Can the church, therefore, (whom God has so graciously called out of that sinful world for the express purpose of succeeding where the world had initially failed) really also fail to esteem and exalt its precious Lord so miserably – and yet expect great blessing? It is necessary for the point to be made, making clear that revival – like individual salvation – is something that can never be earned. It is an act of the grace of God from beginning to end. But… we can forfeit God’s blessing, as David reminds us in Psalm 66:18, using the example there of heard prayer.

Firstly, some clarification:

There is still power in the gospel and its message in Wales in 2024. As recently as a couple of months ago I was one of many blessed attendees at the baptism of two teenage girls. There are many Christians around Wales today who are receiving much needed edification, comfort, conviction and more from sitting under the regular preaching of the gospel. There are still new converts being saved by the gospel’s preaching too. As Paul once wrote to the flailing church in Corinth:

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 1 Corinthians 1:18

This is one of the reasons why I become so exasperated by churches who downgrade a preaching service to something else because “preaching doesn’t seem to attract non-Christians”. We are told that yes, of course, non-Christians are going to find the preaching of Christ to be both foolishness and a stumbling block, but as Christians, we know it to be the power of God – in saving us, as all Christians once experienced, and in the building up of our faith. William Cowper was able to write during a time of great revival:
“Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood shall never lose its power”
Thank God that this is still true for us today!
The country of Wales has had a great history of Christianity and revivals. Some of the most famous include the 18th century Great Awakening revivals, with preachers such as Daniel Rowlands, Howell Harris, William Williams, and even the English George Whitefield being greatly used, the revival of 1859 of Humphrey Jones and David Morgan, and the widespread revivals of 1904-5.
Although, thankfully, there are a good number of churches around Wales that are bucking the current general trend of Christianity today, there are also many churches that are dwindling in number at a startling rate, many churches are closing or are recently closed, and many churches of all types and denominations are feeling a great sense of powerlessness in the taking of the gospel to the lost.
One of the most wonderful stories I have come across from reading of the Welsh revivals of the past – this account coming from the 1904-5 revival – concerns a man named Levi Jarvis:
Levi Jarvis was a man who loved to drink, who loved to fight, and who was feared throughout the whole community. This fearsome man, however, became very scared of the revival that was now spreading throughout his locality… so much so that his wife thought he was going mad! He would even leave his house for work an hour earlier than usual, so as to avoid the conversations concerning the revival from his fellow workers as they walked together to the coal mining pit.
Well, one day, when Levi Jarvis returned home from work, his wife said to him, “Levi, you’ll never believe it! R.B. Jones (the preacher of that revival) has called round, asking to speak to you!” Levi Jarvis responded by taking a big drink of water, picking up the loaf of bread from the table and running off into the mountain to hide himself away!
A mere hour or two later, Levi Jarvis was found stepping into the entrance of the packed-out church, and as the preacher stopped speaking to look at Levi Jarvis, and all the congregation turning to look upon him also, Levi Jarvis asked in a trembling voice, “Can the Lord Jesus save such a sinner as me?”
40 years or so later, this same Levi Jarvis was known to gather the young people of the church to himself, and say, “Come, and let’s talk about that time when the Lord saved me!”[1]
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What we know by nature is not that our lives are meaningless but that we are under God’s wrath for our transgressions. The cross deals with man’s ultimate problem as revealed to us in conscience. It is in the context of God’s revelation that a theologically informed gospel must be preached. God’s fury is upon the impenitent, whether there is hope of better meaning or not! The relevant-relational aspect of the cross is that hell-bound enemies can become friends with God through the one-time propitiatory sacrifice of Christ for our sins.

A pastor can be more or less Reformed, but a doctrine either is or is not Reformed.
A Debtor To Mercy
The church will always have to war against false gospels. From the time of the Judaizers to this very day, the church has been bewitched by sacerdotalism, syncretism, decisional regeneration, social gospels, prosperity gospels, Lordship Salvation and many other false teachings.
Some of these deceptions are more obvious than others, depending upon the degree of marginalization of the person and work of Christ. All false gospels promise deliverance from one thing unto another. Things become a bit trickier when the Christ remains at the center of the message.
While fundamentalists during the 1980s and ‘90s were on the lookout for anti-Christ, certain Reformed folk were setting their sights on Robert Schuller and then Joel Osteen, while still others were fighting the New Perspective on Paul and Federal Vision. During this time of disquiet, another false gospel not only received a wink but a motion toward a comfortable seat at the Reformed table. Lordship Salvation, promulgated by John MacArthur with endorsements by such notables as J.I. Packer and James Montgomery Boice, became a non-confessional doctrinal option in the broad tent of Reformed evangelicalism.
The MacArthur controversy wasn’t a fair fight. The Lordship gang of independently minded untouchables were picking on the theological weaklings within Arminian Antinomianism. Because the Reformed faith wasn’t under attack, many who grasped Reformed soteriology didn’t bother to take a side in the Lordship debate. Strictly speaking, there was no correct side to take! Both sides were wrong, though only one side positioned itself as historically Reformed. The prominent darlings within Reformed evangelicalism who weighed in on the debate were popularizers and preachers, not confessionally minded theologians. Although they took the Lordship side, the debate was largely dismissed as noise among Reformed academics because both sides were outside the tradition.
During the fog of war, a new star was arising.
While MacArthur and company were flexing their independent muscles in the Reformed evangelical schoolyard, many on the fringe of Reformed confessional theology were spooked into confusing justifying faith with the fruit of progressive sanctification. Forsaking oneself and commitment of life replaced receiving and resting in Christ alone for justification. While certain crusaders falsely, yet confidently, claimed to be defending the faith once delivered unto the saints, a new star from the multi-cultural city of Manhattan was rising above the theological smog. This talented leader was not focused on the nature of saving faith, but on the evangelistic question of what the gospel offers sinners in a postmodern context.
With the stage presence and communication skills of a CEO of a multinational conglomerate, Tim Keller sought to identify and meet a legitimate need by trying to reach the nations for Christ in the dense 23 square miles of New York’s apple.
I know no Reformed pastor who has made more disciples in such a short period of time as Tim Keller. Even Keller’s disciples are already spawning disciples!
Fast forward to 2023. The new gospel eclipses the theology of the cross.
Instead of seeing the objective act of premarital relations as sin, our greatest need is to look away from self-centered romance in order to find life’s truest fulfillment in Christ alone. The offer of Christ is no longer an offer of imputed righteousness and forgiveness for uncleanness, but rather is packaged as freedom from self-idolization and the vapid fulfillment of existential experience. Christ is offered to men and women as the door to freedom from the sin of self-imposed slavery. The world with all its social woes is our unmistakable object lesson. What unregenerate person could miss what is in plain sight! The world’s poverty, disunity and abusiveness is a result of a broken relationship with God. That’s the bad news. The good news is Jesus is the remedy for the unfulfilled life and all broken and abusive relationships. Christ will satisfy our needs if only we become satisfied with Christ. It is God who makes true worshippers through Jesus Christ. Herein we find a “take it to streets” approach to Christian Hedonism.
The new gospel would be as attractive as it is relevant to the postmodern urbanite. Of course, hell, too, needed to be reworked a bit. Hell is no longer a place of eternal torment and punishment for sins against a loving yet wrathful God; and outer darkness is no longer accompanied by weeping and gnashing of teeth. Rather, hell is a reasoned trajectory of living one’s life without Christ at the center. It’s a dimension to be pondered more than a place to be feared. Hell is a philosophical extension of life lived without God. Hell contemplates the future eternality for disembodied spirits resulting from a meaningless temporal existence. It’s the expansion of this life, as opposed to the wages of sin. (Likewise, heaven isn’t an inheritance and sabbath rest from the battle against indwelling sin, as it is the transcendent spatial trajectory for the Christian after death.)
Does this gospel message sound familiar?
We live in a broken world in which we try to find meaning, acceptance and healing through material pleasures, careers, entertainment, community and intimate relationships. Perhaps we even try to find meaning by trying to be a good person. But no matter how hard we try, if we’re honest with ourselves we will admit that we cannot rid ourselves of emptiness. We always seem to suffer under abuse or broken relationships leading to further discontentment. No matter how often we become disillusioned with material things, ideologies and the relationships in which we entrust ourselves, we continue to turn to those idols for ultimate satisfaction and happiness even though they fail us without fail.
Our biggest problem is we are separated from God who made us to be in relationship with him. The good news is we can be restored to God who is the only one that can give our lives meaning. Jesus came to give us life abundant. But to be restored to God we must turn from self and believe Jesus paid for our sins. That is the only way our emptiness can be replaced with meaning. We need a relationship with God who is the author of all meaning. We need that relationship because God created us as relational beings.
The bad news is, if you continue to seek meaning apart from God, upon death you will enter into an eternal darkness void of all meaning and bliss. If you don’t seek in this life meaning from God, you’ll get your heart’s desire forever. You will reap for all eternity more of what you’re experiencing now, a meaningless life where self is at the center. Hell will be where you send yourself. Your punishment will be your unquenchable search to find fulfillment in created things, apart from God at the center. So, I urge you, come to Jesus for the forgiveness of sins so that you might find meaning now and forevermore. Only through Christ can God heal your brokenness and give your life the true meaning for which you were created and have been searching.
The problem isn’t that the word “sin” is utterly absent from the contemporary gospel presentation. Rather, sin is so ill-defined that the theology of the cross loses its context, and by that its relevance. If our greatest need may be motivated by a self-absorbed desire for meaning, then Christ crucified for sinners isn’t being offered.
Any gospel that denies the theology of the cross is another gospel. It’s also not very enticing!
If the “meaningless” of this life is life’s eternal penalty, I suppose most can accept that consequence without too much dread. But who will say they can embrace being cast into biblical hell? The stakes of the game of life aren’t terribly high if one actually enjoys his selfish life.
That man’s life outside Christ is meaningless is a minor point. Even Christians don’t always find fulfillment! Man has a sin problem. His very existence outside mystical union with Christ is an offense to God. The contemporary gospel isn’t that we can escape God’s wrath, gain a right standing to God’s law, and be adopted as sons of God in Christ. Today’s gospel exchanges life’s disappointments for meaning. The felt need we are to try to elicit with the gospel is one of purpose and fulfillment, not deliverance from the wages of sin, which is death.
The true meaning of the cross is contextualized not by purpose but by what is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness.
What we know by nature is not that our lives are meaningless but that we are under God’s wrath for our transgressions. The cross deals with man’s ultimate problem as revealed to us in conscience. It is in the context of God’s revelation that a theologically informed gospel must be preached. God’s fury is upon the impenitent, whether there is hope of better meaning or not! The relevant-relational aspect of the cross is that hell-bound enemies can become friends with God through the one-time propitiatory sacrifice of Christ for our sins.
The theology of the cross and the doctrine of justification unearth man’s need and by extension the biblical gospel.
Consider the multi-faceted import of the cross of Christ:

Propitiation presupposes wrath.
Satisfaction presupposes justice, which again presupposes wrath.
Expiation presupposes the middle ground of enmity being removed through a propitiatory sacrifice that exhausts God’s wrath.
Reconciliation presupposes alienation because of sins that deserve God’s wrath.
Sacrifice presupposes an offering for sin that deserves God’s wrath.
Redemption presupposes deliverance from bondage, and condemnation, which demands God’s wrath.
Love is Jesus suffering the unmixed wrath of God for unjust sinners.

The theology of the cross is not one of restoring meaning to life. The cross is a symbol of love, mercy and grace, which finds its only expression in the context of the wages of sin, which is death, not want of purpose. Because today’s gospel is not theological, it’s not biblical.
There’s a wisdom to the cross that relates to theological justification.
How the cross brings meaning to life isn’t at all obvious. However, when we begin to understand our need for a perfect righteousness and satisfaction for sins, the cross is not just intelligible but can be seen as the profound wisdom of God.
As I taught my adult daughters since they were little children, sinners like us need two things to stand before a holy and righteous God – a perfect righteousness that’s not our own and God’s gracious pardon for our sins. What we need to stand in the judgement is accomplished only through the active and passive obedience of Christ. Accordingly, our greatest need is not for meaning in life but to be justified in Christ. The new gospel dilutes our sin problem, and, therefore, the gospel’s remedy.
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Repentance is concrete. If there has been a sin, then we seek to change. If I have been making an idol out of money, I stop, and begin to delight in the Lord alone. If I have been putting impure things in front of my eyes, I stop, and pursue better things. If I have been getting enraged with my family, repentance means I stop, and I seek God’s grace for self-control. If I have been neglecting prayer, then I seek to begin again, and to create new habits. The examples can be multiplied. The point is that repentance means change.

One of the New Testament words for “repentance” means literally “a change of mind.” But this change of mind isn’t merely intellectual, as if repentance is a matter of accessing the right information.

It is deeply personal, a matter of our heart and life.
Repentance means we change our minds about ourselves, because we see our helplessness and how much we need grace. At the same time, repentance is changing our mind about God and seeing him as our one and only refuge. We come to grasp that it’s only because of the Lord’s great mercies that we are not consumed.

By the grace of his Holy Spirit, these changes are the beginning of new life.

This was the point of John the Baptist’s question when he called his listeners to receive the baptism of repentance. His question was essentially this: What will they look like after they’d been baptized in the Jordan? They’d be dripping wet, of course. They might’ve gone on their way, smiling and relieved.
But if they have really believed in God and repented of sins, then their life will look different. It will be changed. Such was the force of John’s preaching in Luke 3:8,

Therefore bear fruits worthy of repentance.

Repentance is no abstract activity, but something you can see. As we draw on the sweet waters of God’s grace, fruits on our branches will grow.
First, true repentance changes our relationship with God. If you know yourself to be a chronic idolater and rebel, but now forgiven and cleansed, you will begin to love God, thank and worship him. Now you want to spend time with the Lord. You want to listen to him.
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