anyone whose confidence might be in human free will: “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.” What kind of answer is that? Our Lord is saying, “Spiritual birth is not up to you; it’s up to the Holy Spirit, and you have no control over where or when the Spirit moves.”
Salvation is a divine work. It has to be, since flesh just produces flesh. Dead people can’t give themselves life. The Spirit gives life to whom
He will. You can see when it happens, but you can’t make it happen. Jesus, in John 5:21 declares, “Just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son also gives life to whom He wishes.” The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in agreement that this is a work of divine power. Perhaps nowhere does Jesus make that clearer than in John 6:44: “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” The Good News from our Lord’s own lips is that “if the Son makes you free [from sin], you shall be free indeed” (John 8:36).
In none of those texts, by the way, did Jesus ever defend the sinner’s ability. Yes, the sinner has a kind of free will—in the sense that we aren’t compelled to choose by any external force or compulsion. But as Luther clarified in Bondage of the Will, the sinner will always choose according to his own strongest desires. In other words, his choices don’t determine the state his heart; but the state of his heart determines how he will choose. What is the fallen human heart like? Jesus said, “From within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man” (Mark 7:21-23). Here is an Old Testament summary of the same truth: “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick” (Jeremiah 17:9). The King James Version gives an even more forceful rendition: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” Is there anything we can do to heal ourselves? “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then you also can do good who are accustomed to doing evil” (Jeremiah 13:23).
One’s skin color or an animal’s pelt design are morally neutral, but the human heart is not. None are changeable apart from divine intervention.
Along with the heart, the human mind is corrupt every way possible. It also is unwilling and unable “because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:7-8). Perhaps that’s the most definitive text of all regarding the sinner’s absolute inability and unwillingness to acknowledge the true God on his own. The sinner is unable also to acknowledge the Gospel on his own: “A natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised” (1 Corinthians 2:14). The truth is, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3). Sadly, “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4).
What can remedy that? The Apostle Paul answers that question in the next verse: “We do not preach ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your bond-servants for Jesus’ sake” (v. 5). What happens when we’re faithful to do that? “God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness’ on the first day of Creation, will shine a light in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (v. 6). Again, it’s a divine miracle. The heart and the mind are affected and infected by depravity, but God is willing to bring healing through the Gospel.
Human beings are naturally religious, but not in the good sense of the word. In Romans 1:23, the apostle Paul explains the same phenomenon we discussed earlier—how we tend to blaspheme by substituting the true God with a false one of our own invention (or we blindly go along with someone else’s false god). None of us is excluded. The bottom line is this: “There is none righteous, not even one, there is none who understands … none who seeks for God” (Romans 3:10-11, citing Psalm 14:1-3). Both the Old and New Testaments make it crystal clear that we have no potential, no capability, no hope on our own. The sum is that man is evil and selfish, unwilling and unable because he is dead. He loves his sin and attempts to soothe his conscience by meeting the low standards of his invented god. Because man is made in the image of God, he may occasionally recognize sin for what it is, but only in its grosser forms. Meanwhile, he will miss a world of damning subtlety.
We have been referring to this doctrine as “Total Depravity.” That expression can be somewhat confusing, because it might seem to suggest that every sinner is as thoroughly vicious or twisted as it is possible to be. Yet clearly, that is not the case. Not all sinners are rapists or serial killers. Some manage to seem pretty good by comparison. Some are philanthropists and some are great artists. We were made in the image of God, and that image is still indelibly
stamped on us—damaged but not utterly eradicated. We all have
talents and abilities and human affections that can look very good and make us seem admirable. Furthermore, the principle of common grace restrains the full expression of human depravity. So the world itself, for the most part, is in some state of order, not complete anarchy. Obviously, then, we’re not as bad as we could be when it comes to the manifestation of our fallenness.
Many people therefore insist that there must be some residual good left untainted in the sinner that can help bring about his or her salvation. Surely there is some divine spark in us that can redeem us. If we would simply refuse to think of ourselves as bad, there’s no limit to the good we might do. That’s the theme of countless self-help books and metaphysical seminars. It’s the religion of Oprah and Norman Vincent Peale. That same kind of thinking is also all too prevalent in the contemporary church.
But Scripture is clear about the extent of our depravity: “The whole head is sick and the whole heart is faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head there is nothing sound in it” (Isaiah 1:5-6). The word total in the expression “total depravity” refers to the fact that sin has so thoroughly infected us that no part of our being—neither mind, affections, nor will—is free from the taint of sin. We’re totally dead spiritually. Like an array of corpses ranging from freshly dead to thoroughly decomposed, some may be in a more advanced state of putrefaction than others, but all are equally dead. Our inability is total, too—because there is absolutely nothing we can do to earn our salvation. If we are to be awakened from that death and redeemed
from our sin, God must do it, and God alone.
The Bible plainly and repeatedly teaches that the sinner is both unable and unwilling to make the first move, because he is a hardened rebel lacking any spiritual life or any godly desires. At best, he will make a false move toward God based upon his own fallen desires and motivated by some self-aggrandizing incentive. When Christians try to tell people God wants to give them whatever they want if only they will come to Him, they are actually hiding the truth about God’s glorious, sovereign nature and compounding the sinner’s own self- deception. Regeneration is not synergistic (a two-way cooperative effort) but monergistic (a one-way act of God). If it were not a work of God alone, we would be doomed, because the Fall has rendered us totally unable to cooperate with Him or contribute anything of saving value to the work God does for us.
In regeneration we neither resist nor cooperate. We are acted upon. We are changed by the Holy Spirit, not apart from our will but through our will by His illuminating our minds so we understand and believe the Gospel. We believe not because we had more sense than the people who refuse the Gospel but because God graciously made the first move and opened our hearts to heed His Word and believe it (cf. Acts 16:14). There’s nothing for us to be subtly proud of, but only profoundly grateful for.
I wonder how this text would go down at the next revival or evangelist training meeting: “The Lord’s bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth, and that they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will” (2 Timothy 2:24-26).
That is the historic doctrine that has been affirmed through the centuries. Titus 3:3-7 explains that we all start life foolish, “disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” Amen! What can we do in response but praise Him for His grace and live for His glory?

The Implications Behind the Doctrine of Depravity

 

Flat denial of total depravity has been a staple of America’s religious culture for well over a century. It is at the heart of both modernism and theological liberalism, which de-emphasized theology and exalted philanthropic deeds. Churches that went that way wanted the fruit, but severed the root—so they withered and died. Witness the condition of mainline denominations that embraced modernist thinking. All of them are spiritual wastelands today.
The Emergent movement is currently positioning itself to repeat the same mistake. Its foundation is neo-liberalism, so its leaders say things like, “We don’t know what the Bible means—nobody does, so let’s just be like Jesus in the world and help the poor and disenfranchised.” They are not preaching the same Gospel He preached, but they are shrewd enough not to jettison the “evangelical” label because they want access to the churches old-line liberalism has not already utterly dissipated. The term evangelical is quickly becoming meaningless, so instead of depending on it or any other label, remember what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “Every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit…. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:17-20).
The gurus of the Church Growth Movement who canonized pragmatic methodologies for attracting unchurched people were the middle modernists, between the old and the new, bearing the same bad fruit: a plethora of church programs and preaching styles designed to ape the world and feed sensual appetites. All of these movements have de- emphasized theology, but there’s still an incipient Arminianism underlying all of them—inherent in the belief that somehow sinners will respond better if our methods change. We have to be careful of that. Because people think salvation is a result of sinners’ own free- will decisions for Christ, they tell sinners what they want to hear to try to get them to like Him—and that in turn has obscured the gospel rather than unleashing it to do the true work of salvation.
We must recognize that the fallen sinner hates the true God and fatally loves himself. Of course he wants a god who will give him what he wants! The Gospel, however, assaults the sinner’s self-worship, self- assurance, self-esteem, and smugness, shattering his confidence in his religion and his spirituality. It crushes him under the full weight of God’s Law with a verdict of guilty. The only way he can be set free is if he comes to loathe himself and all his ambitions, repent of his sins, and love the one true God, whom Holy Scripture reveals to be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
That is the message under which God awakens the sinner and leads him to repentance and faith. Never appeal to that which enslaves the sinner—materialism, sex, pleasure, personal ambition, a better life, success, or whatever—in an effort to convince the sinner of his need to be rescued from the very enslavement you’re appealing to! Instead, call the sinner to flee from all that is natural, all that so powerfully enslaves him, and urge him to come to the Cross to be saved from eternal judgment.
What about 1 Corinthians 9:22: “I have become all things to all men, so that I may by all means save some”? Verse 19 makes clear what he meant: “I have made myself a slave to all, so that I may win more.” It
Soft preaching makes hard people. You preach a soft Gospel and you’ll have hard, selfish people. You preach hard truth and it will break hard hearts, like when the Apostle Peter preached on the Day of Pentecost to the very people who crucified Christ and “they were pierced to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brethren, what shall we do?’” (Acts 2:37). If you want to see people respond like that, never change the essential Gospel message from group to group. Shifting contexts do not identify reality. Reality is not on the outside; it’s on the inside, and all hearts are the same: desperately in need of salvation from sin.
Paul’s Gospel message never changed from Jew to Gentile. The starting point was often different—for with Jewish people he could start with the common ground of the Old Testament but with the Gentiles he started with God as Creator. But the Gospel message itself always remained the same. Paul went from country to country, people group to people group, preaching the same message. That was an era without mass media or globalization: not only were cultures highly defined and restricted, but different societies were also unique at the local, city, town, and even village level. Paul, however, was not paralyzed by any of that; he had no preoccupation with “contextualization.”
wasn’t that he changed the Gospel message, but that he made any necessary personal sacrifices to preach the Gospel to as many people as he could. God help us to be as faithful in our outreach to the lost.
I’ve seen enough different cultures and preached the gospel in enough contexts and through enough interpreters to know that it is sheer folly to try to change the content of the gospel to suit each one. The gospel isn’t our message to adapt. We are ambassadors, tasked with delivering a very simple message accurately. There’s nothing more important than getting that message right. It doesn’t matter how “cool” you are; what really matters is how clear you are in proclaiming God’s truth. Wherever I have gone in the world, I have endeavored to preach the same Gospel according to Jesus, and God has been faithful to save souls.
Those of us who preach can take no credit for what we do—except for what we mess up! We’re the only ones in the world responsible for all the failures and none of the successes. Our attitude, therefore, is “all humility and gentleness” (Ephesians 4:2). We’re never to parade ourselves as if we’ve accomplished some great thing if God, in His mercy, saves sinners under our preaching. We carry the treasure of the Gospel in our lowly selves, likened in Scripture to “earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves” (2 Corinthians 4:7). Remember that the goal of the Christian, well summarized in 1 Corinthians 10:31, is whether “you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”

This chapter is extracts taken from Spurgeon’s book The Soul Winner.

Men need to be told that, except divine grace shall bring them out of their enmity to God, they must eternally perish; and they must be reminded of the sovereignty of God, that He is not obliged to bring them out of this state, that He would be right and just if He left them in such a condition, that they have no merit to plead before Him, and no claims upon Him, but that if they are to be saved, it must be by grace, and by grace alone. The preacher’s work is to throw sinners down in utter helplessness, that the may be compelled to look to Him who alone can help them.

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True conversion is in all men attended by a sense of sin, which we have spoken of under the head of conviction ; by a sorrow for sin, or holy grief at having committed it; by a hatred of sin, which proves, that its dominion is ended; and by a practical turning from sin, which shows that the life within the soul is operating upon the life without. True belief and true repentance are twins: it would be idle to attempt to say which is born first. All the spokes of a wheel moved at once when the wheel moves, and so all the graces commence action when regeneration is wrought by the Holy Ghost. Repentance, however, there must be. No sinner looks to the Saviour with a dry eye or a hard heart. Aim, therefore, at heart-breaking, at bringing home condemnation to the conscience, and weaning the mind from sin, and be not content till the whole mind is deeply and vitally changed in reference to sin.

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Dear brethren, I do beg you to attach the highest importance to your own personal holiness. Do live unto God. If you do not, your Lord will not be with you; He will say of you as He said of the false prophets of old, “I sent them not, nor commanded them: therefore they shall not profit this people at all, saith the Lord.” You may preach very-fine sermons but if you are not yourselves holy, there will be no souls saved. The probability is that you will not come to the conclusion that your want of holiness is the reason for your non-success; you will blame the people, you will blame the age in which you live, you will blame anything except yourself; but there will be the root of the whole mischief.)

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Read McCheyne’s memoir, read the whole of it, I cannot do you a better service than by recommending you to read it; there is no great freshness of thought, there is nothing very novel or striking in it, but as you read it you must get good out of it, for you are conscious that it is the story of the life of a man who walked with God. Moody would never have spoken with the force he did if he had not lived a life of fellowship with the Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ. The greatest force of the sermon lies in what has gone before the sermon. You must get ready for the whole service by private fellowship with God, and real holiness of character.

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Open your mouth, brother, with a full expectation, a firm belief, and according to your faith so it be shall it be unto you.
That is the essential point, you must believe in God and in is gospel if you are to be a winner of soul; some other things may omitted but this matter of faith must never be. It is true ‘that God does not always measure His mercy by our unbelief for He has to think of other people as well as of us; but, looking at the matter in a common sense way, it does seem that the most likely instrument to do the Lord’s work is the man who expects that God will use him, and who goes forth to labour in the strength of that conviction. When success comes he not surprised, for he was looking for it. He sowed living seed, and he expected to reap a harvest from it; he cast his bread upon the waters, and he means to search and watch till he finds it again.

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It may happen that some of you do preach very earnestly and well, and sermons that are likely to be blessed, and yet you do not see sinners saved. Well, do not leave off preaching; but say to yourself, ” I must try to gather around me a number of people who will be all praying with me and for me, and who will talk to their friends about the things of God: and who will so live and labour that the Lord will give a blessed shower of grace because all the surroundings are suitable thereto, and, help to make the blessing come. I have heard ministers say that, when they have
preached in the Tabernacle, there has been something in the congregation that has had a wonderfully powerful effect upon them.’ I think it is because we have good prayer meetings, because there is an earnest spirit of prayer among the people, and because so many of them are on the watch for souls.

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A dying man is needed to raise dying men. I cannot believe that you will ever pluck a brand from the burning without putting your hand near enough to feel the heat of the fire. You must have, more or less, a distinct sense of the dreadful wrath of God and of the terrors of the judgment to come, or you will lack energy in your work, and so lack one of the essentials of success. I do not think the preacher ever speaks well upon such topics until he feels them pressing upon him as a personal burden from the Lord. “I did preach in chains,” said John Bunyan, “to men in chains.:’ Depend upon it, when the death that is in your children alarms, depresses, and overwhelms you, then it is that God is about to bless you

Preaching should confront men and women with God and eternity. In order to do this, it has to be biblical. It has to tell people what God is saying in his Word. From the preacher’s point of view, this does two things. It helps to give him an authority that is far more than his own ability and gifts of oratory. People need to know that God is speaking through his servant. Secondly, it gives the preacher an endless source of material to preach. He is not dependent upon current events for his sermon topics, but has a huge reservoir of biblical teaching to draw upon.

Great preachers varied in nationality, temperament and sometimes in doctrine but they all sought to bring God to the people. This is why they made a difference. They set out not merely to inform people, but to transform them. The most drastic and radical transformation that a man can know is that from spiritual death to spiritual life. These men preached for this. They knew that the sinner’s greatest need is for regeneration, so they preached to reach his heart and soul. This governed how they preached and created in them a great desire to preach Christ, the cross and his redeeming blood.

They preached to create a conviction of sin in the unbeliever. It is not conviction of sin for a man to feel bad because he is drinking too much or generally making a mess of his life. Sin is not just a violation of socially accepted standards. To see sin only in social or moral terms will not lead people to conviction. Sin must be seen in the light of the law and holiness of God. The gospel is not an aspirin for the aches of life, to soothe and comfort people in their misery. It is a holy God’s answer to the violation of divine law by human beings whose very nature is to rebel against him.
Most people think salvation is the product of morality and religious observance. In spite of the clarity of the New Testament message, they still cling to their own efforts to save themselves. But salvation by works never creates conviction of sin because it fails miserably to take into account the holiness, purity and justice of God. It sees sin only as a moral or social blemish and not as an affront to the Lord, law and character of God. It is the law of God which produces conviction because it shows us our sin in relationship, not to society and people, but to God. It shows us that we have failed to meet God’s requirements.

A common feature of all great preachers is a longing for success-to see souls saved. Andrew Bonar says of Robert Murray McCheyne,

‘He entertained so full a persuasion that a faithful minister has every reason to expect to see souls converted under him, that when this was withheld, he began to fear that some hidden evil was provoking the Lord and grieving the Spirit. And ought it not to be so with all of us? Ought we not to suspect, either that we are not living near to God, or that our message is not a true transcript of the glad tidings, in both matter and manner, when we see no souls brought to Jesus?

Bonar continues.

‘Two things he seems never to have ceased from ñ the cultivation of personal holiness and the most anxious efforts to win souls.,

How McCheyne links these two things is highly significant. He wrote to William Burns in September 1840,

‘I am also deepened in my conviction, that if we are to be instruments in such a work, we must be purified from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit. Oh, cry for personal holiness, constant nearness to God, by the blood of the Lamb. Bask in his beams – lie back in the arms of love – be filled with his Spirit-or all success in the ministry will only be to your own everlasting confusion … How much more useful might we be, if we were only more free from pride, self conceit, personal vanity, or some secret sin that our heart knows. Oh! hateful sins, that destroy our peace and ruin souls.’

McCheyne believed that

‘In the case of a faithful ministry, success is the rule and the lack of it the exception.’

And when there was no success, no souls saved, he did not blame the people but looked first at his own heart.

BORN NOT MADE

Preachers are born, not made. Was Jeremiah the only preacher set apart by God before he was born (Jeremiah 1:5)? Was he an exception or the norm?
Preachers are not the products of education and training but are men set apart by God and equipped by the Holy Spirit for their life’s work. This does not mean that they do not need training, but above all there needs to be the call of God. Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones and Moody had no formal theological training but it was obvious that they were prepared by God and that his hand was upon them. Preaching is a special gift from God and those who have it need to guard it carefully and seek to nurture it for use to God’s glory.

Many evangelicals today have lost confidence in preaching. We may lament this and mourn the fact that in some churches music and drama have replaced preaching. But why has it happened? Is it not the fault of preachers themselves? Is it not because gospel preaching too often lacks authority, relevance and power, and consequently fails to save souls? It has been said that the most urgent need in the Christian church today is true preaching. Most preachers would agree with that but many Christians in the pew do not. That is not surprising if the preaching they hear is so sentimental as to have no substance, or so intellectual that they cannot understand it.

What is true preaching? What constitutes true gospel preaching? It involves both a proper content and a correct presentation. The gospel must be preached in a language that people can understand. In the last century, Spurgeon was pleading,

‘We need in the ministry, now and in all time, men of plain speech. The preacher’s language must not be that of the classroom, but of all classes; not of the university, but of the universe …

“Use market language,” said George Whitefield, and we know the result. We need men who not only speak so that they can be understood, but so that they cannot be misunderstood.’ Plain speech is not slang but simple language and concepts that people can understand.

Preachers will only make a difference when their preaching clearly shows to people the Lord Jesus Christ. The only difference that is of any significance is the one Christ makes in the hearts of men and women. It is possible for a preacher to make a difference to his hearers that is only temporary. He comes and preaches and makes a great impact but if you passed that way in a year’s time, you would see that there is now no longer any difference to be seen. It was only temporary and this is because it was not the gospel, not Christ, that made the difference but the preacher himself. Such preaching is only a form of entertainment. It does not confront sinners with God, but merely holds their attention for a while until something else comes along.

A SERIOUS RESPONSIBILITY

Preaching is not a hobby but should occupy a man’s whole life and thinking. The preacher sees everything in relationship to his ministry. In this sense he is never on holiday. His mind is continuously taken up with the next sermon and the next congregation. The seriousness of the matter causes what Paul calls in I Corinthians 2:3-4 a ‘trembling’. What do we know of this trembling? Why did Paul with all his great abilities preach in weakness, fear and trembling? Surely it must have been because he felt the awesome responsibility preaching puts upon a man.

Preachers who make a difference know something of this trembling. It was said of McCheyne that when he entered the pulpit, people would weep before he opened his mouth – to quote Lloyd-Jones,

‘There was something about his face, and in the conviction which his hearers possessed that he had come from God; he was already preaching before he opened his mouth. A man sent from God is aware of this burden. He trembles because of the momentous consequences, the issues that depend upon what he does.

Preaching is the most exciting and uncertain activity a man can partake in. The preacher never knows what is going to happen when he steps into a pulpit. In fact, anything can happen when the power of the Holy Spirit comes and divine unction dominates the ministry. Thomas Olivers was antagonistic to the gospel and went to hear George Whitefield preach in the open air with the intention of disrupting the meeting. But when the preacher started, he was unable to interrupt and was compelled to listen. Whitefield had a bad turn in his eye and his enemies called him Dr Squintum, but Olivers said that it did not matter which way Whitefield’s head was facing, ‘his eye was always on me.’ He was saved and went on to write that great hymn ‘The God of Abraham praise’.
Preaching is also a battle because the devil hates it. He does not mind men who get into a pulpit to give a nice, gentle homily, but he hates it when Christ is uplifted and sinners are confronted with the holy God. This battle takes many forms. Sometimes it is in the heart and mind of the preacher as he grapples with his own unworthiness. Sometimes the devil attacks him before he leaves home for church with tensions with his children. Sometimes the attack is frontal. One of the greatest preachers I have ever heard was the late Douglas MacMillan of Scotland. Douglas was preaching for us at Rugby in a series of evangelistic meetings. I was ill in bed and unable to attend. After the service Douglas came into my bedroom to see me, and I could see by his face that the service had not gone well. Some of the young men of the church had gone into the streets to try to get passers-by to come in. They persuaded two twelve-year-old boys to come. The boys came in and were quiet throughout the service but Douglas told me that he felt evil coming from one of these boys which bound him in his preaching. Douglas MacMillan was a strong man physically, intellectually and spiritually, yet this twelve-year-old boy so affected his preaching that he felt bound. That has to be the attack of Satan.

Preaching is no cosy chat but a taking on of hell in preaching the gospel to sinners. The best of sermons can be left flat and lifeless. The greatest sense of expectancy can be dashed. But the opposite is also true, and such power can come from God on to the preaching that is inexplicable in terms of anything merely human. Heaven and hell are locked in battle when the gospel is preached.
Great preachers are so only because God is pleased to bless their preaching and use them in remarkable ways. They will have other things going for them, such as natural abilities, but it is God who makes the difference. They are aware of this and are continuously sensitive to the hand of God on them. To them, this is the only thing that matters. They will prepare their sermons diligently and seek to prepare themselves spiritually, but they do not depend on these and all the time they look for divine unction

Repentance and faith cannot exist without each other. True repentance involves seeing sin for what it really is; not just a character defect, but a permanent attitude of rebellion against the love and care and righteous authority of God. It is this new understanding of God and of one’s own sin that leads to true repentance. There will also be a great desire to break with the past and to live in future only to please God (Acts 26:20). That is repentance.
Faith is an unwavering trust in the Lord Jesus Christ as the only Saviour to deal with sin (Acts 20:21; Romans 3:25). It is not merely an intellectual assent to a set of doctrines, but a coming to Christ in repentance, crying for mercy. Faith hears the truth of the gospel, believes it and then acts upon it. Saving faith progresses from a belief in certain facts to a real trusting in Christ and what he has done on our behalf and for our salvation. Faith is a response of the mind and heart to the Saviour of whom the gospel speaks (1 Peter 1:21).
Conviction of sin, repentance and faith are the biblical way and are far removed from an easy believism or a mouthing of the so called prayer of faith.
In the last 150 years or so the sinner’s prayer has become an indispensable part of evangelism. It has been made popular by the ministries of Billy Sunday and Billy Graham. Before that it was almost unknown and certainly it is not found in the New Testament. There when sinners were confronted with the gospel two things were necessary to lead to salvation, conviction of sin and repentance.
In Acts 2 the gospel was preached with the result that sinners ‘were cut to the heart’ (deep conviction of sin), they were then told to repent. No prayer was given them to repeat but 3000 were saved. Today if a man shows an interest in the gospel he is urged to repeat the sinner’s prayer and on the strength of that is told he is now saved. The prayer will vary but basically it is, “Lord Jesus, I need you. Thank You for dying on the cross for my sins. I open the door of my life and receive you as my Saviour and Lord. Thank you for forgiving my sins and giving me eternal life. Take control of the throne of my life. Make me the kind of person you want me to be.”
There is nothing wrong with the words but what is wrong is the emphasis put upon them as a means of salvation. As a means of salvation they are about as useful as a bag of chips. The chips may look good, smell good and taste good. They will temporarily fill a hunger gap but tomorrow you will have to get another bag because the chips effects soon wear off. There is no lasting value. That is not the salvation of the New Testament and that is why so many who pray the sinner’s prayer do not last long in the Christian life. When this happens we are told that the follow up was poor, and they fell from grace, instead of the more obvious reason that they were not saved in the first place. Consider the following scenario that is all too often seen today.
A man attends church fairly regularly on a Sunday morning. He never comes to the evening service or the mid-week prayer meeting and he never reads the Bible or prays on his own. He is not a Christian. He knows it and everyone in the church knows it. One Sunday he shows more than a passing interest in the gospel and this thrills the Christians in the church. One of them eagerly encourages him to pray the sinner’s prayer and he is told he is now a Christian. He still does not attend the Sunday evening service or the prayer meeting, and still never reads the Bible or prays, but he has prayed the sinner’s prayer and that is enough for most Christians. But it is not enough for God who demands conviction of sin and repentance as essential to conversion and a changed life as evidence of it.
The whole system speaks of an impatience on our part with God’s way. It is as if we say to God, ‘Lord, you have made the way of salvation too hard by your insistence on conviction and repentance so we will devise an easier and quicker way’.
The sinner’s prayer will certainly give you results but what about the fruit? Warren Wiersbe makes the strong point that ‘There is a difference between “fruit” and “results”. You can get “results” by following sure-fire formulas, manipulating people, or turning on your charisma; but “fruit” comes from life. When the Spirit of life is working through the Word of life, the seed planted bears fruit; and that fruit has in it the seeds for more fruit (Genesis 1:11-12). Results are counted and soon become silent statistics, but living fruit remains and continues to multiply to the glory of God (John 15:6).’
How did Jesus deal with a man who appeared to be searching for God? The Rich Young Ruler had all appearance of a genuine seeker and if he was given the sinner’s prayer he would have gone away believing he was now a Christian. But Jesus took him to the law, to the Ten Commandments, in order to show him his sin. This young man had no awareness of sin let alone a conviction of personal guilt. If he had, then perhaps the sinner’s prayer might have been of some use to him, but no conviction means no repentance and this means no salvation.
When seeking to evangelise, stick to God’s ways.
In his book God Sent Revival Thornbury says that Charles Finney in his use of the anxious put God up for vote. If this is true, and I believe it is, then we have to say that today’s use of the prayer of faith by-passes God’s essential in salvation of repentance. It is noticeable how the emphasis on conviction and repentance has all but disappeared from evangelical preaching today. They have been replaced by phrases like, open your heart to Jesus or make a decision for Jesus.
In the matter of salvation God has to be kept as sovereign if not we will end up filling the church with chaff and not wheat. Dallimore says of Charles Wesley, ‘During 1743 and 1744 certain of Charles’s views and practices were beginning to change. For one thing, he came to recognize that everyone who professed faith in Christ was not necessarily converted. He stated, ‘We have certainly been too rash and easy in allowing persons for believers on their own testimony; nay, and even persuading them into a false opinion of themselves.’ And to ‘a young son in the gospel’, he declared, ‘Be not over sure that so many are justified. By their fruits ye shall know them. You will see reason to be more and more deliberate in the judgement you pass on souls. Wait for their conversation. I do not know whether we can infallibly pronounce at the time that anyone is justified. I once thought several in that state, who, I am now convinced, were only under the drawings of the Father. Try the spirits, therefore, lest you should lay the stumbling-block of pride in their way, and by allowing them to have faith too soon, keep them out of it forever.’
God’s way of salvation is very clear in the New Testament. Hear the word of God. (Romans 10:17) Believe it. (Acts 4:4) Conviction and repentance. (Acts 2: 37-38) Receive Christ as saviour. (1 John 5:11).

To evangelize is to make known to sinners the good news of the gospel. It is to tell them that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son to die upon the cross, that those who believe in him should not perish for their sins, but instead receive everlasting life (John 3:16). Gospel preaching properly focuses upon the death and resurrection of Christ, because without these there is no atonement for sin, no justification, and thus no gospel. It was the love of God that made the cross possible. But it is the holiness of God that makes the cross necessary. If God were not holy he could treat sin as casually as we do, but his holiness demands that sin be punished legally and fully. The character of God demands that he must be just as well as the justifier (that is, the one who justifies the ungodly).

The law that God gave to Israel at Sinai, by the hand of Moses, is a verbal expression of the holiness of his character. It puts into words what God is, and what God expects. Thus when the law says, ‘You shall have no gods beside me,’ it is not evidence of petty resentment on the part of God, but of holy jealousy. God demands our sole obedience because all other gods are false gods and will lead us astray. The law, then, is restrictive only in order to be protective. It is for our good, or to put it another way, it expresses both God’s holiness and his love. It is impossible to preach a full gospel without both these ingredients being present.

The aim of evangelism is to bring sinners to a saving experience of Christ. But how are sinners saved? The answer to that will determine whether or not there is any relationship between evangelism and law. If salvation is only a decision that the sinner makes in response to the offer of salvation; if it is simply ‘deciding to accept Jesus as my Saviour’, or merely ‘giving my heart to Jesus’ – then there will be no place for preaching the law, because there will be no place for either conviction of sin or repentance.
Much of modem evangelism has bypassed the call for repentance because it has reduced salvation to an act of human will. It couches the offer of the gospel in language such as, ‘To be happy you need Jesusí; ‘You need Jesus to mend your marriage’, and so on. In such ‘preaching’ the law of God would be an inappropriate intrusion. But if salvation is impossible without conviction of sin and repentance, then the law is crucial. For it is the very purpose of the law to convince us of our sin, and only such conviction leads to repentance.

What is conviction of sin?

It is not ‘conviction of sin for a man to feel bad because he is drinking too much or generally making a mess of his life. Sin is not just a violation of socially accepted standards. To see sin only in social or moral terms will not lead people to conviction. Sin must be seen in the light of the law and holiness of God. The gospel is not an aspirin for the aches of life, to soothe and comfort man in his misery. It is a hoIy God’s answer to the violation of divine law by human beings whose very nature is to rebel against Him. So, says Dr Jim Packer, we are not preaching the gospel, ‘if all we do is to present Christ in terms of a man’s felt wants. (Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Do you want peace of mind? Do you feel you have failed? Are you fed up with yourself? Do you want a friend? Then come to Christ…… To be convicted of sin means … to realize that one has offended God, and flouted his authority, and defied him, and gone against him, and put oneself in the wrong with him. To preach Christ means to set him forth as the one who through his Cross sets men right with God again. To put faith in Christ means relying on him, and him alone, to restore us to God’s fellowship and favour.’

Most people think salvation is the product of morality and religious observance. In spite of the clarity of the New Testament message, they still cling to their own efforts to save themselves. But salvation by works never creates conviction of sin because it fails miserably to take into account the holiness, purity and justice of God. It sees sin only as a moral or social blemish and not as an affront to the Word, law and character of God. It is the law of God which produces conviction because it shows us our sin in relationship, not to society and people, but to God. It shows us that we have failed to meet God’s requirements.  Salvation remains impossible as long as God’s demands remain unsatisfied.

What are God’s demands?

God requires from us a righteousness equal to his own. We may think that is unreasonable, but it is not. God created man sinless, and he wants us to be the way he intended us to be. That is not unreasonable, but it is impossible! Our sin makes it impossible. We cannot satisfy God’s reasonable demands. So where does that leave us? It leaves us unable to save ourselves and needing a Saviour. And this Saviour will have to provide for us a righteousness as good as God’s. Where can such a righteousness be found? In Christ, says the Bible. ‘God made him [Christ], who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor. 5:21). And it is this righteousness, Christ’s own perfect righteousness imputed to the sinner, that is revealed in the gospel ‘I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of every one who believes … For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed … ‘ (Rom. 1:17). Thus the gospel makes known to us God’s solution to the problem: in Christ, God provides for us the very righteousness that He demands. That is the gospel. There is a righteousness from God that comes to us through faith in Jesus Christ.

A sinner can hear all this and not make head or tail of it unless he is convinced of sin, unless he first sees his own helplessness and hopelessness. He must see that he is not meeting God’s demands and that he can never meet them. He must see his sin in relationship to God and the function of the law is to show him just that. The law makes no attempt to compare one man with another; it takes us all to the yardstick of the holiness of God and there we all fail miserably.

The purpose of the law

Writing to the Galatians, Paul asks, ‘What, then, was the purpose of the law?’ (Gal. 3: 19). A few verses later, he answers his own question: ‘The law was our tutor to bring us to Christ’ (Gal. 3:24). This is the role of the law in evangelism.

When we are talking of evangelism and the law of God it is the moral law we have particularly in mind, that is, the Ten Commandments. This is not to say that other parts of the Law of Moses have no application in preaching the gospel. For example, the death of the animal sacrifices reminds us that death is the penalty for sin. It also foreshadows the substitutionary work of Christ. But the Decalogue has a particular place in evangelism, because it is through these commandments that men are made aware of their sinful state. That being the case, we have to ask, what is the relationship of man to the moral law? The answer is twofold. Before Adam sinned, he had a wholly positive relationship to the law of God. But after the Fall, that relationship changed dramatically.

W. G. T. Shedd, in his Sermons to the Natural Man, says, ‘The moral law in its own nature, and by the divine ordination, is suited to produce holiness and happiness in the soul of any and every man. It was ordained to life. So far as the purpose of God, and the original nature and character of man, are concerned, the Ten Commandments are perfectly adapted to fill the soul with peace and purity. In the unfallen creature, they work no wrath, neither are they the strength of sin. If everything in man had remained as it was created, there would have been no need of urging him to “become dead to
the law”, to be “delivered from the law”, and not be “under the law”. Had man kept his original righteousness, it could never be said of him that “The strength of sin is the law.” On the contrary, there was such a mutual agreement between the unfallen nature of man and the holy law of God, that the latter was the very joy and strength of the former. The commandment was ordained to life, and it was the life and peace of holy Adam. There is nothing wrong or lacking, therefore, in the law. The fault lies in ourselves, that we are sinners. It is our sinful state that puts us under ‘the curse of the law’ (Gal. 3: 10) and makes us rebel against it because we are sinners the law of God is obnoxious to us, and that for two reasons.

The first reason is that the law is law, and the sinner does not like being told he is wrong. He does not like absolutes; he prefers standards that are relative, because he can manipulate such standards to serve his own convenience. The absolutes of God’s law defy such human ingenuity: they will not appease his conscience and they leave him forever uncomfortable in the presence of God.

The second reason is that it is the law of God. There is a holiness about the law that will not yield an inch to man’s sinfulness. It makes no allowances and accepts no plea in mitigation. It is the unchanging law of an unchanging God and is thus as holy and pure as God himself. There are two ways in which man could come to terms with God’s law. The first is if the law could be altered so that it could agree with man’s sinful inclination. He would then be happy in his sin because the law would become like his own heart and there would be no conflict between man and law. The second is if man could be changed so that the inclinations and desires of his heart would be in accordance with divine law. Then again there would be no conflict.

The first of these two ‘options’ is not on. The second is made possible by the gospel of God’s grace. But if the gospel is to have this effect, it must be presented in a way that makes clear where man’s problem lies. The prime purpose of the gospel is not to make men happy, but to make them righteous in the sight of God. Therefore there is no way the gospel can be preached without the law also being preached. It is only the preaching of the law that shows man what his problem really is, since it is through the law that we become conscious of sin (Rom. 3:20). The law presents us fIrmly and forcibly with the fact of our own personal sin and guilt (Rom. 3:20; 4:15; 5:13) and having done that, it can lead us in repentance and faith to Christ.

Shedd asks, ‘Of what use is the law to a fallen man?’ He answers, ‘It is preached and forced home in order to detect sin, but not to remove it, to bring men to a consciousness of the evil of their hearts, but not to change their hearts.’ In other words, there are limits to what the law can do for us. It forgives none of the sin it reveals; it cannot change the heart it convicts of vileness and depravity; it saves no lost sinner. Therefore the gospel preacher’s responsibility is to use the law for its prescribed purpose and then move on quickly to the grace of God in Christ to heal the wound the law has exposed. The purpose of the law is to lead us to Christ.

Misuses of love and law in gospel preaching

There is a preaching of the love of God that can encourage people to continue in their sin. A woman who had been having psychological problems, and was being treated by a psychiatrist, began to attend an evangelical church. She came under conviction of sin as, through the preaching, she saw her sin and guilt. She told her psychiatrist and he was angry and told her to stop attending that church. She did so, and attended another so-called evangelical church. She told them of her experience and of her psychiatrist’s anger at her feeling guilty. They said that would not happen in their church because they would surround her with the love of Jesus.

To be surrounded with the love of Jesus sounded very spiritual but sadly, in reality, it meant in this case that that church never preached sin or repentance and sinners were never confronted with their real need.

If we are not guilty of this mistake, consider something else that we may well be guilty of. There is a preaching of the law that can discourage sinners from ever seeking Christ. The law is meant to expose the wound so that the balm of the gospel can be applied, but many preachers use the law not so much to expose the wound as to mutilate the body. What I mean is that too often our gospel preaching lacks balance. It is 95% sin, judgement and hell, while the element of good news becomes a two-minute postscript added at the end. You cannot preach the gospel without the law, but the law cannot save. The purpose of preaching the gospel is to save; therefore gospel preaching should be pre-eminently a preaching of Christ and the cross. To reduce that to a postscript is not to preach the gospel at all.

In preparing a gospel sermon we should give a great deal of thought to its balance. It needs both law and grace, and the balance between these is very important. What is the correct balance? It may be that in our days there needs to be a stronger emphasis on God’s holiness and law than is common. This aspect has been neglected for so long that men no longer blush at their sin. But having said that, our purpose is not to leave men with a sense of guilt. It is to lead them to the Lord Jesus Christ who in his love and mercy can deal with that guilt.

The correct use of the law in gospel preaching

How, in conclusion then, should we use the law in preaching to the lost? What is the correct use of the law in evangelism? By correct I mean biblical. Romans 3:20 and Galatians 3:21 tell us clearly that the law cannot save, bµt it is essential in turning a sinner to Christ for salvation.
This is because it teaches three things that a man must understand if he is to be truly converted.

1. The law must be used to teach the sinner the holiness of God
One of the basic problems with man is that he does not take sin seriously and this is because he does not take God seriously. There is always the tendency to reduce God to manageable terms. Every system of religion apart from biblical Christianity does this. Tozer wrote, ‘Among the sins to which the human heart is prone hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at bottom a libel on his character. The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than he is – in itself a monstrous sin – and substitutes for the true God one made after his own likeness. Always this god will conform to the image of the one who created it and it will be base or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from which it emerges.’

It is this thinking that lies behind the saying: ‘The God I believe in would never send people to hell’.  The only answer to such unbiblical nonsense is to see and appreciate God as the Holy One. As we understand more of God’s holiness, we shall inevitably also understand more of man’s sinfulness and the necessity of Christ’s atoning death. God’s holiness is revealed gloriously in the law and the cross. God is holy and everything he does and instigates is holy. This is seen clearly in the law; its commandments, says Romans 7:12, are ‘holy, righteous and good’. The law forbids sin in all its forms, whether it be the vileness of idolatry, murder or adultery, or sin in its more subtle forms of pride and covetousness. God forbids sin because it is repugnant to his holiness and it pollutes and harms his creation. If the law cannot restrict sin then God will destroy sin. God’s wrath and justice are direct consequences of his holiness. God hates sin, as a mother hates a disease that is killing her child.

In preaching the law we must not put before the sinner vague and tentative suggestions as to what God thinks, but clear and precise statements of his attitude to the issues that confront men every day. The law leaves us in no doubt as to the holiness of God, and this confronts the sinner with a huge dilemma. What can he do? His sin condemns him and the holiness of God leaves him with no escape. The law has pushed him into a corner and kicked away the crutches he was depending on. He feels useless and hopeless. But this is the point at which he must arrive if he is to embrace by faith what Christ has done to redeem lost sinners such as he. As Spurgeon said, ‘A man is never so near grace as when he begins to feel he can do nothing at all.’

2. The law must be used to show the sinner the reality of his sin
Sin was a fact long before the law was given by God and it reaped its grim harvest of death from Adam to Moses. It was while mankind languished in that terrible condition of sin, condemnation and death, that God added the law (Rom. 5:20). ‘It was not’, says Leon Morris, ‘concerned with preventing sin (it was too late for that). Nor was it concerned with salvation from sin (it was too weak for that). The law can only condemn (Rom. 4:15). It was concerned with showing sin for what it is, and it certainly showed magnificently that there was much sin.’

The law shows up sin and prevents man justifying it with pathetic excuses. So when a man excuses his temper as a temperamental weakness, the law of God says, ‘No, it is sin.’ When a man excuses his sexual lusts as being natural in any red-blooded man, the law says, ‘No, it is sin.’ Thus the law defines and pin-points sin. The meaning of ëYou shall not commit adultery,’ cannot be misunderstood. Men can wriggle all they like in discomfort under such a command, but they can never say it was not clear. They can argue all day that such teaching is old fashioned, and that we must be modern, but they know in their hearts that the commandment is right, especially when it is their own spouse who commits adultery.

The function of the gospel preacher is to use the law to make people see their sin as God sees it. It is to make the sinner think in terms of God’s absolute standards, not the ever-changing whims of society. The preacher is always up against fluctuating standards of morality and changing views of what is right and wrong. This fluctuation makes the sinner feel comfortable because what he was doing wrong ten years ago may well now be considered right in the eyes of society. What he is doing wrong now may well be acceptable in five years time. So he thinks, ëWhat is the problem? I am free to make my own rules.’  We must show him that his problem is with the unchanging standards of God; that he will be judged by God, not by trendy TV producers or the editors of tabloid newspapers.

3. The law must be used to point sinners to Christ
We often quote Romans 3:23: ‘All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.’ But Paul does not put a full stop after this statement. He continues, ‘and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 3:24). The whole point of bringing the sinner to a realization of his sin is that he might forsake his works and flee to Christ for deliverance. Thus we should never preach the law without also preaching the redemption that is in Christ. This work of redemption, says the apostle, justifies the sinner in the sight of God. Christ has borne the curse of the law, ‘becoming a curse for us’ (Gal. 3:13), that we might be declared righteous before God.

This imputed righteousness, Paul continues, is free. It cannot be obtained by anything we are or do, for Christ has already paid the whole price. He has ‘bought [the church] with his own blood’ (Acts 20:28). He has purged our sins ‘by himself’; that is, without our aid or cooperation (Heb. 1:3, NKJV). Any attempt to tender our good works or religious offerings to secure our salvation is a negation of the gospel and a rejection of Christ’s finished work.

Finally, this redemption is by grace. It is the outcome of God’s eternal purpose, motivated by God’s eternal love and carried to certain fruition by God’s eternal Son. Grace is God’s propensity to give eternal riches to those who deserve eternal condemnation, that he might receive eternal glory. The law exposes our devastating poverty so that we might find unsearchable riches in Christ. Let us be warned, therefore: if the law of God is on our lips, the love of God must be in our hearts and the compassion of Christ in our minds. This is how we should preach the law, for only thus will God be honoured.

You do not need a pulpit to preach the gospel though the pulpit is the more conventional way. But God has given his church many ways to make known his love in a dark world. God may not have given you any of the gifts necessary for preaching but he has given you all the gifts you need to gossip the gospel to friends and neighbours. When we are willing to use these gifts it is amazing how many opportunities are given us to do so. This informal witness is not a substitute for pulpit preaching but a supplement to it. It is a means of bringing folk to church to hear a fuller account of gospel truths.

The most effective evangelism is unorganized where ordinary believers tell people about Jesus. If your church wants to organize a gospel campaign there is no need to import a big name evangelist to preach for you, just motivate your own people to get out among their friends and speak about Jesus. Several years ago I was preaching in California and the church organizing my itinerary told me that they had arranged a BBQ at the home of one of the Christians. This woman had been converted a year before through listening to a sermon of mine on tape and now she wanted all her neighbours to hear the good news so she invited them to her home to hear this British preacher. That night I spoke to about 70 unbelievers at her home. They came because obviously they respected this woman and wanted to hear what had so changed her life. The last recorded words of the risen Christ to his apostles before his ascension were, ‘you will be my witnesses…’ Every Christian is called to be a witness.

Witnessing begins with caring

It begins, firstly, with caring about the glory of God. God is not glorified and honoured in this world because the vast majority of people do not know and love him. His truth is trampled in the mud and his name taken in vain. The only way for this to change is for people to become Christians. Look at how different your attitude to God is now, compared to what it was before you were converted. If you care enough about God’s glory, you will tell people the good news of the gospel.

Witnessing begins, secondly, with caring about people caring about unbelievers in their bondage and spiritual blindness. Without Christ, men and women are going to hell. Do you care? Then witness to them of the only way of salvation.

Many Christians are timid about witnessing. To counteract this many different methods and schemes of personal evangelism have been devised. This is all done with the best of intentions, but it does not provide the answer to the problem. It makes witnessing too mechanical and artificial, so that instead of being a natural overflow, it becomes rather like scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Witnessing flows out of worship

If witnessing begins with caring, it is also true to say that witnessing flows out of worship. Too many older Christians tell new converts that the first thing they need to do is to learn how to witness. This is wrong. The prime need of the new convert is to learn to worship. Witnessing will always be difficult unless the heart of the believer is absorbed in God.

My heart is full of Christ, and longs
Its glorious matter to declare!
Of Him I make my loftier songs,
I cannot from His praise forbear;
My ready tongue makes haste to sing
The glories of my heavenly King.

Charles Wesley is perfectly correct. Fill your heart with worship of Christ, and witness will inevitably be the overflow of your experience of God. Read Acts 2:41-47. God may never call you to be a preacher or a missionary, but if you are a Christian he has already called you to be a witness for him in this world. In Acts 11, where we read that the gospel started spreading into the entire world, God did not only use great preachers. Ordinary timid believers were used:

‘Some of them, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus. The Lord’s hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord’
(vv.20-21).

Take heart from this, and follow the example of those nameless saints.

In word and deed

You must never forget that once you are known as a Christian, everything you do is a witness. It may be a good witness or a bad witness. Your behaviour is every bit as important as your words. People will quite rightly dismiss all you say if they do not see the gospel having an effect upon your life. Witnessing, therefore, is not an occasional happening, but a twenty-four hour business.

Your life will show where you stand with God, but it is your words, more than anything else, that will show unbelievers where they stand. The gospel must be spoken (Romans 10:14). The people in your home, school, factory or office need to hear of God’s love and offer of salvation. If you do not tell them, it may well be that no one else will.

You must never confine your witnessing merely to giving a testimony of your own experience of God. This can, of course, be included, but your purpose must be to present people with the gospel. They must be shown that they are sinners (Romans 3:23), under the wrath and judgement of God (Romans 1:18) and already condemned by God (John 3:18). You must tell them that God demands repentance (Acts 3:19; 17:30) so that they can then turn in faith to Christ for salvation (Ephesians 2:4-9; John 1:12).

In your witness, do not be arrogant or aggressive. On the other hand, do not be timid or apologetic. Speak naturally and warmly of the things of God. Do not be over-concerned about proving a point and winning an argument. Be patient and loving. Do not be surprised if you are ridiculed for your strange beliefs (Acts 26:24; 1 Corinthians 4: 10). Keep pointing people to Jesus. Let his name be the word most frequently upon your lips, that people may see you are Christ’s servants. Be concerned for individuals.

‘If you had one hundred empty bottles before you, and
threw a pail of water over them, some would get a little in
them, but most would fall outside. If you wish to fill the
bottles, the best way is to take each bottle separately and
put a vessel full of water to the bottle’s mouth. That is successful personal work.’
C. H Spurgeon

I realize that many who read these words will not be preachers, but these chapters are nevertheless relevant to all believers. Whether we are preachers or hearers, we need to re-examine what we expect from the ministry of the Word. What should we look for? What do we need to hear from the pulpits of our churches? True gospel preaching will not only fulfill the preacher’s ministry, but will revive the desire of every believer to make Christ known.

Spurgeon said,

‘Soul-winning is the chief business of the Christian minister.’

He did not say it is the only business of the minister, but that it is certainly the chief business. To dispute this would be to deny the whole thrust of the New Testament regarding the work of the church of Christ. For a preacher to neglect his chief business is a denial of his calling, yet many good biblical preachers openly admit that they feel more comfortable teaching saints than evangelizing sinners. And because there are few unconverted people attending their churches they have ceased preaching the gospel altogether.

If soul-winning is our chief business, and we are not winning souls, where does that leave our calling to preach? To quote Spurgeon again,

‘Now, in the last place, the man whom Christ makes a fisher of men is successful. But, says one, “I have always heard that Christ’s ministers are to be faithful, but that they cannot be sure of being successful.” Yes, I have heard that saying, and one way I know it is true, but another way I have my doubts about it. He that is faithful is, in God’s way and in God’s judgement, successful, more or less. For instance, here is a brother who says that he is faithful. Of course, I must believe him, yet I never heard of a sinner being saved under him. Indeed, I should think that the safest place for a person to be in if he did not want to be saved would be under this gentleman’s ministry, because he does not preach anything that is likely to arouse, impress, or convince anybody … he that never did get any fish is not a fisherman. He that never saved a sinner after years of work is not a minister of Christ. If the result of his life work is nil, he made a mistake when he undertook it.’

Spurgeon preached that in 1886 just a few years before he died. It is not, therefore, the intolerant judgement of a young man, but the mature conclusion of an old one. To those of us who may go several years without seeing a conversion, it can sound daunting and devastating. Was Spurgeon revealing an unfair lack of sympathy with preachers less able than himself? It is not my business to defend the renowned Baptist, but I would urge all preachers to seek the answer in his book The Soul Winner. I shall use several quotes from this book, because I believe it will help us to understand and share his thinking.

What is the real winning of a soul for God?

Spurgeon asks this question and then proceeds to answer it. He says first of all that the sinner must be instructed so that he may know the truth of God. He cites Matthew 28: 19-20:

‘Go … and teach all nations … teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you,’ (AV)

and concludes that teaching is the heart of gospel preaching. All too often we seem to accept as a fact that there will be less content in a sermon for sinners than a sermon for saints. Spurgeon would strongly disagree with that. He argues that the gospel is good news and that,

‘There is information in it, there is instruction in it concerning matters which men need to know, and statements in it calculated to bless those who hear it. It is not a magical incantation, or a charm, whose force consists in a collection of sounds; it is a revelation of facts and truths which require knowledge and belief. The gospel is a reasonable system, and it appeals to men’s understanding; it is a matter for thought and consideration, and it appeals to the conscience and the reflecting powers.’

This point is emphasized by Paul’s example at the jail at Philippi. The great question is asked: ‘What must I do to be saved?’ The answer is given: ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.’ But Paul did not leave it at that. What exactly was the jailer to believe? Who was Jesus Christ? Acts 16:32 is crucial: ‘Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house.’ It was as a result of that preaching of the gospel that the jailer and his family were saved.

Spurgeon goes on:

‘And, do not believe, dear friends, that when you go into special evangelistic services, you are to leave out the doctrines of the gospel; for you ought then to proclaim the doctrines of grace rather more than less. Teach gospel doctrines clearly, affectionately, simply, and plainly, and especially those truths which have a present and practical bearing upon man’s condition and God’s grace. Some enthusiasts would seem to have imbibed the notion that, as soon as a minister addresses the unconverted, he should deliberately contradict his usual doctrinal discourses, because it is supposed that there will be no conversions if he preaches the whole counsel of God. It just comes to this, brethren: it is supposed that we are to conceal truth and utter a half falsehood, in order to save souls … This is a strange theory and yet many endorse it. According to them, we may preach the redemption of a chosen number to God’s people, but universal redemption when we speak with the outside world; we are to tell believers that salvation is all of grace, but sinners are to be spoken with as if they were to save themselves …We have not so learned Christ. He who sent us to win souls neither permits us to invent falsehoods, nor to suppress truth. His work can be done without such suspicious methods. ‘

John Elias makes the same point:

‘There is a great defect in the manner of many preachers. It can scarcely be said that the gospel is preached by them … Though these preachers may not be accused of saying what is false, yet, alas, they neglect stating weighty and necessary truths when opportunities offer. By omitting these important portions of truth in their natural connection, the Word is made subservient to subjects never intended. The hearers are led to deny the truth which the preacher leaves out of his sermons. Omitting any truth intentionally in a sermon leads to the denial of it.’

Spurgeon and Elias were soul-winners so we must listen to them. They were not advocating heavy theological sermons that the unconverted will not be able to understand: they were stressing the need to preach the full gospel. If sinners are to be saved they must hear the truth, and all the truth. It is our failure at this point that produces the sort of wishy-washy conversions that give churches so many pastoral problems. We owe it to men and women to tell them the entire gospel – to speak of God’s eternal purposes in Christ, of election, calling, justification and redemption; of both God’s love and wrath; of both heaven and hell; of both grace and human responsibility.

Spurgeon says,

‘The preacher’s work is to throw sinners down in utter helplessness, that they may be compelled to look up to him who alone can help them. To try to win a soul for Christ by keeping that soul in ignorance of any truth is contrary to the mind of the Spirit… The best attraction is the gospel in all its purity. The weapon with which the Lord conquers men is the truth as it is in Jesus. The gospel will be found equal to every emergency; an arrow which can pierce the hardest heart, a balm which will heal the deadliest wound. Preach it, and preach nothing else.’

Spurgeon’s second answer to the question:

‘What is the real winning of a soul?’ is that we need to impress the sinner so that he feels his need of Christ. In this he keeps the balance between content and presentation.

He says, ‘A purely didactic [teaching] ministry, which should always appeal to the understanding, and should leave the emotions untouched, would certainly be a limping ministry.’ He then proceeds to make the powerful statement that

‘A sinner has a heart as well as a head; a sinner has emotions as well as thoughts; and we must appeal to both. A sinner will never be converted until his emotions are stirred.’

For most of us who love the Bible, it is relatively easy to preach the truth and give a faithful exposition of Scripture. The difficult thing is to preach the truth in such a way that we stir the hearts and prick the consciences of sinners. An easy way out is to say that only the Holy Spirit can do this. That is true, but is it the whole truth? We must not use this as an excuse to avoid our responsibilities and reduce preaching to mere lecturing.
How can we preach so that sinners’ hearts are stirred? It is not by filling the sermon with sentimental stories and heart-rending illustrations. That may well stir emotions but it will not lead to salvation. That is the method of the actor, not the preacher. Neither will we succeed by filling the service with gimmicks and working up an atmosphere.

So how do we do it? We do it in three ways.

Firstly, by having regard to the content of our message.
What should that content be? We preach, said Paul, ‘the unsearchable riches of Christ’ (Eph. 3:8). If Christ is not the heart of every sermon, then these riches will be missing and our hearers will go away impoverished. We may use the Bible to preach morality, judgement, history, ecc1esiology, eschatology, and so much else. But unless we unveil Christ ‘in all the Scriptures’ (Luke 24:27) we shall leave men forlorn and shut the door to grace.

Secondly, we shall affect our hearers by preaching to them and for them. This means plenty of application all the way through the sermon, pointing the truths, pushing them home, and showing their relevance to the everyday affairs of life. In this way we will guard against being heavy and boring. Sadly, according to many of God’s people who listen to sermons every week, a lot of preachers are simply dull. Their content may well be biblical, but their presentation is so dry that their hearers soon ‘switch offí. Our application of Scripture truth must be such that every sinner who hears us knows that God is speaking about, and to, him or her. Sinners are great wrigglers and they must not be allowed to wriggle out of conviction of sin. Furthermore, our application must be appropriate. For instance, if we go on and on about AIDs, the vast majority of unregenerate men and women in the congregation will totally agree. They will be comfortable, even enjoying our tirade, because we are preaching about a sin of which they are not guilty. We must point up the ordinary sins of ordinary people.

We should not confuse application with illustration. A well-chosen illustration can help enormously in bringing home a point, and in lightening our presentation. But some preachers go overboard in their attempt to be interesting. Illustrations should be neither too lengthy nor so frequent that they destroy the train of thought and logic. If they are to listen well, people must be able to follow the preacher’s argument and line of reasoning.

Thirdly, we must give attention to the manner in which we preach. Richard Baxter said,

‘I preached as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.’

In other words, he had a sense of urgency, of deep concern, of warmth and passion. Speaking of pathos, Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones said,

‘A special word must be given also to the element of pathos. If I had to plead guilty of one thing more than any other I would have to confess that this perhaps is what has been most lacking in my own ministry. This should arise partly from a love for the people.’

Richard Cecil, an Anglican preacher in London towards the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, said something which should make us all think,

“To love to preach is one thing; to love those to whom we preach is quite another.”

The trouble with some of us is that we love preaching, but we are not always careful to make sure that we love the people to whom we are actually preaching. If you lack this element of compassion for the people you will also lack the pathos which is a very vital element in all true preaching.’

If we do not feel for the people, and do not feel the power and significance of what we are preaching, they will never feel their need of the gospel. It will come across to them as mere words and nothing more. The gospel has to grip our hearts both in our preparation and in the pulpit.
It ought to excite us and this will be conveyed to our hearers. Are we afraid of emotion in the pulpit? Lloyd-Jones, having distinguished between emotion and emotionalism, complains,

‘Emotion is regarded as something almost indecent. My reply to all that, once more, is simply to say that if you contemplate these glorious truths that are committed to our charge as preachers without being moved by them there is something defective in your spiritual eyesight.’

We are not to preach as lecturers, detached from their subject. Neither are we to preach with the silly excitement of actors doing a TV commercial. Our business, according to Spurgeon, is to

‘continue to drive at men’s hearts till they are broken; and then we must keep on preaching Christ crucified till their hearts are bound up; and when that is accomplished, we must continue to proclaim the gospel till their whole nature is brought into subjection to the gospel of Christ.’

The preaching we need today

In his biography of Jonathan Edwards, lain Murray has a remarkable chapter entitled ‘The Breaking of the Spirit of Slumber’. In this he deals with the type of preaching needed in the 1730s because of the spiritual condition of the day. He says,

‘It has sometimes been assumed that the preaching of the eighteenth century leaders in the revivals in North America was simply continuing a well established tradition. That, however, is not the case. The commonly accepted preaching was not calculated to break through the prevailing formalism and indifference, and the preaching which did bring men to a sense of need and humiliation before God was of a very different order.’

What was this different preaching that God so richly blessed? Edwards said,

‘I know it has long been fashionable to despise a very earnest and pathetical way of preaching, and they only have been valued as preachers who have shown the greatest extent of learning, strength of reason, and correctness of method and language. But an increase in speculative knowledge in divinity is not what is so much needed by our people as something else.
Men may abound in this sort of light, and have no heat… Our people do not so much need to have their heads stored as to have their hearts touched, and they stand in the greatest need of that sort of preaching which has the greatest tendency to do this.’

We are facing people today, in and out of the church, who have little sense of the evil of sin and little love for God. Preaching that merely fills their heads with facts but does not touch their hearts is not going to change anything. Edwards described the people of his day as

‘stupidly senseless to the importance of eternal things.’

Therefore they needed preaching which would ensure that ‘their conscience stares them in the face and they begin to see their need of a priest and a sacrifice’. Note the emphasis on Christ. Such preaching starts with the preacher’s apprehension of Christ in his glorious person and saving power. It continues as he feels the urgency of the task and is satisfied with nothing less than the glory of God in the salvation of sinners. Finally, it requires an experience of, and dependence on, the Holy Spirit, who will honour a Christ-centred ministry.

lain Murray says,

‘True heart-searching, humbling and convicting preaching requires an experimental acquaintance with the Spirit of God on the part of the preacher.’ Murray concludes the chapter with these words: ‘The preaching through which the spirit of slumber was broken in the 1730s was searching and convincing. A band of men was being raised up for whom the gravity of sin, the possibility of an unsound profession of Christ, and the carelessness of a lost world were pressing burdens. Behind their public utterances was their vision of God and of eternity.’