Audio Transcript

The book of Romans answers some of the most important questions we have about life, particularly our own lives. What was my spiritual condition before my conversion? What did God do in Jesus Christ to save me from that condition? How is that work different from what God has done inside of me? How did God overcome my stubborn resistance and give me the gift of faith? And now, how should I live in light of this precious salvation God has given me and is working out inside of me? How does it affect my relationships, my work, and my life at home, in the church, and in the world? What confident hope can I have for the future?

Paul’s letter to the Romans is such a precious gift from God, answering all these questions for us. Pastor John, as we approach March and prepare to dive into Romans in our Bible reading and read it throughout the month, help us out here. You’ve been reading and studying and cherishing this letter for over sixty years now. What advice would you give us to help us draw out the most glories from this great letter?

Let me see if I can raise the expectations of us all as we move into Romans again this year. I will claim, without any fear of contradiction, that Paul’s letter to the Romans is the greatest letter that has ever been written in the history of the world by anybody — Christian or non-Christian.

Why Romans Is So Great

Here’s what I mean by greatest. Three things.

1. It is the fullest divinely inspired summary of the greatest realities in the universe.

2. Among those inspired writings, it is not only the fullest summary of the greatest realities. It penetrates more deeply into those realities than any other book does, like the condition of humanity outside Christ, the meaning of justification by faith, the miracle of the Christian life lived after the law in the Spirit, the condition of the natural world under the fall, the future destiny of the people of Israel, the mystery of why God would prepare vessels of wrath for destruction — things like that. It’s just unparalleled in its penetrating power.

3. What I mean by greatest is that no other letter has had a greater impact on the history of the church and the world than this one. Augustine traced his conversion to Romans 13:13. Martin Luther entered the paradise of imputed righteousness and freedom through the portal of Romans 1:17. And John Wesley’s heart was freed from the strivings of the Oxford Club into the joy of faith by hearing the Moravians read Luther’s Preface to Romans. And millions upon millions of others have walked into peace with God along what we call “the Romans road.”

Romans 3:23: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Romans 6:23: “The wages of sin is death.”
Romans 5:6: “While we were still weak . . . Christ died for the ungodly.”
Romans 10:9: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

Goodness, how many millions of people have heard those four glorious and painful and wonderful truths and been saved by God? It’s the greatest letter that has ever been written, and we should enter the front door of Romans this year with a sense of wonder and reverence and thankfulness and expectation and joy.

It’s not just the Mount Everest of Scripture, which it is. It is a whole range of mountain peaks of soaring revelation. If there’s any Scripture to which we should apply Psalm 119:18, this is it: “[O Lord,] open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your [instruction].” (That’s a good translation of torah, sometimes translated “law.”) So, with this sense of expectation and wonder and reverence and thankfulness for the greatest of all books, is there a peculiar angle from which we should come at this book as we read it this year?

How to Approach Romans

Well, I’m very hesitant to limit anybody’s approach to this book. It is, without exaggeration, an ocean. It’s an ocean of insight into reality, and the ocean has no bottom, and the ocean has no shores, which means that this book will never be exhausted by finite human beings in what it has to show us about God and his ways and about his world and his people. But if anybody listening to us would like a suggestion, here’s mine.

“Romans is the greatest letter ever written in the history of the world by anybody — Christian or non-Christian.”

I would dare to say that no believer fully understands who he is and what God did to make us believers — who we are and what we will become. I would venture to say that most Christians have an incomplete — and many even a defective — grasp of what happened to make them a Christian and the miraculous thing it is to be a Christian. Therefore, my suggestion is that many of us read Romans, ransack Romans, this year — for three to four weeks or however long we’re in it — to find the answer to five questions.

1. What was my condition before Christ saved me?

First, what was my condition before conversion to Christ? Which is a form of the same question, What would be my condition now if God had not powerfully moved in my life to save me? We must let God answer this question from Romans, not from our experience.

Some of us were saved when we were six years old, and we don’t have any memory at all of what our condition was before we were saved. And some of us think we know how bad we were because of the bad things we did before we were saved, but we don’t realize how bad we were because, deep down, the analysis of our condition and our corruption is so much more profound than any experience could teach us. We must be taught by God what our condition was (and would be today if we weren’t saved), or we won’t be singing “Amazing Grace” the way we should.

2. What did God do to save me from that condition?

Here’s the second question we should try to answer: What did God do in Jesus Christ in history to save me from that condition? Now, let’s not confuse that question with what God did in me — in me. Martin Luther’s whole world was turned upside down when he realized that his salvation was accomplished outside of him. He called it extra nos. I remember the first time in seminary I heard that phrase, and it landed on me similarly, with power — extra nos, outside of us.

Centuries ago, on a hill outside Jerusalem, it was done. The salvation was achieved. The decisive, divine work was done before Luther existed, you existed, I existed. What did God do outside of us to save us in eternity, in history? Romans is really good on that. Let’s answer that question, because we need to know what he did for us outside of us thousands of years ago, before we ever existed, not just what he does in us.

3. What did God do in me to save me?

Third question: What, then, did God do in us to save us? What does he do to us by his Spirit and his sovereign grace? How was my resistance to him overcome? How did that happen? How did my faith come into being? What was that like? If the mind of the flesh is hostile to God and cannot submit to God’s law (Romans 8:7), how did I get saved? The glory of God’s grace that we find in the Bible is so powerful and decisive that we stop attributing things to ourselves that the Bible attributes to God.

4. How then should I live?

The fourth question I hope we can answer this year is this: How then shall I live in this world if I was saved like that? How shall I live in this church? How shall I live with my enemies? How shall I live in relation to the government, in relation to unreached peoples of the world? By what power can I live the Christian life? How am I to gain that power? How am I to defeat sin? How do I live the Christian life?

5. What does God have in store for me?

Last question, number five: What is my future? What’s my future in this life? What kind of care does God take of me in this life as I walk in the Spirit? What is my future forever? Those are my five questions.

Now, I don’t want to limit anybody’s insights as you read Romans. God has things for you to see besides these five questions, I am sure. So, one way to do both — to let God say whatever he wants to say besides these, and to do this ransacking for these five answers — is to get a notebook or a few sheets of paper and put these five questions on five different pages. And then, as you read — I think that the sections we’re going to read are fairly short — just stay alert to these five questions. And every time you see something that relates to one of them, jot it down on that particular page while he shows you all kinds of other things as well.

Let God speak to you any way he pleases. And don’t fret that you can’t see it all. Depending on how old you are, you can read it maybe another hundred times — and there will always be more to see.

The landscape of college ministry has shifted dramatically over the past 25 years. But here in 2025, I’m still consistently receiving the same question that I asked as a student: “Why am I not feeling it?”

Why am I not more excited about Jesus? Why doesn’t the gospel taste sweeter to me? Why are my emotions not responding to the best news in the world? I have a wealth of Christian resources, but I’m still desperately grasping for joy. Why does it stay tantalizingly out of reach?

Two Common Diagnoses

Before we go further, it must be said that the majority of those who experience this kind of unwelcome numbness are not fully numb. They are selectively excited. They still find themselves giddy about gaming, wild about the weekend, or captivated by a crush. It’s the spiritual pursuit, or perhaps the very nature of God, that douses the flame.

Years ago, I was leading a weekly Bible study of sophomore men. At the beginning of each meeting, one of these sophomores was playful, energetic, even squirrely. But almost without fail, his eyes would begin to droop when we would open the Bible — as if some form of yet-undiagnosed, Scripture-induced narcolepsy had seized him. (My children are often afflicted with the same strange condition.)

While this was an embarrassingly overt case, parallel stories of selective excitement remain common, and there are generally only two diagnoses.

Spiritually Dead

On the one hand, the person has yet to develop a taste for God at all. Scripture clearly states that God turns on the lights of Christward affection in our hearts (2 Corinthians 4:6), but before that wonderful awakening, we are prone to be bored by anything that doesn’t directly or indirectly exalt ourselves. So the Bible, which humbles us on every page, is somewhere between repulsive and boring, and talk of God evokes a response akin to Edmund’s at the first mention of Aslan’s name.

If you are reading this and deeply concerned that you are of that number, I am less concerned than you are — precisely because you’re unsettled. It is far more likely that you fall into a second category.

Spiritually Distracted

In this case, the person isn’t “feeling it” because he has been nibbling on lesser joys, like a child who has no appetite for a steak dinner because there are a dozen candy wrappers in his pocket. I confess that I often live here, surprised by my lack of hunger for the living God but slow to consider how I have given myself to the seemingly innocent distractions of little phone games or ESPN throughout the day (or throughout the season). As C.S. Lewis puts it, “Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires,” we are then shocked at our lack of spiritual fervor (The Great Divorce, 38). We make a mockery of David’s singular aim of God-gazing in Psalm 27:4, betraying our true practice in this ungodly paraphrase:

Twenty-six things have I asked of the Lord, and those will I seek after . . . gazing upon his beauty is peripherally one of them.

So, if your affections for God aren’t accurately reflecting the goodness of who he is, first take an honest inventory of your prayer life, your thought life, your diet, and (perhaps especially) your screen time. Perhaps you will find that you are an average hyper-stimulated citizen of the twenty-first century, giving in to secular liturgies with every free moment.

When the Dryness Remains

But when that inventory is taken, the competing liturgies are stripped away (or at least taken captive to the obedience of Christ), and that spiritual dryness remains, what then? What of the seasons when I put my head under the normal waterfall of grace, and I still feel thirsty? Or worse, when my thirst is as weak as the trickle that falls from the expected fountainhead? What if, like Heman the Ezrahite in Psalm 88, “Every day I call upon you, O Lord; I spread out my hands to you,” but “I suffer your terrors; I am helpless” (Psalm 88:9, 15)?

Many have experienced deserts vaster and drier than my own, but I can offer a few helps from my mixture of faithfulness and failure in this area.

1. Trace sunbeams back to the Sun.

I once met with a Christian counselor after getting fed up with my hyperactive mind, my questions about God, and the ensuing distance from him I felt. That counselor gave me some simple advice I have carried ever since: use creation to taste the goodness of the Lord. He told me to take moments to be more tactile and less cerebral, touching a leaf to remember God’s brightness and liveliness, feeling a breeze to remember his gentleness. Gamers today advise one another to “touch grass,” and if we are using said grass-touching to trace sunbeams back to the Sun, it’s not bad advice (James 1:17).

2. Let art wake you up.

God is not boring. In his presence is fullness of joy (Psalm 16:11). But my own drabness dirties my lens for seeing him, so I often employ the aid of musicians and filmmakers to turn my experiential prose into poetry. God has gifted some with the ability to feel deeply and, even better, to depict their emotions vividly. Borrow from them. My tear ducts regularly run dry until God opens them through the haunting, heavenly sounds of Sigur Rós or the depiction of fatherly pursuit in Finding Nemo.

3. Engage the poor and marginalized.

I assume that most of the world, for most of history, has struggled less with longing for God than we do in the prosperous and peaceful West. I currently live in a town called Mount Pleasant, and the back half of the name fits (not so much the front: our highest point above sea level is seven feet). So, in a Monday-morning pastors’ meeting, our senior pastor asked, “How do we keep longing for heaven here?” He was heeding the warning of Hosea 13:5–6:

It was I who knew you in the wilderness,     in the land of drought;but when they had grazed, they became full,     they were filled, and their heart was lifted up;     therefore they forgot me.

Yes, we have the universal wake-up calls of sin, aging, disease, and death to keep our longings aimed at eternity, but the contrast between Mount Pleasant and heaven doesn’t always seem so stark. Seeking to build heaven on earth is a recipe for numbness. When we tie our life to those of the poor, the fatherless, the widow, or the refugee, we not only heed the heart of God but also remember more regularly the brokenness of our current age.

4. Gaze at Jesus, not your affections.

I spent too many years checking my spiritual blood pressure and becoming immediately discouraged by the gap between the wonders of God and the gospel on the one hand and my puny affections on the other. It became a tooth-gritting (and losing) battle that was eventually resolved (and continues to be) by acknowledging the full sufficiency of my Substitute.

“Unsatiated hunger for God is the fitting experience of the believer before glory.”

I remember driving around the University of Minnesota in my white Nissan Quest minivan in a yelling match with the Lord as my questions and self-doubts tied me in knots. By God’s grace, it finally came to me: Jesus’s affections for his Father were perfectly aligned with the magnitude of divine beauty. The strength of his faith was one hundred percent. Why had I been assuming that my sinful actions required a crucifixion, but my affections and faith were on my shoulders? I asked Jesus to take the lump sum of my weakness, including my paltry hunger for him, and to cover it with his blood. Though less dramatic, my experience was not dissimilar to Martin Luther’s: “The gates of paradise were opened to me.”

My gaze shifted. And the strangest thing happened: when my subjective affections ceased to be the basis of my confidence, they began to grow. Jesus’s gracious sufficiency to cover and carry me made him seem as wonderful as he actually is.

5. Wait.

I have often swallowed the microwave mantra of our instant-gratification society. I don’t go to Wendy’s if the drive-through is too long. I feel the impulse to reach for my phone if two people are in front of me at the grocery store. This disease makes me feel as though a day or week or month of spiritual dryness is abnormal, even unjust. Waiting, though a prominent theme across the pages of Scripture, does not have popular appeal. Yet Jeremiah commends it:

The Lord is good to those who wait for him,     to the soul who seeks him.It is good that one should wait quietly     for the salvation of the Lord.It is good for a man that he bear     the yoke in his youth.Let him sit alone in silence     when it is laid on him;let him put his mouth in the dust —     there may yet be hope. (Lamentations 3:25–29)

It is good to wait? Why? There may be some speculation here, but I think our taste for the unseen God is best cultivated when we are conscious of the dry and desert land that is this fallen world without God’s visible, tangible presence. The entire life of a believer can rightly be described as a fast, beset with hunger pangs until Jesus’s return (Matthew 9:15). Unsatiated hunger for God is the fitting experience of the believer before glory. Feeling that this is not the way it’s supposed to be is the way it’s supposed to be — for now.

But now is so very brief in the grand scheme. To quote Gandalf, soon “the grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it . . . white shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise” (The Lord of the Rings, 1030). In that instant, we will see and so become like Jesus (1 John 3:2), and all our nagging numbness and depressing doubts will be put to death. Take heart, feeble-faithed believer; he will carry you there.

Solitude is threatening because these voices of various kinds come in and threaten us, like Satan with accusations. And one of the ways to push out those voices is to fill your mind and heart with another voice. And that’s what this session is about.

I honestly didn’t want to talk about COVID-19 anymore. I’m sure you don’t either. But I’m going to do it anyway. And it’s because I think the virus is a good picture of what I want to show you in this session about loving God through daily Bible reading. COVID-19 has a couple trademark symptoms. You know them by now: a cough, shortness of breath, extreme tiredness, and loss of smell and taste. I had COVID-19 (it wasn’t a serious case), and that might have been the most disorienting thing about the virus for me. I’d get hungry, and I’d go to eat something that I’d eaten hundreds, maybe thousands, of times: pasta, pizza, chicken, Chipotle. And it wouldn’t taste right.

In fact, it wouldn’t taste like much at all. It’s the exact same food, the exact same flavors, and yet something changed in me. I did a little bit of research over the last few weeks (and I mean a little — just very little). At least one serious study says that the reason we lose our sense of smell and taste is because the virus disrupts our olfactory cells. It’s the cells that relate to our sense of smell, and 80 percent of our taste comes from what we smell. The virus can’t infect these cells, but when it gets close to them, the brain sends all of these extra immune cells that clog up the olfactory system, in some cases for weeks, or months, or years. People lose their sense of smell or taste. It can happen for years.

Lies That Block Our Spiritual Senses

I suspect something similar happens, at least in seasons, when we resolve to read the Bible. If you’re like me, there are times when you open the Bible, a meal that you’ve enjoyed hundreds, maybe thousands, of times, and yet something doesn’t taste right. Maybe it doesn’t taste like much at all. It’s a symptom, and I believe this happens because our spiritual olfactory senses are under attack. They’ve been disrupted and distracted by a virus, by subtle lies that Satan feeds us about this book. And so, with these few minutes together, I want to expose and confront just four lies that undermine Bible reading.

These aren’t the only four lies, by any means. There are dozens, if not hundreds. But I’ve experienced these four personally, and I suspect that they’re pandemic. I just want you to hear someone say out loud that they’re not true. And I’ve chosen these four in part because I see them all, or at least the shadow of them, in Psalm 19:7–11. If you have a Bible, you can turn there and I’ll or reference verses throughout.

1. The Bible is irrelevant.

The first lie is that the Bible is irrelevant to your real life. Now, right off the bat, we probably wouldn’t say this out loud to anyone. We know that the Bible is theoretically relevant to our situation in some way. But when it comes time to sit down and read it, doubt can begin to creep in, can’t it? The distance between the Bible and me can feel wide — between a book like Ruth and our relationships, between Deuteronomy and the deadlines that we have at school or work, between 1 Peter and the problems that we’re bringing into this new year. Will reading this really old book really make any difference in my job or classes or friendships or future marriage? To which God says in Psalm 19:7, “The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.”

This book makes people wise — genuinely, supernaturally wise. And it’s not just any people, but simple people. People like me. This book can make you wise. It really can. And it makes these simple people wise in every age, from ancient Israel to modern Louisville, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles. And it makes us wise in all kinds of circumstances: school semesters, dating relationships, first jobs, and world missions. God didn’t shoot this book out into the future and hope that it would land a couple thousand years later and be relevant to you. That’s not what happened with this book.

“The Bible is a reviving book, a restoring book. It’s a balm to weary and hurting hearts.”

No, still today, the book that’s in your hands is breathed out by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (your righteousness), so that the man or woman of God may be complete, equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16–17). This book gives wisdom for every difficult situation and decision you will face. And the testimony of this word is sure.

2. The Bible won’t make sense.

Now, of course, just about anyone can understand some verses, like John 3:16, Romans 8:28, and Psalm 23. I don’t hear anyone saying that they can’t understand any of the Bible, but a lot of us struggle to understand a lot of the Bible. And when we commit to reading the whole Bible over and over year after year, we’re going to walk through strange and difficult passages: Ezekiel, Hebrews, Revelation, and so on. After a while, the exercise can start to feel kind of futile. We may think, “Am I ever going to understand more of this?” To which God says, “The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes” (Psalm 19:8).

Remember, even the apostle Peter had a hard time understanding some passages in the Bible, and he wrote whole books in the Bible. In 2 Peter 3:16, he says that there are some things in Paul’s letters that are hard to understand. To which Paul says, in 2 Timothy 2:7, “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.” The Lord will enlighten your eyes in everything. That’s what he says. It’s not immediate, of course, but he’ll give you real light now, and then, if you keep looking and looking and looking, that light will grow over months and years and decades.

So, rejoice in what you can see now. It’s a miracle. If you see any beauty, any truth, any worth in this book, it’s a miracle that God has given you. Rejoice in that, and then expect to see more and more and more because this book enlightens our eyes. It doesn’t just give us something to look at, but it actually alters our vision so that it improves the longer that we live in it.

3. The Bible won’t address my pain.

When we look back on these seasons when we’ve struggled to read the Bible, a lot of us can probably point to some heartache or pain where the struggle started, where the Bible lost its taste. That’s not always the case. In fact, for some of us, that’s the very point when the Bible started tasting sweeter. But suffering can become a barrier to hearing God in Scripture. I wonder if you’ve experienced that. It’s a difficult relationship, a chronic pain, or an illness. Some looming uncertainty about your future can become this barrier to hearing God in his words.

You might think, “Will the chapters for today really say anything that will help me through this?” To which God says, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul” (Psalm 19:7). This is a reviving book, a restoring book. It’s a balm to weary and hurting hearts. David describes the same reviving power in Psalm 23:1–3, when he says,

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.

This God comes and finds us in our valleys — afflicted, confused, broken — and he leads us into safe pastures and peaceful waters. And his rod for leading us, his rod of peace and comfort and direction, is this book.

Notice that he doesn’t just treat our wounds or our particular suffering, but he revives the soul. He goes deeper than our wounds. He offers a deeper, more meaningful rest and healing than all the things that we might turn to in our suffering.

4. The Bible won’t make me happy.

Some of us don’t even think about the Bible in categories of happiness. Wisdom, yes. Correction, yes. Promises of future happiness in heaven, yes. But meaningful happiness today? Really? Friendship makes us happy. Great food can make us happy. Recognition and praise for our work can make us happy. Sports can make us happy, if the right team wins. Marriage might make us happy. But the Bible? Really? To which God says, at the beginning of Psalm 19:8, “The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.”

God wrote the Bible not merely to give you wisdom in your relationships, or to make you articulate in your theology, or even just to comfort you in your suffering. No, he also wrote the Bible to make you really, really happy. Jesus says of his words in John 15:11, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”

Jesus spoke at the Last Supper, and then in all of Scripture, that his joy might be in you, and that your joy may be full. God gave us a Bible so that we might be as happy as God, infinitely happy through this book — knowing him and loving him through this book. And of all the things that David says about Scripture in these verses here in Psalm 19, this is the piece that he can’t help but say a little bit more about. Consider Psalm 19:9–10:

The rules of the Lord are true,     and righteous altogether.More to be desired are they than gold,     even much fine gold;sweeter also than honey     and drippings of the honeycomb.

This is what the Bible is. It’s more desirable than gold. It just is, no matter how you feel about it in the moment. It is more to be desired than gold. It is sweeter than honey, even when our spiritual taste buds can’t taste it. The Bible is a happy-making book. And so, when Bible reading gets hard, or life gets busy, or you don’t taste what you used to taste in these pages, remember: This book revives the soul. This book gives supernatural wisdom for all of life. This book can be understood. And in understanding it, you’ll begin to understand everything else. And this book is the deepest, richest well for joy.

Is your Christian life too private, too indoorsy?

“You are the light of the world,” our Lord declares. “A city set on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14). Some of us, it seems, mean to test that claim.

We can yell about Jesus as loudly as we want in our homes and church buildings — but we must keep it behind those walls. Public life is off-limits. The good of society requires it, you see. How can a multicultural, multireligious community flourish with the Christians insisting that all other gods are false and that Jesus is the only way to heaven? What about the atheists? Muslims? Jews? Our lofty ideals tell us to leave all the high places intact.

Though the heavens cannot contain him, though earth is his footstool, do we — his grasshoppers leaping upon his lawn — try to cage the living God in church buildings and around dinner tables? They say he is too wild and transgressive to be unleashed into the community. They are not wrong. He came to bring division: light from dark, the truth from the lie, his sons from Satan’s. Our God holds up his Son; his Son holds out his ring for all other gods and men to kiss. Refuse, and his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessing is only for those who take refuge in him.

Man does not like a God who lays claim on everyone and everything. And we, his ambassadors, too quickly grow tired of discipling them to observe all that he commanded. We comply with society’s red tape above our Savior’s red letters. Sheep, too happily sheepish. The Sunday gathering soon becomes the one (and virtually only) place for overt Christianity. Christ must be left out of malls, sports, restaurants, workplaces, and anywhere else he is unwanted. We quickly feel we have done enough to huddle once a week in that fenced green pasture. We are well-fed, happy enough, and sleepy.

Will Stones Cry Out?

Charles Spurgeon, a man who went to the people in open-air preaching and evangelism, states my main burden well:

We ought actually to go into the streets and lanes and highways. . . . Sportsmen must not stop at home and wait for the birds to come and be shot at, neither must fishermen throw their nets inside their boats and hope to take many fish. Traders go to the markets, they follow their customers and go out after business if it will not come to them; and so must we. (Lectures to My Students, 224)

How do you bring the gospel to where the people are? Christ teaches us to be fishers of men, but do we drop our nets in the boat instead of the sea?

How much of Christianity is lived among ourselves, for ourselves? The gathering of God’s people is the most notable event a calendar can contain. Heaven and earth meet when the saints gather to hear from their Lord. Yet, as much as the church is an end, we also harness together to bring others in. We are refreshed, equipped, and emboldened to go out on mission and return, in coming weeks, with more souls.

Does it bother you when additions to your church body grow stagnant? Are you concerned that so many in this world are perishing without hearing of Christ? If the gathering continues, kids’ programs run smoothly, and some spiritual benefit is exchanged from Sunday to Sunday, is all well with your soul?

Will that building that saw nearly all of our light testify against us on the last day? Will the walls testify that we knew that great name by which men must be saved, knew that souls outside were perishing, knew that a vast eternity stretches before every soul and that most run to ruin, and yet, like the rich man with Lazarus, kept feasting inside?

How about the windows? How much of that beautiful stained glass is stained with our neglect of the people on the other side? How many of these painted lookouts are but kaleidoscopes through which we peer at people who have never heard the gospel from our lips?

“Let us bring Christ to the people that we might bring the people to Christ.”

Or how about the pews? Surely they will protest their innocence. They were meant to be a training ground, a place of equipping. They meant to send their bearers along on their mission. Instead, these pews, looking down upon so many dress shoes, high heels, and boots in our congregations, saw so few beautiful feet going out to publish the good news of happiness and salvation among the people (Isaiah 52:7).

What of the roads leading to and away from the gathering? They had heard rumors about “The Great Commission,” though they saw evidence of only “A Nice Suggestion.” They would have been stones crying out, most willing preachers for their Lord, if only given such a chance. They pointed out into a wide world in need of Christ. But alas, so few returned week by week with a testimony of conquest.

Go

Horatius Bonar says the part we’d rather leave unsaid:

Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered the heart of man, what a soul in hell must suffer forever. Lord, give us bowels of mercies! We too ought to pray, “Give us thy tears to weep; for, Lord, our hearts are hard toward our fellows. We can see thousands perish around us, and our sleep never be disturbed; no vision of their awful doom ever scaring us, no cry from their lost souls ever turning our peace into bitterness.” (Words to Winners of Souls, 12)

Brothers and sisters, souls are dying, hell is gaping, an awful doom awaits the perishing. We have been entrusted with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Go and tell it on the mountains, over the hills, and everywhere. Go and do street evangelism, or hand out gospel tracts, or knock on doors, or preach in the open air, or move overseas as a missionary, or engage in mercy ministries, abortion witnessing, or letter-writing. Be simple or get creative, but go — across an ocean, across a taboo, across a street. Go — to unbelieving family members, to classmates, teammates, neighbors. Go — to the least of these, to the forgotten in prisons or nursing homes, to the poor, orphans, and widows. Go.

What has our Lord left us here for? “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). If you know the excellencies of Christ — who he is, what he has done, and what he has done for you — go and proclaim them.

“Well, they don’t want to hear about his excellencies.” So be it. Jesus does not remind us of his supreme authority for nothing: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:18–19). Because of his supreme authority over heaven and earth, there is never a place where the gospel has no place. Where the King says, “Go!” you may go — you must go — no matter what man threatens. When they strictly command us to no longer speak in the name of Jesus, disciples of the cross reply, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19–20).

Let us bring Christ to the people that we might bring the people to Christ.