It is 'Repent or Perish' for present day evangelism. These are harvest days. The crop is now being reaped. What we have sown and watered is now come to maturity and the barns are full. Behold what we have done. We have spawned this great Religious Monster called Christendom or Christianity? The barns, we fear, are filled with more tares than wheat. The net seems to contain more snails than salmon. Behold thrice religious American; and thrice pagan America. More church members and riots in the streets. A Bibleless, Christiess monster on our hands threatening to continue to count noses, while Rome burns. Can it be that the message and method of popular, successful evangelism need to-be summoned to the bar and examined as to guilt and accomplices after the fact.
One encouraging sign of the times in our day is that many are seeking to examine the culprit, viz, modern, popular, successful? evangelism. Few are boastiiig these days. Burdened, almost defeated, pastors and evangelists are almost shut up to honest confession and earnest entreaty. Some are well nigh at the place of resorting to the Bible message and method of obeying our Lord's command to evangelize all nations. It may be that the time is not too far off when the many books will for a while be shelved and the Book of books will be studied again. In that Book is the message to be proclaimed and the method to be followed. May God hasten such a day.
Just how much responsibility for the 'status quo,' which is Latin for the mess we are in,' should be laid on present day evangelism is, of course, a matter of opinion. Of one thing I am reasonably certain, the 'much' or the 'how much' is enough to justify a conviction that we must set ourselves to the task of slaying the evil giants of evangelism today. The preaching of a perverted gospel and the use of man-devised methods which we thought would be so much more successful that Bible methods and message must be challenged, destroyed and replaced if possible with true evangelism. Let me single out one of these 'giants' and, if space permits, offer them a word of caution.
The 'giant' I thus now expose is as follows: Today's evangelism has become a thing of externalism. This is made manifest by, among others, the following.
A. By legalism on the one hand and antinomianism on the other. Churches today are heavily loaded with people who make their own rules and live by them, and others who have done away with all law in the name of liberty. Pharisees in one corner, thanking God they are not as others, and profligates in the other, sinning the more because of abounding grace. Both miss the mark and bring reproach on the name of the Lord. One need not experience the new birth to be either of the two here mentioned. (We need a John Wesley and a George Whitefield to return with their one message of an inward work of grace in a man's life which changes also the outside.)
B. By a faith which is mere intellectual assent. What a rebuke needs to be administered to us today, who, perhaps in our zeal to simplify the way of salvation, tell the sinner that faith is like stepping on to a motor bus, or agreeing to buy an insurance policy, as though faith had no moral quality and involved no moral decision. The keynote of faith and knowledge must be love. It has always been so. We have disunited faith from love and forgiveness from purity. The soul of true religion is still love, humility and obedience. The true gospel is of the Spirit not the letter.
C. By a widespread tendency in many professedly evangelical circles today, namely, where salvation by grace through faith is quite openly treated as a separate thing from a life of self-denial and cross bearing. Again it must be insisted that Christ can be known only in discipleship.
D. By methods of evangelism, which methods of course must logically follow the perverted message of 'another Jesus,' wherein physical acts of people, viz, hand showing, signing on the dotted line, walking an aisle, coming to the 'alter of prayer' etc., etc., are of more account than humility and repentance. We have succeeded far too well in divorcing justification and sanctification and in our success are sending souls to the judgment seat clothed in the garments of a tight evangelical formula without any inward conformity to the law of Christ. Martin Luther, who was given a copy of the book, "German Theology," the voice of the pre-reformation Reformers and then wrote that he owed more to it than any other book, save the Bible and the writings of Augustine, imbibed the spirit of these his predecessors. To him repentance was not the mere overture to salvation, it was the permanent ground and condition of it. The first of his ninety-five theses rang the death knell of all externalism whether found in Rome or modern evangelism. Here it is: "When Jesus Christ in the Gospel says 'Repent,' He means that the whole life be one of repentance." That death knell must be sounded again.
E. By the popular espousal of antinomianism in its worst possible form, the idea that it is possible to 'take' Christ as Saviour without also, taking' Him as Lord. This evil giant must be dethroned.
F. By a scrupulous avoidance today of the fact of the inwardness of true salvation and the reality of union with God. At the age of 85, Nicholas of Basle was arrested and burned as a 'heretic.' The chief crime of which he was accused was that he "audaciously affirmed that he was in Christ and Christ was in him." The preaching of such men as Nicholas was that the union of the soul with God is the ultimate goal and that this can only be affected by the denial and dethronement of self, and the incoming and enthronement godliness is unselfishness: a godly life is the steadfast working of inward freeness from self: to become Godlike is the bringing back of man's first nature. They set forth a living Christ who must be embraced, not merely historically as an article of faith but much more as a principle of life, inasmuch as His highest and full significance lies in the fact that He perpetuates and reproduces Himself anew in man. The lifegiving power is not the letter but the spirit, not the work but the disposition. It requires of man to strive after God in Christ, goodness and virtue, not for the sake of reward or merit, but from the purest love and because these are the highest, noblest and most desirable objects. Surely we must have once more this vital note in our evangelism or we perish!