The Challenge of the Non-Christian World
Today one third of the world's popula tion lives in countries governed by regime officially endorsing atheistic ideologies Many densely populated countries have al ready closed their doors to the preaching of the Christian gospel—the Advent message.
A Faithless Christian World Also Needs Help
In so-called Christian lands we face some very real problems. In the Western world the "intellectual climate is rapidly moving ever further away from the biblical view of God and man. In the West, a new and unprecedented rejection of Christian ideas, attitudes, and conduct is evident in the culture at large. Former bastions of Protestant orthodoxy are succumbing to a deceptive secularism that contradicts the revealed word of Scripture and distorts the meaning of the Gospel."'
A so-called "new evangelism" beguiles large segments of the Christian church and insistently asserts itself in many quarters. "The new evangelism says the major emphasis should not be on 'old fashioned Bible thumping' but on righting the wrongs of society, on civil rights, poverty, and war"
"Sentimentality will never save the world," Colin W. Williams of the Australian Methodist Church, declared. "Eighteenth-century evangelism is no longer an adequate symbol for contemporary society." 3
"The redemption of the world is not dependent upon the souls we win for Christ. . . . Contemporary evangelism is moving away from winning souls one by one to the evangelization of the structures of society."
This new evangelism substitutes education and social reform for the work of the Holy Spirit. Its concern is with Vietnam instead of Calvary. It substitutes cash for the cross and admonishes men by the rule of social ethics rather than by the Ten Commandments. This new humanistic fraternity becoming known as a religion-less Christianity has little to offer a sin-sick, war-weary, fast-disintegrating twentieth-century world.
Even God's Remnant Church Is Needy
Yet another front demands attention from the Seventh-day Adventist evangelist —our own remnant church. The picture is not so bright as we wish it were. The third chapter of Revelation, verses fourteen through twenty-two, paints an all too accurate and familiar picture. "I have been shown that the spirit of the world is fast leavening the church,' the messenger of the Lord wrote years ago. "Many who have been zealous in proclaiming the third angel's message are now becoming listless and indifferent!' "As a people, we are almost paralyzed."' What a fearful picture of God's church in this awesome crisis hour!
We are confronted today with a burgeoning non-Christian world, an indifferent, faithless, "Christian" world, an apathetic Laodicean church. This is the measure of the challenge before Seventh-day Adventist evangelists at this hour! What a fearful challenge it is!
What Message Will Suffice?
The question to which I wish to address myself this morning is, What message is sufficient to meet this awesome need? Is the Advent message as we have been preaching it for the past century relevant in times like these?
In order to answer these two questions I would like first to bring the subject into focus by raising two further questions. What are the objectives of our evangelistic preaching? What must our message accomplish in the lives of men and women who sit under our ministry? The answers to these questions, I believe, fall under four headings:
Objectives of Our Evangelistic Preaching
1. Our message must transform the lives of those who accept it. They must truly experience the new birth. Whether they be non-Christians from Asia or Africa, world-loving liberals from Western lands, lukewarm Seventh-day Adventists, or hardened atheists from any part of the world, sinners must be born again. Your message and mine, under the power of the Holy Spirit, must accomplish nothing less! "Ye must be born again," Jesus said.
2. Our message must provide a broad spiritual base from which these newly baptized, believers may grow in grace and develop characters that will fit them for the kingdom. The practical points of the gospel must not be passed over lightly. Instruction in subjects like conviction, confession, restitution, faith, prayer, Bible study, and other kindred subjects will enable them to press on toward the all-important goal of Christlikeness.
3. Our message must fully instruct and firmly establish new converts in all points of our faith. These babes in Christ must be fully conversant with the great truths that have made us a people. Recently I was visiting in a city where the pastor told me he had lost his assistant a few weeks before.
"He had been a minister in another denomination before accepting the Advent message," the pastor explained, "and after working with us for about six months he came to me one day and informed me he wished to terminate his services with the Adventist Church. I asked him why."
"Because," the other man replied, "I do not believe what the Seventh-day Adventist Church teaches. In fact, I have never believed in Mrs. White as a prophetess, nor have I ever accepted your position on the millennium and the state of the dead."
Occasionally we hear of other people leaving the church after baptism, after they discovered doctrines they were not aware Seventh-day Adventists teach. This is not right. Our message must fully instruct and firmly establish new converts in all of the truths of God's Word.
4. Our message must provide help for the new member in adapting himself to a new way of living. Sabbathkeeping, tithe paying, our message of healthful living, and other peculiarly Adventist doctrines frequently pose a new way of life for many who accept this truth. Our evangelistic preaching must provide assistance that will enable such persons to adjust smoothly and certainly to this spiritual revolution that has occurred in their lives. We must teach them how as well as what and why.
Is the Advent Message Relevant?
Now that we have stated what we desire to accomplish through our evangelistic preaching—what our objectives are—we may turn our attention to the all-important questions: Is the Advent message, as we have preached it through the years, relevant in times such as these? What sort of message must we preach to reach modern men and women?
To state it subjectively—our preaching, must be Bible based, Christocentric, person-directed, and Spirit-filled.
If our preaching is to bear the credentials of heaven we must be true to our high calling and "preach the word" (2 Tim. 4:2). When Philip confronted the eunuch with the gospel, he "preached unto him Jesus" (Acts 8:35). Peter's power-filled preaching at Pentecost demanded that "every one of you" (Acts 2:38) repent and be baptized, and the evangelistic ministry of the early church accomplished its divine commission primarily because the evangelists "were all filled with the Holy Ghost" (verse 4). Here is our message and our pattern.
Heralds of the new evangelism insist that such an approach is not relevant in the 1960's. Opposers of the gospel in apostolic times adopted similar attitudes. When Paul and Philip preached a Christ-centered gospel in the first century, nothing could have seemed more irrelevant to Jewish and pagan listeners. But the Holy Spirit took their Bible-based, Christ-centered preaching and turned whole cities upside down. They proclaimed a message that was "the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth" (Rom. 1:16). Though the gospel was "unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness" (1 Cor. 1:23), it contained greater wisdom than the wisdom of man.
Christ was uplifted as man's only Saviour (Acts 4:12), and these early preachers of righteousness called their wicked generation to repentance and baptism (Acts 2:38). Sinful hearts were broken and sinful lips were compelled to cry out, "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" (verse 37). In the Spirit-filled preaching of the apostles we find the gamut of our message for today.
Bible-based, Christ-centered preaching turned the pagan and Jewish world upside down in the first century! Within weeks of their Master's ascension, Luke writes, "The Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved" (verse 47). Shortly thereafter, he wrote again, "Many of them which heard the word believed; and the number of the men was about five thousand" (Acts 4:4). In many other places in the book of Acts we read that large numbers believed. Finally the chronicler of progress in the early church closes his story with these exultant words of triumph: "And Paul dwelt two whole years [in Rome] . . . , preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him" (Acts 28: 30, 31). How these words still stir our hearts as we read them two thousand years later!
A Changeless Christ in a Changing World
Since this dynamic history was written great changes have taken place on earth. The twentieth-century world bears scant resemblance to the world the early church faced. If Paul, Peter, or Philip were to miraculously appear in our age they would be breathless as they witnessed high-powered cars, express trains, jet planes, satellites, and other products of this age of technological advance. But these changes are only surface changes—scientific advances. Men's hearts have not changed. They are still "desperately wicked" (Jen 17:9). Man's mode of travel, man's increase of knowledge, have not changed man's heart. The human heart today needs the same transformation human hearts needed in apostolic times.
In the twentieth century, as in the first, men are born, they sin, they experience sorrow and fear, they face a day of judgment, they die, and an eternity for weal or woe inevitably confronts them. The picture may be in a different frame, but it is the same frightful scene.
Our world today still has its Marys and Marthas, its Sapphiras and Ananiases, its Pharisees and publicans, its harlots and prodigals—sinners of every ilk. We have the sick and sorrowing. The nobleman's son, the centurion's servant, the demoniac of Gadara, the widow of Nain, and the sisters of Lazarus are ever with us in increasing numbers.
Yesterday by the Sea of Galilee, by the rolling Jordan, on the dusty roads of Samaria, on the grassy slopes of Nazareth, on the busy streets of old Jerusalem—everywhere He went, the God-man from Bethlehem saved from sin, healed the sick, and bound up broken hearts. The preaching of His blessed gospel saved and healed men in the first century, and it has saved and healed the needy in every century since.
Thank God, Christ and His gospel have the same undiminished power today. By Lake Michigan or Lake Victoria, on the banks of the mighty Father of Waters or the twisting, turgid Congo River, on the rolling prairies of our own Midwest or the green mountainsides of old Europe, in the crowded thoroughfares of teeming Asian cities or on palm-studded ocean isles, the changeless Christ still heals the sick, still binds up the brokenhearted, still saves wretched sinners from hopeless, morning-less graves.
Tomorrow the people of Chicago, of Tokyo, of Sydney, of Montevideo, of Glasgow, of Pago Pago will still need Him for comfort, for health, for salvation, for eternal life—a life that measures with the life of God.
Yes, the divine Christ of the Advent message is still totally relevant to the lives and the needs of modern man. May God help us to lift Him up in all His beauty and loveliness in our preaching. "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me" (John 12:32). Only an uplifted Christ has the answer to the world's needs today. "Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). "Christ crucified—talk it, pray it, sing it, and it will break and win hearts." eThe preaching of Christ and Him crucified has lost none of its transforming power. It is as potent and relevant today as it was in the days of the apostles.
(To be continued)
Notes:
1 Christianity Today, Oct. 28, 1966, p. 32.
2 Reported in The National Observer, Dec. 12, 1966.
3 Ibid.
4 Quoted by Billy Graham in Christianity Today, Nov. 11 1966. p. 4.
5 Testimonies. vol. 5, p. 75.
6 Ibid, vol. 8, p. 118
7. Ibid, vol. 4, p. 426.
8. Ibid., vol. 6, p. 67