Written by Stanley D. Gale |
Tuesday, June 21, 2022
It is the Spirit who opens eyes to His beauty and opens ears to His call. Whether at the tomb of Lazarus or before the Athenian philosophers or to the hearers assembled before us, the response of the congregation is not elicited by the preacher but by the One preached.

A group of pastors was talking about preaching, evangelistic preaching in particular. The question was raised about the appropriate way to urge people to profess faith in Christ. How do we appeal to our listeners so that they know a response is necessary for them to realize the benefits of the gospel?
The group was theologically savvy enough to know that they could not cajole anyone into the Kingdom. They fully believed the apostle when he says: “My speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:4–5).
They recognized that they were not to be spiritual salesmen but spiritual midwives, working in tandem with what God would bring about.
The question then remains. How do we preach to the will? Knowing that many in our congregations are without the Spirit of God and thus do not have ears to hear (1 Cor. 2:11, 14), how do we speak to them with an eye to their confessing Christ?
Let’s examine our personal experience. How did you come to Christ? For me, I had heard the gospel in full or in part many times. But there came a point when what was at one time absurd to me began to make sense, what was repugnant began to be savory, when that which I resisted became irresistible.
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We learn a great deal about ourselves when we rub up against people who think, live, work and act differently to us. We often learn, not just how annoying other people are, but why they might find us difficult and annoying. Sometimes they might well have a point and often we have to find a way to work through it. If we can’t, we are going to struggle in the church because Jesus tells us, ultimately, we must.

In any church, you will rub against people you don’t get on so well with. There are always people whose personalities we gel with better than others. I’m not talking about people who sin against you (though that will happen), I just mean people will naturally gravitate to certain other people and may find others rub them up the wrong way.
The world’s answer to such situations is to cut such people out. If you don’t click with someone, then forget about them. If you don’t like them so much, just avoid them. If you feel someone just isn’t your cup of tea, you don’t have to have anything to do with them. Just keep out their way and leave them to get on with being themselves, somewhere far far away from you.
But in the church we cannot do that. We shouldn’t do that. We have to love our brothers and sisters. How can we say we love God but hate our brother or sister? John’s answer is that we can’t. But even if we don’t hate them, we just don’t get on with them, we can’t easily do any of the one another things Jesus commands us to do from a distance.
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That Rome and its emperor were “problematic” in various ways would have been plain to any Jew or Christian (and not a few pagans) who gave it much thought. On the other hand, the imperial system seems not have served as an especially high-priority ideological or theological target, which is the real rub for many: it is embarrassing to contemporary sensibilities that expect vibrant critique, protest, and resistance to the political realm.

You have adopted the proper course, my dear Pliny, in examining into the cases of those who have been denounced to you as Christians, for no hard and fast rule can be laid down to meet a question of such wide extent. The Christians are not to be hunted out; if they are brought before you and the offence is proved, they are to be punished, but with this reservation – that if any one denies that he is a Christian and makes it clear that he is not, by offering prayers to our deities, then he is to be pardoned because of his recantation, however suspicious his past conduct may have been. But pamphlets published anonymously must not carry any weight whatever, no matter what the charge may be, for they are not only a precedent of the very worst type, but they are not in consonance with the spirit of our age.[1]
This correspondence of the emperor Trajan with Pliny the Younger, the sitting governor of Bithynia and Pontus, has been notorious in Christian circles for a long time. Even Tertullian was commenting on it about a century afterward. Most stunningly for moderns, Trajan advertises the Roman policy of religious repression in quasi-progressive terms: “Yes, my dear Pliny, punish, torture, and execute incorrigible Christians as they pop up, but let’s not have any witch-hunts now; this is the ninth century ab urbe condita, after all.”
Eyes may be rolled justifiably at Trajan’s self-congratulatory little tag—nec nostri saeculi est, such nonsense “doesn’t belong in our age,”—yet it and the rest of the letter tip the Roman hand, at least in this particular period, which comes near the apex of Roman power.
Namely, acute ideological, religious, or theological conformity did not necessarily constitute a political desideratum unto itself, certainly not as it has for many a modern regime. By the far the greater concern taking shape in the emperor’s mind is breakdown in the public social order. To be sure, Christians themselves might threaten that order in certain ways (e.g., their apparent egalitarianism for one, as per the female slaves apparently serving as officers for the community), though Pliny himself in the first letter seems at pains to stress that most of what they appear to be up to is fairly harmless on that front, albeit misguided.
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