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The Erosion of Evangelistic Preaching in the West By Peter Masters

Now, the subject today is of such importance worldwide, we have never really had a season since the Reformation when people who love the Gospel, truly love the Gospel, have so seldom preached it.
There has been a massive departure from the practice of evangelistic preaching on a regular basis, and this is our subject today.
And I'd like to begin by turning to 1 Corinthians chapter 9 and verse 16.
First Corinthians chapter 9 verse 16, for though I preach the Gospel, I have nothing to glory of, for necessity is laid upon me, yea, woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel.
Now I'll be coming back to this verse in the course of time, but I'd like to set the scene and introduce matters really by trying to outline some of the reasons why Gospel preaching is in decline, why it has almost disappeared.
It's true whether we're considering Arminians or Calvinists.
There was a time, maybe 30, 40 years ago, when even though Calvinists had stopped preaching the Gospel, Arminians could still be relied upon to do so.
We may not have liked their presentation of the Gospel, we may have seen it sliding into decisionism and easy believe-ism, we might have been very concerned to see inadequate emphasis on repentance and Holy Ghost conversion, but nevertheless they made a pass at it.
But even they have given up, even they very seldom engage in regular Gospel preaching, and even the evangelists that they hire and depend upon frequently are not attempting to lay down the message of salvation.
I'm sure you're aware of this, but they're big names, we'll talk about almost anything but and just give some kind of an altar call on the end.
Even they really do not lay out the plan of salvation even in the manner in which they used to.
Regular frequent preaching of the doctrines of salvation has almost gone, at least the preaching of them in a persuasive manner.
So this is our subject, and this is the first observation then that I would make where the Gospel is preached, that is to say where there is an evangelistic presentation of the soul-saving doctrines designed to be used as the Holy Ghost to bring men and women under conviction and to persuade them to come to Christ and to offer the Gospel to announce that universal tender of salvation, the old terms.
Where that is done, it is done only occasionally.
Although the preacher at the church will have such a service maybe once in two months
or three months or even two or three times a year, and that has become the practice.
Now that's a great tragedy and a great shame, and at this juncture I would just point out
that the regular preaching of the Gospel achieves under the hand of God three things.
The preaching of the Gospel is the chief means by which God gathers out his elect.
It is effective for the calling in of those who will be brought to salvation.
That's obvious.
But secondly, the preaching of the Gospel is an aspect of worship, and I would encourage
all pastors, all preachers to remember this, that if on the Lord's Day the soul-saving
doctrines of the Gospel have not been preached in a way that warms the heart and stirs even
the unbelievers but believers I have in mind at the present time, then the people of God
haven't had the fullest opportunity to worship.
Worship centers on the Gospel.
We have a service for the instruction of the saints.
We have a service for the preaching of the Gospel, and that completes the act of worship.
It moves the people of God.
It reminds them of the ground on which they stand.
But thirdly, remember, the preaching of the Gospel is a school.
After all, the people of God are witnesses, and where will they learn the great arguments?
Where will they learn the great persuasions?
Where will they learn how to deal with all sorts and conditions of men and women but
under the preaching of the Gospel?
If you are a regular Gospel preacher, then in the course of time your people will be
the most efficient witnesses.
They will know how to deal with every kind of unbeliever.
They will know the arguments.
They will have a great fund of illustrations.
It's under Gospel preaching that the people are best equipped to, in their turn, represent
the Gospel to others.
So do remember that.
It's a tremendous satisfaction to an evangelistic preacher when even seasoned believers get
out their notebooks and scribble something down, and they realize they've got an argument
or approach they never had before.
So it's three things.
It is God's principle means of calling out the elect.
It is part of the worship of the people of God.
And you are presenting a school for personal witness in the preaching of the Gospel.
But there's another tendency which has led to the absence of Gospel preaching.
And I'll deal with this quickly, a second heading.
It is that we have been plagued by a romantic approach to evangelism and to Christian service.
By romantic I don't mean anything to do with love.
I mean more that we imagine that the work can be gloriously carried out by preaching
alone, not necessarily even evangelistic preaching.
There's a vague, rosy, romantic view has appeared.
And it is this.
As long as the people of God gather together and they love the Word and they find themselves
an eloquent preacher who will preach from the Word of God, everything will somehow just
work out and follow suit.
Everything will happen.
The Spirit of God will visit and bless, and all you have to do is guarantee that the Word
is preached.
Now good-hearted Christian people, the world over, but particularly in Britain, seem to
have gone this way.
The great thing is the anointing of God upon the preacher.
It doesn't particularly matter what he's preaching as long as it's the truth.
It doesn't particularly matter whether it is actually the soul-saving doctrines of the
Gospel.
As long as there is the anointing of God upon the preacher, everything will just work out
fine.
And this romantic view has really swept in, and I gather, too, it's come to you here.
And there is this point of view that all that matters is the anointing of God.
Back at home, there are churches that are floundering, and yet they are convinced that
the solution to all their problems is just to have a sound preacher and to pray for revival.
If you read certain Christian magazines, we have one Christian newspaper in our country
that has a regular editorial, pretty well plays it down the same lines.
The first part of the editorial reminds you of how bad things are, and the state the country
has got into, and how unbelieving and godless, and so on.
The second part of the editorial generally says, well, what's to be done about it?
And the solution is this.
Well, I'll tell you first what the solution is not.
The solution is not that churches should be stirred to action.
The solution is not that Christian people in their churches should get down to witness
and evangelism and Sunday schooling and all the traditional methods and neighborhood visitation.
Never a word of that.
The churches can go on in their low-key manner.
The people of God can have no avenue of Christian service.
Sunday schools can go on closing.
All these things don't seem to disturb the little team of editorial writers on this particular
magazine.
Because I'm criticizing it.
They are good and they're believing people, so a name isn't necessary.
But the solution is always the same.
There is one way out.
Pray for revival.
That's all.
Now you see, yes, it is vital to pray for revival.
That is very good.
But it's the only solution to those who subscribe to the romantic school.
There's nothing to be done.
Nothing is worth doing.
In fact, one great preacher we had actually came out with this kind of sentiment quite
frequently.
And while being critical, I won't presume to name him either.
But this was his point of view.
Active activity?
Why, when revival comes, God will do more in five minutes than you can do in 40 years.
So in the meantime, you do nothing or next to nothing and you just pray for revival and
you look for the anointing of God upon the preacher.
There have even been books written or old books reprinted where the titles have been
formed or changed to service and support this romantic point of view.
One excellent book about a great preacher from the United States in the last century
was retitled God Sent Revival because that was the message of the publishers.
God has to do everything.
God will do these things.
The romantic point of view.
Just look for the anointing.
Now, of course, we don't deny that.
We want the anointing of God upon all preachers.
We depend entirely and utterly upon the power and the work of the Holy Spirit.
But don't drift into the romantic view.
You know, the romantic view eventually leads you here, that if revival hasn't happened
and if the churches continue to subside, it's God's fault because nobody would actually
articulate that.
But this is the logic of it.
It's God's fault.
He hasn't sent revival.
It's nothing to do with us.
We're not responsible.
We're doing as much as we can.
Well, that's not the old way of thinking.
That isn't the true Calvinistic way of thinking.
True Calvinism doesn't eliminate human instrumentality, nor does it eliminate the need for hard work.
I'm not going to do this, but we could spend half an hour to an hour expounding the great
laboring verbs of the New Testament, which apply not only to ministers, but to all Christian
people, the hard, toiling, striving terms.
True Calvinism has never denied the presence of those verbs in the Word of God and those
great martial exhortations.
So this is the romantic point of view.
Good people with whom we would all fellowship, in whose company we will delight, who love
the Lord, and love the Word, and love the Gospel, and long and pine for souls, but there
seems to have swept over many friends this romantic delusion.
It's all down to the Lord, and there's nothing for us to do.
Well, the romantic preaching view, the revival-only view, the intense hatred of Arminian activism,
which is built up to such an extent that we're terrified to do anything.
This has come in, and this is one of the reasons, too, why regular evangelistic preaching has
gone out.
Then there's a third thing I want to mention swiftly, and I must hurry, and it's this.
So many good men will tell me this, but I don't understand what you're talking about
evangelistic preaching.
Whenever I preach, I'm preaching the Gospel.
Whenever I preach, I preach the Gospel.
You see, what has happened is that the term Gospel has become a synonym for all the counsel
of God, and providing the preacher is preaching the Word, he thinks he's preaching the Gospel,
and he's persuaded himself along those lines.
Now that's dreadfully destructive to evangelistic preaching, and it's quite wrong.
You know, this is how Rome uses the word Gospel.
Gospel in the New Testament, as I hope to prove to you later on, is a technical term
which applies specifically to the soul-saving doctrines of the Gospel, presented in an evangelistic manner.
Now every evangelical used to believe that 40 years ago, but not today.
There's been a corruption of the term, and we must grasp this.
Don't fall for this one, friends.
You see, Rome doesn't understand what the term Gospel means.
So within Rome, it is a synonym for the grace of God in any shape or form, generally.
The Gospel just represents the grace, the activity, the truth of God in the vaguest,
broadest, most comprehensive way.
Liberals have a similar corruption of the term.
To a liberal, Gospel means anything from social action to just the general influence of God
in the world.
We evangelicals, Protestants, let's say, used to have a very careful definition of
the term Gospel, always related to soul-saving doctrines.
But now we've gone the way of Rome and the liberals, and it's become a vague synonym
for all the grace of God.
So whenever you preach, you preach the Gospel.
I once heard a preacher laying this down, and being most careful to say this, Gospel
does not mean just the soul-saving, the basic doctrines he declared, the three R's, and
so on.
Oh no, Gospel, he said, is all the counsel of God.
Well, of course we preach all the counsel of God, but we mustn't lose sight of the
fact that in its usage in the New Testament, as I will prove, it is always a very specific
term.
And that's why the passage we're looking at, it becomes dynamite in the light of that.
First Corinthians chapter 9 and verse 16, the second part of the verse, necessity is
laid upon me, yea, woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel.
Now if we're not preaching regular, frequent evangelistic sermons, we can't stand up
to that verse unless we make Gospel a synonym for all Bible truths.
That's the only way we can get out of the condemnation implicit in this verse.
So of course we're very keen to water down the term Gospel, even as Gospel lovers, and
we have to be very careful that we don't drift that way.
Now there's a fourth heading I'll give you.
Many friends, when they grow to love the doctrines of grace, go through a phase where if they
preach the Gospel, they will only preach the law.
It's a strange thing, and it's difficult to account for it.
Different people, different thinkers have tried to account for this in different ways.
But it is a phase that first stage Calvinists tend to go through, law only preaching.
And of course the law does need preaching, but they only thunder.
They find the odd Puritan, and it isn't that common among the Puritans, but they find the
odd Puritan who speaks very eloquently and persuasively of needing to bring the sinner
gibbering prostrate onto the ground, terrified and cringing under the strictures of the law.
And only then, only then when you're quite sure they've come to an end of themselves,
and there's nowhere for them to turn, and they're distraught and sighing, almost a
kind of Puritan Toronto blessing in reverse, only then can you give them a few grains of Gospel.
So there are some friends who, in their love for Calvinism, go through that phase at first,
law only.
And they forget the persuasion.
The kingdom of God is like a merchantman seeking goodly pearls.
They forget the richness of the grace of God.
They forget indeed that the word Gospel happens to mean good news.
And while they're cutting the thinner down to size, and letting off the great volleys,
and reducing them to dust and ashes, they forget this is hardly good news if you only
see things that way.
And so they forget the persuasion of the Gospel, and they come now and let us reason together.
So we have to maintain our balance.
The Gospel is a presentation of the heart of God, as well as a warning of the sinfulness
of sin, and bringing a person into that state where the Holy Spirit can convict them of
sin.
So remember that.
That spoils Gospel preaching when we become one-legged Gospel preachers, lopsided Gospel
preachers, and think that that is all that can be done.
Of course, if you think that law preaching is all there is to it, you cannot give people
a diet of that permanently.
So naturally, you're not going to do that very often.
Your whole being will rebel against that.
If you're a law-only man, you'll eventually become only an occasional Gospel preacher.
There's another trend, and this is a fifth heading.
There are others who say that all you must do is preach the person and work of Jesus
Christ.
Well, of course, that is vital in Gospel preaching, and that is a large element of it.
But it is another of these reactions from Arminianism, or these—I'm sorry if the
terms are too withering, friends, I don't mean to use these terms, but I have to put
it this way—a somewhat immature stage of Calvinism to get locked into only one aspect
of the Gospel.
Even if it's one of the very rich aspects, like the preaching of the person and work
of Jesus Christ.
I notice that some of our academic writers, seminarians, who are great men who contribute
so much to our understanding, but who are not themselves regular preachers, tend to
go for this.
When asked, well, what do you preach when you preach the Gospel?
They say, oh, the person and work of Christ.
And it tends to be the answer of those who are not themselves regular preachers of the
Gospel, but merely trainers of others.
But do take care of that.
If you preach only the person of Christ, you drift into the romantic area again.
You think, all I've got to do is wave the flag, describe Christ, preach his wonders
and his glories, and people will fall about in repentance.
But that's not what the apostles did.
They preached Christ as the solution, but they also used persuasive arguments.
The Word of God is full of persuasive approaches to needy souls.
There is a whole science of persuasion in the Bible.
And if you preach only the object of it all, great as Jesus Christ is, that is not to cover
the ground.
You're not doing the job.
So there's much more to it.
You cannot reduce Gospel preaching to a simple formula like the law or Christ.
There's far more for you to do, and I would stress that.
There is a sixth heading I'll give you.
Some people evangelize only by personal witness, special occasions, and catechism classes.
The various parts of the world where the missionary tradition has perhaps left the churches saddled
with only one Lord's Day service, maybe only a morning service.
You see this more in the Far East, just a single service every Lord's Day.
And when you've only got one service, what are you going to do with it?
Well, you're going to teach the saints, so there'll be no Gospel preaching.
So how are you going to evangelize?
And with all fairness to some of these churches in the Far East that have only one service
a day, my, they do evangelize.
We give them credit for that.
But how are you going to evangelize?
Well, mainly through personal witness, special events, and catechism classes.
Personal work, small group work.
And effective though it may be, and used as it may be by God, we have lost the balance
of the New Testament where there is a primacy of preaching.
These other things take place, but they support preaching.
And if you lose the balance of the New Testament and regular evangelistic preaching goes out,
then you can expect some detrimental consequences because the balance of the New Testament is
given by God.
It is divine genius.
And if you lose that balance, there will be a price to pay.
And the price to pay often, visible price, in such churches is a lot of glorious conversions,
but unfortunately also a lot of wood, hay, and stubble, a lot of short-term profession
of faith.
Because preaching has an edge to it.
While it must present the heart of God and the mercy and the grace of God and the glorious
good news of the Gospel, it also, preaching can put its finger on the sinner's sin much
more than personal witness can.
That's obvious.
If you tell a person in personal witness the worst about himself, he'll either knock you
down or won't ever talk to you again, or if he's your boss, you'll be in difficulty of
some sort or other, you won't make friends.
Personal witness cannot go the whole way as preaching can.
It cannot cut right to the heart as preaching can.
And so, although this is a digression, if we lose the balance of the New Testament and
evangelistic preaching goes and we have to concentrate on personal witness, good as it
is entirely, and small group evangelism and classes, you mustn't be surprised if it becomes
a little too easy to profess Christ if people are so inclined and will have a price to pay
and so on.
So I mention that, that sometimes evangelistic preaching has gone out because there haven't
been two Lord's Day services so that you could assign one to teaching the saints and
one to preaching to the lost, according to the old traditions, which you had here in
Australia just as we had in Britain years ago.
I don't know how far back it goes, but in Britain I think you have to go back 45 years
to, for the time, 40 years when every church, every evangelical church had an evening gospel
service as almost the law that you, I don't know how long ago it was in Australia, but
I should imagine that 30, 40, 50 years ago whenever you'd have found that today's subject
matter would have been completely superfluous.
Everybody did it anyway, but this has happened the world over.
I was not so, last year had a quick dash into Sri Lanka for a pastors conference and was
talking about a number of these things and the men of 60 years of age and over said yes,
it was always like that here too.
And then the gospel services and then the evening services went out almost completely.
But this is a modern thing, you see, that evangelistic preaching has been abandoned.
Seventh heading that I want to give you is this.
We are all touched in reform circles and Calvinistic circles, we are all touched with a little
high Calvinism or a little hyper-Calvinism.
It seems to penetrate our ranks, even though we are not hyper-Calvinists, even though we
may regard ourselves as traditional, historic, mainstream and balanced Calvinists, of course
I'm aware of the definition of a hyper-Calvinist, that it is anybody who is more Calvinistic
than you are, you're aware of that, but although you may well think that you are not hyper-Calvinists,
hyper-Calvinism has penetrated our ranks and it's made many people very uncomfortable about
a presentation of the gospel.
This is a strange thing, I could name to you people who have written vigorously in favor
of the universal tender of salvation, in favor of the gospel offer and they're renowned for
being in support of the gospel offer.
Number one, they never personally make one.
Number two, their doctrine of regeneration is of such a character that they couldn't
make one, even if they wanted to.
This is a strange contradiction, that there are people who are vigorously in support of
the gospel offer who are unconscious hyper-Calvinists.
It's a strange thing, but it's true at the present time, so we will need to touch upon
this a little.
Of course, I like the way this has been put by one or two teachers in the past, that this
is the debate about the second person.
You familiar with this language and this approach?
This is the debate about the second person, not the second person of the Trinity, the
second person of English grammar.
This is the debate about the second person.
For those of you who have lost touch with your English grammar, that tiny minority among
you, perhaps it may just help to remind you that the first person is I, I am, we are,
the second person is you are, and the third person is he is, they are.
What person do you use to preach the gospel?
The hyper-Calvinist, if he says anything about the grace of God, which he does, he rejoices
to, if he makes anything like an evangelistic sermon, it will all be the third person, he,
man is a sinner, he needs a saviour.
Jesus Christ is a sufficient saviour for him, for them, it's all in the third person because
he's terrified of making an offer to anybody and he's terrified of what he thinks is manipulation.
If he says you are a sinner, there is a saviour for you, Christ has come to suffer and die
for someone like you and he will save you, oh, but how do I know?
My doctrine of predestination and election and so on has wrongly forced me to think that
I dare not say such things.
He may not be one of the elect, I can't address him in a direct manner and if I do anyway,
it may stir him inside and I may be subjecting him to human manipulation and he may make
some sort of an emotional response.
So the best I can do is this indirect style of Gospel preaching, Christ over there somewhere
is a saviour and he is a sufficient saviour for those who are his, the indirect method.
Of course this caught on in the United States very strongly in the early 18th century and
then there came a great blast of warm air, a gale in fact, Whitfield appeared on the
scene, Jonathan Edwards in due time, Tennant, Frelinghuysen, all those great preachers,
you are sinners, Christ is a saviour for you and of course there was a storm, manipulation,
trespassing on the sovereign territory of the Holy Spirit.
Whether you are a hyper-Calvinist or a Calvinist may be detectable in your use of English.
What do you say friends? How do you preach? Is it all over there or is there some persuasion
and some interaction? Because you may think you are a moderate or a true Calvinist, we
won't talk about moderate Calvinists, moderate Calvinist is a three pointer isn't it? Two
and a half to three and a half is moderate, something of that order, so you may regard
yourself as a true five point Calvinist and you may not know it but if you can't use the
second person there's a lot of hyper-Calvinism that's got into you and so just take care
of that friends because this is a big issue. Your grammar shows and we need to wrestle
and persuade those who are before us. Well as I said this is an eighth heading, there
are people who are very shy of a Gospel offer, they believe in it but they never make it.
Now if I can delicately mention one or two names because you may read these authors and
I do so with great care. First of all I'll mention the name of the late Professor John
Murray. If you know his commentary on Romans you'll be a great supporter of his work.
If you've read any of his works in fact you will benefit from him enormously so I want
to say this with great care but when it comes to Professor Murray on regeneration take care.
This is because in this area he strays over into hyper-Calvinism. If you've read Redemption
Accomplished and Applied and you've taken it all in and you've learned it well it may
inhibit you from ever making a Gospel offer because Professor John Murray's view of regeneration
is very hard to starboard, it's very hard over into the hyper-Calvinistic camp and I
will need to unravel this and explain this to you a little. He takes the view that regeneration
is virtually conversion. Regeneration which is the initial stage of conversion of course
in John Murray's thinking accomplishes everything up front. So initial regeneration really virtually
has brought about your entire new birth in all its aspects. So that repentance and faith
are the consequences of the new birth, the fruit of the new birth. In other words when
you repent and when you exercise faith in Christ it is because you are entirely born
again in every sense, in every aspect. So that's it. What happens is regeneration. Wake
up I'm a Christian I must repent and I must exercise faith. That's conversion in Professor
John Murray's view. Indeed in Jonathan Edwards view never in his theoretical writings but
in his practical writings it seems to be his view for the first half of his life. If you
read his theology it is not his view. If you read his narrative of surprising conversions
it's always and it happens. You know the Holy Spirit gives the sinner an anaesthetic and
when you come round you're converted. You're not conscious of anything having happened,
your views just change. You're not conscious of being personally convinced of anything.
You just open your eyes and you're born again. I must repent and I must exercise faith. Of
course I'm oversimplifying a little. But if that's your view how can you preach the gospel?
You go to say to your people you must repent and you must put your faith in Christ and
trust in the blood and this is what will happen. Oh no I can't say that it's already happened.
I can't promise them anything. I can't say any ifs. If you do this God will do that.
Well if you will repent and exercise faith good news you've been converted. It's the
result, it's the evidence, it's the sign. Well I'm just parodying the situation and
I may not be being entirely fair to it but you can see how this will inhibit the offer
of the gospel and it will inhibit persuasive preaching because you are preaching to people
to whom if they understand what you're saying the job is already done. It's happened. It's
complete. So what are you going to preach? Now interacting with many preachers this is
a real problem and the only preachers who continue to preach the gospel persuasively,
having believed redemption accomplished and applied, are those who are happy to be inconsistent.
And they scratch their heads and they say well I don't know I believe regeneration
is an instantaneous work which encompasses conversion and well I still think I have a
duty to preach the gospel. I don't understand this wholly but I see the exhortations to
persuade sinners and I'm going to do that even though it doesn't square with my view
of regeneration. And the only people who go on preaching the gospel with that view
are people who can live with inconsistencies. But if you can't your gospel preaching will
be inhibited. So we're going to have to tackle that. Or even brother John Risinger he says
this is how I will address the sinner. Sinner I have nothing to say to you. Sinner if I
explained to you the gospel I'd be wasting my breath because you wouldn't understand
a word of it. Because you are dead as a doornail. Because you are so blind and so deaf and so
hopeless you cannot grasp anything. I have one hope for you. Just sit there and listen
and it may be that the Holy Spirit will regenerate you and then you'll be saved. The word is
almost irrelevant. Why the Lord has said that it will be through the word that he plants
the seed or regenerates the heart? Because the word doesn't actually have any intelligent
part in the process. It's an instantaneous opening of the eyes and you're saved. What
Dr. Jay Adams called zap regeneration. Only the Americans could put it like that. Zap
regeneration. I've searched for years for a word to describe it and to take one that
isn't in the dictionary is a pretty cute way out. But anyway that's their way. Zap
regeneration. And there's another person I will not name but he has an evangelistic tract.
And this evangelistic tract to me is the most curious thing. It has no gospel arguments
in it. It has no gospel remonstration, the old word, none of that. But it works along
these lines. It says in one place, if you are not converted you will not understand
this tract. Same approach as John Risinger and it says however I can give you this advice.
You can use your feet. I thought this was a sort of curious brand of preparationalism.
You can use your feet to take your ears under the sound of the gospel and as the gospel
washes over you it may be that the Holy Spirit will regenerate you. That's pretty hopeful
isn't it? What a tract. Good news. The best thing you've got is your feet. Use your feet
to take your ears under the sound of the gospel in the hope that you may be magically regenerated
and everything will be well. But the gospel itself seems to play no intelligent part in
the process. That is not in my belief how the gospel is used in the process of regeneration
and conversion. It's not a bystander. It's not just a magic thing. No, the Holy Spirit
chooses to use it in a very significant way. I must hurry on. A ninth heading matter which
inhibits gospel preaching is that some people become too closely attached to an apologetic
presentation as though we must be able to convince by rational argument a person of
the existence of God and the reasonableness of the Christian faith before we can hope
to achieve anything. That inhibits gospel preaching. This is coming back in the USA
and some people who are getting a great name for being Calvinists and reformed nevertheless
are taking this view that an apologetic, a rational, a reasonable approach convincing
people is absolutely vital and they major on this. Of course, Francis Schaeffer tended
to go in this direction. Joss McDowell, Os Guinness, all these men, they seem to take
this view. They get an increasing reputation as Calvinistic teachers, but they seem to
be locked into a point of view whereby you must convince by apologetic argument the mind
of the person concerning the existence of God, the reasonableness of Christian belief
and this is the only valid and the vital approach. Well, that does inhibit true gospel reasoning
as we find it in the Bible. There is hardly anything of apologetics in the New Testament
and I'm going to rush through this, but my suggestion is you certainly do use apologetic
arguments to enrich your messages, to bring them to life, to deliver you from being thought
of as totally obscurantist, to add considerable interest. Apologetic approaches can be most
interesting. They can capture the attention and the mind, but whatever you do with apologetics
always remember you don't actually need a word of it. You don't actually need any of
it, because the Christian message is self-authenticating, especially by the operation of the Holy Spirit.
And by the way, the lost sinner is not as dead as some Calvinists would believe him
to be. Yes, the sinner is dead in sin. We need the regenerating, illuminating work of
the Holy Spirit before we can savingly believe, but that doesn't mean we are as dead as the
proverbial doornail and we can understand nothing. We can understand enough, according
to Romans 1 and 2, to be held responsible for our rejection of the gospel, and that's
quite a lot. We are not so hopeless as some Calvinists would paint us. Man dead in sin
is still a man. He is not a beast. He still has a moral consciousness. According to Romans
1 and 2, you can understand quite a lot. And when you proclaim the gospel to, you think
of the apostle Paul. Think of the apostle Paul when he confronted pagan Romans and pagan
Greeks. He didn't attempt to contextualize. He adapted his presentation in measure. He
was no longer speaking to Jews. He was speaking to the weak. Oh, he was much simpler, much
more careful, but he assumed, he took for granted that the message of the one true God
was understandable to any human mind. People are not as ignorant as we think, and we remember
that. So we don't need apologetic approaches. But a tenth heading quickly, I'll give you.
This is inhibiting to the gospel. Would you mind terribly if I called it vosism? Though
I appreciate the writings of Gerhardus Vos as much as any of you, I'm quite sure. But
if you wouldn't mind, just in this inner circle, not for wider public use, so as not
to discredit the name, but just as a form of shorthand, if I might say, vosism is greatly
intimidating to gospel preaching. The reason I'll give you is this. He was the founder
of a school of thought, somewhat pretentiously named biblical theology. I hope if any of
us promotes a system of truth, we would not choose quite such a grand name for it, as
though we had hit upon the only system of truth, the only way of organizing scripture.
Vos's great burden was to find an organizing principle for the word of God, as I'm sure
you know. Probably you would agree with me that as there is not a specific organizing
principle revealed in the word of God, we shouldn't try to find one. We should take
it as it is. But Vos's idea was to find an organizing principle for the word of God.
We must give it a skeleton. The great danger of that is having identified a skeleton, you
force everything into flesh it out according to its shape, and that's what Vos does. So
his organizing principle is that principle of progressive revelation of redemption, redemptive
theology developed through the scripture. Now this is how it is intimidating to gospel
preaching. Not because Vos himself would have been against evangelistic preaching, far from
it. In fact, according to reputation, though he was a schoolman and a seminarian and a
scholar and those people are not conspicuous for their evangelism, apparently he was. So
he was for evangelistic preaching, but this is how his system intimidates it. You come
to the book of Isaiah or the prophet Jeremiah, and you put on these progressive revelatory
development of redemption spectacles, and that's all you're looking for, and that's
all you see. What part does this play in the unfolding of the grand scheme of redemption?
And you don't look at Jeremiah and Isaiah to see the evangelistic arguments which those
books are chiefly composed of. What was Jeremiah doing in his day? Maybe we'll come to this
later. But what was Jeremiah doing? Was he simply proclaiming the doom of the nation?
Was he simply an eleventh hour prophet giving a final hopeless warning? If he was, how miserable
to be Jeremiah. If he was, how gloomy. Because he knew the gloom would come, he was the one
most certainly prophesying it, and yet he had the task of calling the nation to repentance
before it happened, knowing that it was going to happen anyway. What a sad task. No, what
Jeremiah was chiefly doing, he was doing that, but what he was chiefly doing was presenting
under the inspiration of the Spirit the most brilliant and entertaining, by the way, and
sometimes sarcastic, searching, winsome at the same time, remonstrances and appeals to
the hearts of individual people. But if you get yourself all taken up with looking for
the wrong things in the Bible, you won't see those things. If you become preoccupied
with a premillennial search in the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, you will assign their
meaning way down the centuries of time, and you won't see any evangelism in those books
at all. So whether it's vosism or whether it's extreme dispensationalism or millennialism,
you'll miss the evangelistic arguments of half the books of the Bible, and they will
be of no service to you when you come to evangelizing. And this happens, friends. You know, one of
the great objections to evangelistic preaching is this. I couldn't preach that sermon every
week. People seem to think that evangelistic preaching is one sermon, one message, one
general thrust, and they remind me of how Billy Graham once said, I have three texts
and 3,000 sermons. Sorry. I have 3,000 texts and three sermons. I'm lost. I have 3,000
texts and three sermons. That's right. That's the correct way around. And they think that's
what you have to do if you preach evangelistically, because they've never seen the powerful, interesting,
gripping evangelistic arguments and remonstrations throughout the scripture. And make sure that
your theological interest has not cut these things off. Now, we're out of our time for
our first session. I'll just complete one or two points from the last address. We've
come to vosism, and I will point just one or two quickly further aspects, life which
intimidate gospel preaching. I think the brethren sometimes have unconsciously contributed to
a poor view of gospel preaching, not because they intended to. To their credit, they've
been among the groups of evangelicals. They've probably persisted with gospel preaching longer
than anyone else, to their credit, but because they have a lay ministry and a visiting ministry
and in their evening gospel service tradition, the person who is visiting this week doesn't
know what was said last week and hasn't any idea what's going to be said next week. His
tendency is to preach a kind of nutshell gospel, the very basic principles. And so that's very
largely all they ever have, just the same very basic things. And this gives the impression
to many people that that is what gospel preaching is about, a very repetitive summary of the
bare essentials. So all due credit to them for continuing with these things, but they
tend to have a very simplified scaled-down notion of what evangelistic preaching really
is. But I suppose the biggest impediment today is the fact that a new generation of
preachers have never heard evangelistic preaching as it should be done. I think it's likely
that any preacher under 45, under 50 has completely lost touch with the evangelistic preaching
tradition. So you may have heard a professional evangelist at work in his particular style
of operation, but he's probably never been in a church, he's very fortunate if he has
been, he's probably never been in a church where the gospel has been preached each week
or on a very regular basis. And so one has to understand that many preachers don't really
know what we're talking about here. They've never seen it done, they've no idea how it
can be done. In the old days it's one of those things used to be passed on, the whole notion
of regular persuasive gospel preaching, but it doesn't happen now. Mark Hughes, gospel
preaching is the hardest area of ministry if it's conducted on a regular basis. It is
much harder than doctrinal preaching, applied preaching, it's much harder than consecutive
expository preaching of the word to saints. Hard as that may be, gospel preaching is much
harder. It unites together more objectives than any other department of preaching. Remember
that if you're preaching as a regular preacher in a church, you may preach up to 44, 45 sermons
a year in that church. Some people perhaps opt for a little less, but that's quite a
common figure. And you may keep that up for 10, 20, 30 years. That's a lot of evangelistic
sermons and they've all got to be substantially different or the people will grow bored. Don't
forget you've got a basic audience of converted people and you don't want them to lose interest
in the gospel to learn how to switch off five minutes into the sermon because the only thing
that's substantially original is the introduction. And you've got to combine this necessity of
instructing and interesting the saints with your essential task of reaching the unconverted
and yet getting all the basics in more or less every sermon. That's a very difficult
task. And I wonder if this is another reason why gospel preaching has gone out of fashion
over the last 40, 50 years because once it started to go out of fashion, the flesh so
often said, thank goodness for that because this is the hardest department of preaching
to balance these various requirements. And you will get least thanks for gospel preaching.
If you're preaching a heavy going doctrinal sermon, which the people only understand 25%
of, they'll consider you to be erudite, very learned, capable. They'll pump you by the
hand and say, pastor, that was a wonderful message. You may preach the most dazzlingly
original gospel sermon that is wonderfully comprehensible and understandable to all.
And by the very nature of the case, they'll think it was easy for you. And now he just
preached the gospel tonight. You know how it is? Life is like that, isn't it? I remember
once 20 years ago, we had a particular pastoral assistant for a time attached to the church
who was, this may sound terrible, but time makes it possible to say these things, who
was the most muddle headed brother you could imagine. This is a long way from home. Don't
breathe a word of this. Anyway, and it fell to him to organize a Sunday school outing.
Have you told friends about this already? No. Okay. And it was a disaster. Everything
went wrong. Everything was a shambles from beginning to end and people were heard going
up to him afterwards and saying, tremendous burden of responsibility. This you've done
very well. Somebody else organizes the thing and it goes off like clockwork and nobody
says a word. It's easy. I remember reading a review of, of a, you know, like they do
a car test and you may have seen something like this, but there was a comment that intrigued
me as the reviewer of this particular car said, nobody in the, in the office noticed
the ride, so it must be pretty good. And it's like that with organization and it's like
that with preaching. You preach the gospel well and it's crystal clear and everyone will
assume it was easy for you. Make a mess of your expository teaching of the saints and
they'll admire you all the way home. Well, so you won't, the least thanks you'll get
is for gospel preaching and somehow that puts people off because there's a bit of pride
in every human being. So I want to mention that. Just a word here before I switch to
the next address and it is the offer terms. This is a little out of place. People are
often asking, what do we do with the offer terms? What do we say about the blood of Christ?
What do we say about his atonement? As we don't know who the elect are and isn't it
rather dangerous to speak as though we're universalists, as though Jesus Christ died
for you. So come and seek him and be saved. Naturally, no one wants to do that, but you
know, you don't have to be too worried about this because just minimal qualifications will
mean you can be absolutely faithful to your, to your reformed doctrine. The Lord Jesus
Christ died for all who come to him. Isn't that perfectly satisfactory? If you come to
him, if you repent of your sins, you may be sure that his shed blood availed for you and
that he bore away your sins, all of them, all the sins which should have been punished
throughout the everlasting ages. All that punishment somehow incomprehensibly compressed
into the space of a few hours and he bore it all away for all who come to him. Of course,
they only will sincerely repent and they only will come as a result of the work of the spirit
in their lives. You haven't infringed your doctrinal position one bit. Do just think
of this friends, because some genuine preachers are sincerely worried about this. They think
they're flying very close to the wind, but you know, you, you, as long as you use a reasonable
qualification, you may offer Christ and you may assure people that his blood availed for
them. If they come, if they repent, if they seek him, he died for all who come and you
find a qualification along those lines and you have absolutely no problem with these
things.