Revival's Golden Key (13 page)

The risen Savior retained the scars of the cross for a reason. Calvary’s grisly wounds must remain before the eyes of the Christian. They stand as a fearful testimony, not only of God’s unfathomable love for sinners, but of His incredible love for justice.

In the next chapter, we are going to draw from the wisdom of men whose results the Church admires, but of whose methods many are sadly ignorant.

CHAPTER 11

EXPERIENCE, THE TRUE TEST

L
et’s now draw on the experiential wisdom of eminent men of God of the past. Martin Luther, in his commentary on Galatians, wrote: “Satan, the god of all dissension,
stirreth
up daily new sects, and last of all, which of all other I should never have foreseen or once suspected, he hath raised up a sect as such as teach... that men should not be terrified by the Law, but gently exhorted by the preaching of the grace of Christ.” He was speaking of what he perceived as a satanic doctrine that was invading the Church of his day—a “sect” had risen which teaches that men should not be terrified by the Law, but gently exhorted by the preaching of the grace of Christ. His words perfectly describe the methods of most of contemporary evangelism. Modern evangelists would never think of using the Law to terrify, but instead, in ignorance they gently exhort by preaching the grace of Christ. Luther further stated, “The true function of the Law is to accuse and to kill; but the function of the gospel is to make alive.”

J. C. Ryle wrote in
Holiness
of the sinner’s motivation in coming to Christ:

People will never set their faces decidedly towards heaven, and live like pilgrims, until they really feel that they are in danger of hell... Let us expound and beat out the Ten Commandments, and show the length, and breadth, and depth, and height of their requirements.
⁶
This
is the way of our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount. We cannot do better than follow His plan. We may depend on it, men will never come to Jesus, and stay with Jesus, and live for Jesus, unless they really know why they are to come, and what
is their need
. Those whom the Spirit draws to Jesus are those whom the Spirit has convinced of sin. Without thorough conviction of sin, men may seem to come to Jesus and follow Him for a season, but they will soon fall away and return to the world.

Isaac Watts, the great
hymnwriter
, said:

I never knew but one person in the whole course of my ministry who acknowledged that the first motions of religion in his own heart arose from a sense of the goodness of God, “What shall I render to the Lord, who hath dealt so bountifully with me?”

But I think all besides who have come within my notice have rather been first awakened to fly from the wrath to come by the passion of fear.

Dr.
Martyn
Lloyd'Jones
spoke of the function of God’s Law in gospel proclamation:

The trouble with
people
who are not seeking for a Savior, and for salvation, is that they do not understand the nature of sin. It is the peculiar function of the Law to bring such an understanding to a man’s mind and conscience. That is why great evangelical preachers 300 years ago in the time of the Puritans, and 200 years ago in the time of White-field and others, always engaged in what they called a preliminary “Law work.”

John R. W. Stott, commenting on Galatians 3:23-29, said, “We cannot come to Christ to be justified until we have first been to Moses, to be condemned. But once we have gone to Moses, and acknowledged our sin, guilt and condemnation, we must not stay there. We must let Moses send us to Christ.”

A Nazi soldier was once questioned about why he mercilessly shot Jewish women and children during World War II. He told the interviewer that one of the motivations was “curiosity.” He calmly said, “I just fired and they fell.” When the interviewer asked if he felt bad about doing such things, he said, “I was given 20 years, and I served 20 years.” In other words, he had paid his debt to society for his misdeeds. The scales were now balanced. Justice had been served.

However, when the interviewer asked him about his conscience, he refused to speak any further, and immediately terminated the interview. Conscience speaks of more than guilt for transgressions of
civil
law. The conscience bears witness to the Moral Law. It reminds men that there is a God whose Law we have transgressed. Paris
Reidhead
said these wonderfully wise words:

If I had my way, I would declare a moratorium on public preaching of “the plan of salvation” in America for one to two years. Then I would call on everyone who has use of the airwaves and the pulpits to preach the holiness of God, the righteousness of God and the Law of God, until sinners would cry out, “What must we do to be saved?” Then I would take them off in a corner and whisper the gospel to them. Such drastic action is needed because we have gospel-hardened a generation of sinners by telling them how to be saved before they have any understanding why they need to be saved.

Don’t use John 3:16. Why? Because you tell a sinner how to be saved before he has realized that he needs to be saved. What you have done is gospel-hardened him.

What did he say?
“Don’t use John 3:16.”
That sounds like heresy! However, I don’t think D. L. Moody would consider such advice unbiblical. Look at what he said:

It is a great mistake to give a man who has not been convicted of sin certain passages that were never meant for him. The Law is what he needs...

Do not offer the consolation of the gospel until he sees and knows he is guilty before God. We must give enough of the Law to take away all self-righteousness. I pity the man who preaches only one side of the truth—always the gospel, and never the Law
(Pleasures and Profit of Bible Study,
Morgan and Scott Ltd., p. 111).

The Light Didn't Waken Him

Peter lay soundly asleep in Herod’s prison (Acts 12:6). This is faith in action. Faith snoozes, even in a storm. Stephen had been stoned, James had just been killed with a sword—and Peter sleeps like a parishioner in the back row of a dead church. He was bound with chains between two soldiers. More guards stood before the door of the prison. Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and stood by him, “and a light shone in the cell.” There is a strong inference that the light didn’t awaken Peter from his sleep, because the Scriptures then tell us that the angel struck him on the side. As he arose, his chains fell
off,
he girded himself, tied on his shoes, put on his gar-
ment
, and followed the angel. After that, the
iron gate
leading to the city opened of its own accord, and Peter was free.

The sinner is in the prison of his sins. He is taken captive by the devil. He is bound by the chains of sin, under the sentence of death.

He is asleep in his sins. He lives in a dream world. But it isn’t the gospel light that will awaken him. How can “Good News” alarm a sinner? No, the Law must strike him. He needs to be struck with the lightning of Sinai and awakened by its
thunderings
. That will rouse him to his plight of being on the threshold of death. Then he will arise and the gospel will remove the chains of sin and death. It will be “the power of God to salvation.” Then he will gird himself with truth, tie on his gospel shoes, put on his garment of righteousness, follow the Lord, and the iron gate of the Celestial City will open of its own ac-cord.

Our nation is full of people—both in and out of church—who have come under the light of the gospel, but who have never been struck by the Law. (In a later chapter, we will look at how many this may actually be.) They are still asleep in their sins, unaware of their terrible plight because the Law has never awakened them. The power of the Commandments must open their eyes before the light of the gospel can be of benefit. Look at this
sequence
in what Paul writes to the Ephesians: “Therefore He [the Lord] says, ‘Awake you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light’” (Ephesians 5:14). There must be an awakening before Jesus Christ gives us light. Dr. Timothy Dwight, former president of Yale University, concluded: “Few, very few, are ever awakened or convinced by the encouragements and promises of the gospel, but almost all by the denunciations of the Law.”

I received the following newsletter from someone in New York. This illustrates how the gospel makes little sense without the Law:

We went to visit [our 96-year-old grandmother] every week and even though she has not received the gospel so freely these past few years, we kept sharing the truth of Jesus with her each time. Mike would play songs about Him. Wendy would talk to her. We would pray for her physical strength and add into the prayer how we wanted God to reveal His Son to Nana.

Then last week, Wendy got the flu, and while she was in bed feeling miserable, she read Ray Comfort’s book...which challenges us to share the whole gospel and not sugar-coat it. It talks about using the Law when talking to a sinner to make them see how they have personally broken God’s Law and are doomed without a Savior who paid the price for them. It says in Psalm 19:7 that the “Law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul.” God spoke to Wendy’s heart that she needed to share the Law with Nana before Nana could ever see the grace and mercy of God in the cross.

So after committing the day and every detail to God, we went over to visit Nana. She was more alert and less distracted than usual. While Mike was praying, Wendy read her God’s Commandments from Exodus 20:1-17 and then asked Nana point-blank, “Nana, have you ever lied? Or stolen anything, even a little thing?” She replied, “I guess so.” Wendy shared about God’s very real judgments, hell, and heaven, that one day Nana would be standing face to face before God and would have to give an account of her life. Then she read from Isaiah 53:5
,6
and told Nana about Jesus and the horror of His cross. Nana looked shocked that someone would have those awful things happen to Him. Wendy shared some of her testimony and then asked Nana if she wanted to ask God to forgive her of her sins. She said
yes!
And she asked God to forgive her and wash her clean in the Blood of Jesus.

The 96-year-old didn’t know that she was sinning against God until the Law in the hand of the Spirit did its work. Look at Martin Luther’s comments on Romans 7:9 (“I was alive once without the Law, but when the commandment came, sin revived”):

So it is with the work-righteous and the proud unbelievers. Because they do not know the Law of God, which is directed against them, it is impossible for them to know their sin. Therefore also they are not amenable to instruction. If they would know the Law, they would also know their sin; and sin to which they are now dead would become alive in them.

Jonathan Edwards stated, “The only way we can know whether we are sinning is by knowing His Moral Law.” George Whitefield said to his hearers, “First, then, before you can speak peace to your hearts, you must be made to see, made to feel, made to weep over, made to bewail, your actual transgressions against the Law of God.” When we preach the whole counsel of God, we merely work with the Holy Spirit to convince men of sin. In
Today’s Gospel: Authentic or Synthetic
?,
Walter
Chantry
wrote:

The absence of God’s holy Law from modern preaching is perhaps as responsible as any other factor for the evangelistic impotence of our churches and missions. Only by the light of the Law can the vermin of sin in the heart be exposed. Satan has effectively used a very clever device to silence the Law, which is needed as an instrument to bring perishing men to Christ.