Why aren’t we dynamic preachers? Perhaps it is related to the fact we don’t appreciate the seriousness of our sin as we should. We see ourselves as little sinners, just a fraction over the line, so we come to the end of the day with no real sense of having offended God, no sense of how deeply sin and indifference hurts Him. Perhaps we see God as altogether too human, like us not very shocked at habitual sin, comfortably numb to the fact that savoured sinful thoughts really are as bad as the action.
God’s words to Israel are so relevant to us, living in a world where many sins mean nothing, and where God never openly intervenes in judgment: “These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself…but I will set them in order before thine eyes (at the judgment)” (Psa. 50:21,22).
Openings to preach
Perhaps, too, we genuinely think that by not showing any chinks in our armour, we will better persuade people. I submit, the very opposite is true. By showing that we are real men and women, who are desperate sinners thankful for the real and true grace we have so wonderfully come across, we will persuade men.
The more real, the more credible.
The world is tired of slick, well-dressed evangelists with ever-smiling wives. Christadelphians can easily mope that the big evangelical churches are so wonderfully successful. They aren’t. Their own journals point out the way they are no longer making many real converts; rather, that nexus of “Christian” is merely moving around between churches.
Islam is growing, but not “evangelical Christianity.” People are sick and tired of it. Yet they are interested in religion — our Christadelphian “Learn To Read The Bible– seminars prove that — and they are interested, at least theoretically, in Bible-based Christianity.
But they want something and someone who is real — not necessarily a mass murderer who says he has come to Christ in prison, but the guy who works at the desk next to them who is willing to own up to his sins. It would be real to answer the question, “How are you today?” by admitting to swearing at the wife last night, by saying we hate ourselves for it and feel even worse because we sinned against God as well as against her. There’s no devil to blame, only ourselves, and yet we take real comfort in a representative Jesus, who had our nature, who wasn’t the hocus-pocus Jesus of trinitarian creeds and “Mickey Mouse” Christianity, but a real man, a real Saviour, the real and peerless Son of God, who, thankfully, makes reconciliation for me, in all my desperation with myself.
Arrest their attention
The more real, the more credible. “How are you today” “Oh fine, I went to church last night.” “Yes? Oh, that’s nice.” These conversations have no meaning; they are merely a passage of words, a kicking of time; whereas in the urgency of our task to convert men and women, we must be stopping them in their tracks, arresting their attention. Of course “nobody’s interested these days,” and they never have been. Until they meet you and me. For we hold and present the truth of God, with all its exclusivity, its implicit criticism of all that isn’t true, in a genuine humility — this has a drawing power all of its own.
Consider Jonah
Jonah was the great example. How was it that one unknown man could turn up in a huge city and make all of them believe that judgment was really coming, and they really must repent? Why ever listen to this one man?
He must surely have told them the story of his own disobedience, experience of judgment, and gracious salvation. There was something about him that proved to that city that this had really happened — that there was and is a God of judgment above.
Perhaps the “sign” of the prophet Jonah was that three days in the fish had bleached his hair and skin and made him thin, making him look arrestingly different. Whatever it was, his antitypical experience of fellowship with the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus was enough to arrest a whole city in its tracks.
Again, the more real, the more credible.
And we too have died and live with the same Lord, and walk back into our Nineveh’s day by day.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One