Great Forgiveness for Great Sin

Charles Spurgeon

Preached December 31, 1876 

Published MTP 1903

Provided by Mack Tomlinson

 I like the way Luther talks upon this subject. … He says, “Jesus Christ is not a sham savior for sham sinners, but He is a real Savior Who offers a real atonement for real sin, for gross crimes, for shameless offenses, for transgressions of every sort and every size.” And a far greater One than Luther has said, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool” (Isa 1:18). I have set the door of mercy open widely, have I not? There is no one here who will dare to say, “Mr. Spurgeon said that I was too guilty to be forgiven!” I have said nothing of the kind. However great your guilt, though your sins, like the great mountains, tower above the clouds, the floods of divine mercy can roll over the tops of the highest mountains of iniquity and drown them all. God give you grace to believe this and to prove it true this very hour!

The greatness of God’s forgiveness may be judged by the freeness of it. When a poor sinner comes to Christ for pardon, Christ does not ask him to pay anything for it, to do anything, to be anything, or to feel anything, but He freely forgives him. I know what you think: “I shall have to go through a certain penance of heart, at any rate, if not of body. I shall have to weep so much, or pray so much, or do so much, or feel so much.” That is not what the gospel says. That is only your false view about it. The gospel says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” (Act 16:31). Trust Jesus Christ, and the free pardon of sin is at once given without money and without price (Isa 55:1).

   Another thing that indicates its greatness is its immediateness. God will forgive you at once, as soon as you trust Christ. There was a daughter, well beloved by her father, who, in an evil hour, left her home and came to London. Here, having no friends, she soon fell a prey to wicked men and became an utter wreck. A city missionary met with her, spoke faithfully to her about her sin, and the Holy Spirit brought her to the Savior’s feet. The missionary asked for her father’s name and address; and at last, she told him. But she said, “It is no use for you to write to him. I have brought such dishonor on my family that I am quite certain he would not reply to any letter.” They wrote to the father and stated the case; and the letter that came back bore on the envelope, in large text hand, the word Immediate. Inside, he wrote, “I have prayed every day that I might find my child and am rejoiced to hear of her. Let her come home at once. I have freely forgiven her, and I long to clasp her to my bosom.” Now, soul, if thou seekest mercy, this is just what the Lord will do with thee. He will send thee mercy marked Immediate, and thou shalt have it at once. I recollect how I found mercy in a moment, as I was told to look to Jesus, and I should be forgiven. I did look; and, swift as a lightning flash, I received the pardon of sin in which I have rejoiced to this very hour. Why should it not be the same with you, the blackest and worst sinner here, the most unfeeling and the least likely to repent? Lord, grant it; and Thou shalt have the praise!

Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand.— Romans 14:4 —
On the backside of a Sharp Top Mountain in Southwest Virginia lies the wreckage of World War II vintage air craft. On a training mission in February 1943, five airmen lost their lives as they flew a “low-level nighttime navigational” mission, a mission that ended with tragedy and the debris of a B-25 littered throughout the wooded hillside.
Today, if you leave the trail on Sharp Top and look for the fuselage, engine, wings, and other parts of the crash site, you will find a plaque memorializing the event. On an otherwise unmarked hillside, this memorial is the only sign explaining the mangled metal left standing in the woods. Yet my point in bringing up this piece of atlas obscura is not to focus on the plane crash, but to liken it to the state of our religious liberty today. Today, we can find scattered pieces of religious freedom in our country, but by and large most Christians do not know how they got there, how to assemble them, or how to make them fly. For instance, the recent TGC article undermining the sincerely held beliefs of Christians is a prime example.
In that article, Christian lawyer, John Melcon, explains “Why Your Employer Can Deny Your ‘Religious’ Vaccine Exemption.” In the article, he explained the way “religious exemption laws” work and cited three bad arguments for seeking a religious exemption: (1) personal autonomy, (2) my body is my temple, and (3) abortion complicity. In his estimation, the abortion argument “is perhaps the strongest case,” but by comparison to the welcome use of other drugs (e.g., “Tylenol, Claritin, or their favorite anti-aging skin cream“), he insists that this argument is most likely an example of great inconsistency. (N.B. For a quick response to the Tylenol retort, see this Liberty Counsel post).
In his other two arguments, however, the claim is not inconsistency, but denying that personal autonomy or bodily choice is a truly religious reason for seeking a religious exemption. For Melcon, this leads him to reserve religious exemptions for later, greater threats to the Christian faith. It is this argument that I want to address. Instead of addressing his three examples, which are presented with a striking likeness to someone headed for the Emerald City, I want to consider whether waiting for some later crisis is the best strategy. Even more, I will argue that the increasing statism of our country is coupled with a religious fervor that does not call for patient endurance, but bold witness to the truth.
This Really Is a Religious Liberty Issue
As I have written recently, the presidential mandate for Covid vaccines is one motivated by religious interests. With a religious belief in science, those in power are using the force of the state, the threat of job loss, and the fear of disenfranchisement to coerce public and private employer and employees to get the vaccine. Instead of convincing the public of the vaccines beneficial effects, the state is taking a page from Nike’s playbook coercing people to “just do it.” And sadly, Christians thought leaders are playing right along.
Last week, John Piper made the argument that Christian freedom should lead those who are fearful of getting the vaccine to get the vaccine. But ironically, that fear focused not on the anxiety caused by the adverse effects of the vaccine, or the medical concerns, or the uncertain side effects or long terms effects. The fear focused on those who feel pressured to not get the vaccine. But what group of people is putting fear into the heart of Christians not to get the vaccine? I am sure there could be some, but those individuals do not have the force of the federal government behind them.
In this case, I think Piper is misreading the field. The pressure mounting upon Christians is going in the other directions. And Piper’s article is only, if unintentionally, contributing to that pressure. Still, his article is benign compared to that of John Melcon who calls to question the arguments some are putting forward in an attempt to seek a religious exemption.  Indeed, Melcon’s article is one of many Christian hit pieces putting pressure (read: binding consciences ) on those who conscience is bound to not get the vaccine. With sophisticated legal speech, Melcon gives cover for employers and the powers that tax them, as it persuades Christians that it is fool’s errand to seek a religious exemption. But is it? Is it really out of bounds to seek a religious exemption for the Covid mandate? And should we strategize to hold off on seeking a religious exemption now, in order to seek it later?
I wouldn’t be writing this article, unless I disagreed. And I am not the only one. In a short string of tweets, lawyer, professor, and ERLC legal fellow Sam Webb had a few things to say in response to Melcon’s article. Stripping out the Twitter formatting, here’s what he said in response:
Article XVI of the New Hampshire Confession—a Baptist confession used 150+ years—states: “We believe that civil government is of divine appointment, for the interests and good order of human society, and that magistrates are to be prayed for, conscientiously honored, and obeyed, except only in things opposed to the will of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the only Lord of the conscience, and the Prince of the kings of the earth.”
If a Christian who holds no settled convictions against this Confession … cannot in good conscience—or, put differently, in good faith—submit to a government-mandated, employer-enforced vaccination because that Christian believes such mandate, action, or vaccination is “opposed to the will of our Lord Jesus Christ”for any number of reasons, then such objection is, in fact, a sincerely held religious belief and an exemption is warranted.
To cause such Christian to act contrary to conscience—even if ill-formed conscience!—is to claim lordship over the conscience which is further violation of that Christian’s sincerely held religious belief that “Jesus Christ…is the only Lord of the conscience.” Even more, what cannot be done in good faith is sin (Rom. 14:23) and so to force vaccination against conscience is to cause sin.
Let’s end the crusade of binding the consciences of brothers and sisters in Christ on disputable matters and let’s love our neighbor by advocating for the freedom of conscience—even if we disagree with the exercise of such conscience.
This is the exactly right! As I have counseled and signed off on multiple religious exemptions, I have not necessarily agreed with every one of the arguments being made, but I have, after listening to the formulation of the believer’s argument, perceived what their sincerely held, biblically-informed belief is. And because of that recognition of sincerely held beliefs, I have supported those Christians who have put their livelihoods in jeopardy in order to follow their Lord. I have urged them to count the cost, but I have not tried to shame them or bind their conscience. This, after all, is what Romans 14:4 calls us to do, and this is what John Melcon has failed to do.
Let’s end the crusade of binding the consciences of brothers and sisters in Christ on disputable matters and let’s love our neighbor by advocating for the freedom of conscience—even if we disagree with the exercise of such conscience.
With no appreciation for how Romans 14 works or any concern that he might be binding his brother’s conscience, Melcon’s argument results in a pressuring Christians to drop their sincerely held beliefs, because after all, it hurts the rest of us. Unfortunately, this is the same logic that governments are rolling out in this country and across the world (think Australia): “You need to think of the collective good and stop resisting on personal grounds. After all, there is no religious reason not to get the vaccine. It’s just medicine.”
For those who are most sensitive to the issues of religious liberty, however, all coercive arguments will fail. And should fail. As Lutheran writer Matthew Cochrane has observed, “Our government has forgone convincing us and has instead resorted to bullying, censorship, abuse, and coercion. But threats and propaganda do not absolve us of the God-given responsibility to make our best judgment based on the information available to us—even the information government bureaucrats, Big Tech, and corporate interests hide because it casts reasonable doubt on the vaccines.” And unfortunately, many Christian leaders are not far behind them in their tactics or persuasion. And this, I believe, is because they don’t see the bigger picture.
The Bigger Picture: Our Secular State Is Not Irreligious  
What’s the bigger picture? Namely, the way that the vaccine mandate—not the vaccine qua vaccine, i.e., the vaccine as a medical prophylactic—is a religious sacrament and a by-product of America’s growing statism.
For the last decade, Charles Taylor’s magnum opus, A Secular Age, has been a constant reference for understanding the “immanent frame” of our world. The Gospel Coalition even published a book in Taylor’s honor, and for good reason. Taylor, in his terminology, has explained how the secular world has lost its sense of divine transcendence and God’s place in our world. Accordingly, the modern secularism has made it is easier to disbelieve than to believe. Whereas Christendom explained the world in spiritual terms and religious practices, the five hundred year project which resulted in today’s secularism has left a vacuum where God once stood.
Christians know that God is not absent. As Francis Schaeffer put it, he is there and he is not silent, but in today’s naked public square, arguments for God are not permitted and this partially explains why religious exemptions are not appreciated. It was a different day when the language of the first amendment was penned. At that point, religion still possessed honor as a civic good. Today, however, religion, and especially Christianity, is seen as a nuisance and a source of bad behavior. This is why the Equality Act and SOGI policies are on a collision course with Christianity. Sexual liberty has become the new religion and that means that religious protections are now being transferred from people of faith to their secular offspring.
If we are to enjoy any religious liberty going forward, we cannot take a strategy that waits for worse cases to arise.
This is also why Melcon makes the case the way he does. He thinks that by playing our religious exemption card later in the game we will be better off. But what he doesn’t consider—in addition to binding consciences—is the fact that the government is not a religiously neutral or interested in well-timed religious liberty. Rather, it is actively carrying out a religious crusade, albeit one that speaks with scientific and not sacred speech. This is the point that needs to accompany Taylor’s observations. Our world has not only adopted a secular worldview, but in the absence of Christianity, and its secular offspring (i.e., civil religion), secular individuals have deified the state to celebrate and support their hedonistic desires. As Zygmunt Bauman has noted in his book Liquid Life, modernity is not only “presented as a time of secularization (‘everything sacred was profaned,’ as young Marx and Engels memorably put it) and disenchantment.” It is also a time where the enlarging state has adopted and enforced religious values. He continues,
What is less often mentioned, however, though it should be, is that modernity also deified and enchanted the “nation,” the new authority—and so by proxy the man-made institutions that claimed to speak and act in its name. “The sacred” was not so much disavowed as made the target of an “unfriendly takeover”: moved under different management and put in the service of the emergent nation-state. (Bauman, Liquid Life, 44; cited in Peter Leithart, 1 and 2 Kings, 64)
This is what most of our Christian leaders have not sufficiently appreciated. With the election of Joseph Biden, we have seen an unending array of executive orders and economic decisions that have further tied the citizens to the state (think: government bailouts) and forced the state on the citizens (think: all the policies of the CDC). Topping the list of government intrusions is the vaccine mandate. And because this mandate have come with all the trappings of a religion, we now have a state that is forcing its religion on its citizens.
No Religious Liberty Without Liberty of Conscience
If you don’t see how the secular state is instantiating its religious point of view, I encourage to open your eyes. Again, I have outlined this point in a previous article. For now, let me simply connect the dots from religious liberty to liberty of conscience.
Returning to the wreckage on Sharp Top Mountain, we should consider that it would be impossible to know what it was or why it was there without a memorial explaining the crash. Such is the case with religious liberty as well. Many can see the fuselage, the wings, and the engines of religious liberty scattered throughout our country. But very few can put all the pieces together and understand how it works and how it got here.
How many who have read the Bill of Rights, if they have read the Bill of Rights, know what it took for James Madison and the Founding Fathers to make a place for religious liberty? How many critique a religious exemption understand the connection to Romans 14? Evidence for our inability to understand Romans 14 has been seen for the last year. Too many evangelicals have interpreted Romans 13 as a divine imperative to do whatever the government tells you, without considering first who gives the government their authority. Then, interpretations of Romans 14 continue in confusion, because Christians are not trying to protect their brothers freedom. In Melcon’s case, he is (unintentionally) siding with the state to bind other’s freedom. And why? Because now is not the time to raise religious concerns.
All in all, we have lived off the rations of religious liberty for nearly two and half centuries, and it is time to relearn how all the pieces got there and how to reassemble them so that that religious liberty might fly again. Unfortunately, arguments like the one offered by John Melcon and John Piper and countless other Johns demonstrate that even the most lucid among us still don’t quite know how this thing flies.
If we are to enjoy any religious liberty going forward, we cannot take a strategy that waits for worse cases to arise. Rather, we need to reintroduce, rewaken, and reinforce the arguments for religious liberty. This must be done in the public square and in countless conversations with Christians and their neighbors. In fact, this is one of the growing benefits of the religious exemptions. In our local church alone, I can report countless opportunities Christians have taken to share the gospel and their religious convictions about the vaccine.
And you know what? It has had effect, not just on other Christians, but on atheists, and agnostics who have seen the merit of personal liberty of conscience and the demerit of forcing people to get a vaccine against their will. This is what it will take for religious liberty to gain a hearing in public, as well as Christians being willing to suffer for their beliefs. This is what turned James Madison’s heart, when he saw the six Baptist pastors jailed for their faith. And this is likely what will turn other hearts today, witnessing people willing to suffer for the sake of conscience.
Yet, such conversations and suffering will not come if we continue to bind the consciences of other Christians. And this is the other place we need to talk about religious liberty: in the church.
In the church, we need to encourage Christians to form their consciences around God’s Word. But we must also permit Christians to form their consciences differently. When we fail to do that, however, we fail to follow Romans 14, and we further fracture the witness of the church, not to mention hurting individual members who are trying their best to follow God with all their heart.
We must make biblical arguments on the subject, learning afresh how Christians have resisted tyranny, so that we can recognize and resist tyranny in the present.
In such cases, the path of another might not be your path, but it is the path that some servants of the Lord have taken and will take. And in that time, we should as Sam Webb put it, “end the crusade of binding the consciences of brothers and sisters in Christ on disputable matters and let’s love our neighbor by advocating for the freedom of conscience—even if we disagree with the exercise of such conscience.”
This is what Melcon’s argument does not do. It may understand the legal ramifications of religious exemptions and it purports to know what will happen if people seek them. But it does not demonstrate an appreciation for liberty of conscience itself. And the point I am making is that if we are going to see religious liberty in public, it will require the church in America to grow up in its understanding of liberty of conscience among its own members. This means pastors teaching on the subject, Christians standing firm for the truth, and other Christians—whether they share the same conviction about Covid vaccines or not—supporting others who are willing to suffer for their beliefs. Indeed, there have been many Christians in church history who have held different beliefs on different Christians practices. But one thing that has benefitted the Church in America has been the freedom to exercise their religion without the coercion of the state.
Today, with the state taking on its own religious practices, we are not in a place where we can wait for a better time to exercise what remains of our religious liberty. No, teaching the church and our neighbors how to recognize the scraps of religious liberty is where we must begin. We must make biblical arguments on the subject, learning afresh how Christians have resisted tyranny, so that we can recognize and resist tyranny in the present. Indeed, now is the time for us to connect religious liberty with liberty of conscience, and to stop making arguments that aid the state by leading Christians to sin as they ignore their consciences.
If we fail to do that now, we will have little hope of standing later. And for that reason, for those who are standing up and submitting religious exemptions, we need to pray for them and promise them that we will hold them up as they follow their Lord and our Lord—whether or not they are doing it in the same ways that we would. Such is the way of liberty of conscience and the way Christians need to truly affirm the faith of their brothers and sisters.
Soli Deo Gloria.

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Here is a question on which I have been musing for the last 2 years:
If the present generation of Americans were given the opportunity to form a new nation, could they create one equal to or greater than the United States of America?
The answer is an undeniable “no.” The only people who would dare to argue otherwise are those who believe that the USA is a nation that should be torn down or, as President Obama put it, “fundamentally transform[ed].” The problem is that most of the key leaders in this country fit into that category. I’m talking about leaders in the political, educational, cultural, and religious realms.
Establishment politicians have demonstrated their wickedness time after time by their inaction in the face of various moral insurrections led by domestic enemies who want to pursue President Obama’s vision to its logical conclusion of destroying the very foundations on which America is built. Witness the Black Lives Matter riots, covid vaccine mandates, legalization of so-called homosexual “marriage,” and forcing girls not only to share but to celebrate sharing toilets and locker rooms with males. Beyond inaction, too often and with increasing frequency legislative bodies actively aid and abet these domestic enemies by pushing bills and legislation that promote their insurrections. Witness the most recent example of the US Senate’s vote to pass the misnamed “Respect for Marriage Act” by a 62-37 vote. This latest maneuver is especially illustrative of political wickedness because it gives “statutory authority for same-sex and interracial marriages.”
Do you see how they operate? By tying the abomination of homosexual “marriage” to the legitimacy of interracial marriage, the Senators could threaten anyone who voted against it with the career-ending stain of “racism.” By misnaming it the “Respect for Marriage Act,” they simply lied about its attack on genuine marriage so that unthinking & unsuspecting people would think favorably of it and reason that, of course, we should be for respecting marriage! It reminds me of Hitler’s euphemistic “Final Solution.” After all, who doesn’t want problems finally resolved?
Such tactics illustrate Jesus’ words in Luke 16:8, “For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.” That’s true not only for our politicians but also for the creators and producers of our entertainment industries and other influential shapers of our culture. From executive producer for Disney Television Animation, Latoya Raveneau’s giddy celebration of her success in pushing Disney to promote her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda,” to Harvard graduates’ open (and, sad to say twenty-five years hence, highly successful) bold strategy to “overhaul straight America,” they have let slip their dogs of war to great effect on the Christian ramparts of this once-great nation.
The educational institutions of this nation, for the most part, serve as fifth columnists for the moral terrorists seeking to destroy the United States. By that I mean that US citizens are financing most of these institutions through forced taxation to further the agendas of those who are working to eliminate every vestige of righteousness from our borders. Parental protests of school boards across the nation over the last few years have exposed corrupt curricula and activist teachers that seek to push the racism of Critical Race Theory and the perversion of LGBTQ+ ideologies. Some even promote (serendipitously at great financial gain) child abuse through “gender-affirming” mutilation.
On April 26, 1983 the National Commission on Excellence in Education filed a report to the US Department of Education on the quality of education in America. The name of the report signals its findings, “A Nation at Risk.” While the commission focused almost exclusively on academic metrics, what they found led to this chilling assessment:

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves….We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

One can only imagine how those 1983 sensitivities would evaluate the devolution of the American educational complex of 2022. Former failing pedagogy has been supplanted by LGBTQ+ promoting curricula. Listen to some of the teachers who teach that curricula by spending a little time on this site. And then consider that American taxpayers are required to continue financing the insurrection.
One of the greatest disappointments of the last several years has been the failure of so many Christian leaders.
And what have the “sons of light” been doing during this fundamental transformation? For the most part, they have been following feckless leaders who, if not fully complicit in the moral rot and godless degradation of this land have nevertheless facilitated it by their incompetence or cowardice (and in some cases, both). If they were not exhorting us to practice “pronoun hospitality” by participating in the self-deception of those suffering from gender dysphoria they were reassuring us that “God only whispers about sexual immorality.” As it was in the prophet Jeremiah’s day, so it is in our own:

“From prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace (Jeremiah 6:13b–14).

One of the greatest disappointments of the last several years has been the failure of so many Christian leaders. In too many cases they have lacked courage and conviction. Simple, God-fearing believers have been repeatedly lectured by our betters to toe the cultural, political, and educational party line during their attack on the moral order over the last few years. We saw erstwhile trusted leaders shut down their churches at the command of civil magistrates while marching in support of Black Lives Matter protests as if the virus magically withdrew from all public virtue signaling. We were told there is no Christian basis for abstaining from the covid vaccine. Indeed, we were shamed by accusations that refusal of the vaccine is a violation of the second great commandment.
As we watched businesses destroyed, livelihoods forever altered, children’s education retarded, and parents and other loved ones suffer and die alone in hospitals, sycophantic Christian leaders continued to scold us with reminders that pastors are not medical doctors and that we must always trust the science™ regardless of how often or flagrantly those championing that “science” refused to abide by it themselves. Failure to do so, we were assured by such leaders, is to buy into wild conspiracy theories. To add insult to injury, as facts have continued to come to light that expose the failures of our leaders, they continue to refuse to admit their failures. This is both strange and revealing for those exalted to lead practitioners of a religion of justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. True grace sets Christians free to live in faith and repentance. As Martin Luther put it in the very first of his 95 theses,

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” (Matthew 4:17) he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

Is a person who refuses to acknowledge his mistakes even practicing the same religion as Luther?
My love of a nation full of neighbors will not let me feign ignorance or remain quiet in the face of such demonic assaults on them. I want them to know the true God through faith in Jesus Christ.
I write as a Christian and a pastor. But I also write as a patriot. To some, that evokes charges of Christian Nationalism. Honestly? I don’t care. The longer I have lived as a Christian, the more clearly I have come to see that the second great commandment requires at least a modicum of patriotism. How can I love my neighbor as myself if I do not want my neighbor to enjoy the blessings and freedoms that I desire? And if I see those blessings and freedoms being destroyed by frontal assaults as well as by espionage and betrayal, is it loving to do nothing and stay silent?
If I know that “righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Proverbs 14:34), then how can I be ambivalent about the legalized slaughter of unborn babies or have my convictions so disconnected from my voting that I approve of a Christian voting for a Democrat candidate (whose party platform guarantees the protection of abortion on demand)? What kind of hatred must govern my affections for the person who is himself caught up in sexual perversion as well as for the children whom he grooms to declare that Drag Queen Story Hour in public libraries is “one of the blessings of liberty?”
My love of a nation full of neighbors will not let me feign ignorance or remain quiet in the face of such demonic assaults on them. I want them to know the true God through faith in Jesus Christ. I want them—and myself—to “live a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Timothy 2:2b). That is why I will pray for “kings and all who are in high positions” (1 Timothy 2:2a) as the Apostle Paul instructs all Christians to do. And such prayer leads me to action. Because it is insincere to pray for that for which I am not willing to use God-given means to acquire, I will also vote for those civil magistrates who will stand against wickedness and serve the cause of righteousness. And I will encourage all my Christian brothers and sisters to do likewise.
If that’s Christian nationalism, so be it. As Craig Carter so astutely noted recently, “if so, then maybe we could use a little old-fashioned Christian Nationalism.” Because one thing is certain. Our forefathers who founded this nation stood on the foundation of Christian thinking and Christian living that made possible the kind of democratic republic we have enjoyed. Those foundations have been intentionally destroyed by purveyors of wickedness. And the people of God have stood idly by as it happened.
The church of Jesus Christ has been commissioned by our Head to make disciples of all nations. The way that we do that is by teaching and preaching the Word of Christ—all of it, including both law and gospel. It is time that God’s people humble ourselves in the face of the undeniable reality that we have not fulfilled this commission very well in the last few generations of these United States.
May God grant us the grace to repent, to seek His favor and the power of His Spirit, and to give ourselves wholeheartedly to proclaim the lordship of our Christ throughout this nation once again.

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