Lack of passion in our
evangelistic preaching conveys the very clear message to our hearers, that (1)
we don’t care – no compassion for the people we are preaching to; (2) God
doesn’t care – because we are supposed to be his representatives, in a sense;
and (3) the church does not care – that’s the message we are putting
across! Now this says a lot about us and
about the church, but it says nothing about God, and it says nothing about my
Saviour! It says that we have lost a
heart of compassion for perishing sinners.
It says that we are unlike our Saviour and his apostles! It’s saying that the church has moved away
from Christ and from the kind of person that he was, and from showing the love
that he showed to the world when he was here.
Do you remember (and this was also alluded to earlier) the passion and
emotion that arose in Jesus when he viewed unrepentant Jerusalem?[1] John tells us that he wept
over that city. The Son of God wept! Just imagine the eternal Son of God crying
over what he sees before his eyes. The
Saviour of the world was broken-hearted at what he saw. “’Tis mystery all, the immortal dies,” wrote
Charles Wesley;[2]
and it is also a great mystery when the Son of God cried when he saw men lost
in their sins. He wept over those who
would eventually be lost because they rejected him and his Gospel, and the
eternal salvation procured for them and offered therein.
Let me ask you this question,
and I ask myself the same question: When
were you as preachers last broken to tears over the impenitence of your
people? When were you last moved so profoundly
in your soul when you saw the world in which you live and for which our Lord
Jesus Christ died, heading at breath-taking speed to a Christless
eternity? When did that last grip you
and move you?
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