05.01. The Evangel

1 The Evangel The hour is characterized by renewed interest in evangelistic work. Men of all shades of opinion, and men who do not seem to have very profound opinions of any sort, are nevertheless turning their attention towards the great subject of evangelism. I suppose there are a few people in the Christian Church who have no particular interest in the subject. All I can say of such is, that they are living in the mental mood of at least ten years ago. A new interest in evangelistic work is manifesting itself in different ways. Some people are giving themselves to prayer, that God will give us “an old-fashioned revival.” On the other hand, a great many people, equally devoted and sincere, yet who are out of harmony with what they speak of as the older methods of theological thinking, are nevertheless looking for some visitation. These, instead of praying for an old-fashioned revival are attempting to forecast the lines of what they call “the new evangelism.” Now I do not want to be unkindly critical, for I am profoundly conscious that the underlying fact in each case is of supreme value, but I would never pray for an old-fashioned revival, nor would I attempt to forecast the lines of a new evangelism. But why not pray for an old-fashioned revival? Because I want God’s next new thing. Then why not forecast the lines of a new evangelism? Because one evangel is enough for all time.

If a man is praying for an old-fashioned revival, in all probability when God’s visitation comes, he will not be conscious of it. I can quite imagine how forty years ago, men remembering the marvelous movement under Finney, might have prayed for an old-fashioned revival such as that which accompanied his preaching. Then it is more than likely that when God raised up Dwight Lyman Moody, such men would be out of sympathy with all his methods for a long while, for the notes of the two movements were utterly different. Or to go back still further before the great awakening under Finney, perhaps some prayed for an old-fashioned revival, like that under Wesley and Whitefield. If so, they almost certainly lacked sympathy with the new notes at first.

God fulfills Himself in many ways. In every new awakening there are fresh manifestations of God, new unfoldings of truth meeting the requirements of the age. The evangel is always fresh as the break of day, and yet as old as the continuity of day-break through the ages. We ought to be so living that when God begins His great triumphant march, we shall fall in with the first battalion, and have part in the first victories.

It is equally false to speak of a new evangelism, because there is to be no new evangel. When I read what that very brilliant, and very devoted Christian man, Dr. John Watson, says the lines of the new evangelism are to be, I am in agreement with all he does say, and out of agreement in that there are things he does not say. All he says is true. But there are important things he omits. The next great movement will have within it the notes of the social and the ethical. But there will not be omitted from it the notes of blood redemption, and spiritual regeneration. These are the truths we have to keep in mind. When I hear of men speaking of a new evangelism, it is well to ask their definition of the term evangelism. When I see that Mr. B. Fay Mills has gone out into evangelistic work the first impulse of the heart is to rejoice. But when I find that he is simply preaching a doctrine of a social kingdom, without insistence upon the necessity for regeneration, then it is time we declare our separation. To say that the new evangelism is to be ethical, and by that to seem to criticise the old, is to prove a misunderstanding of the old, and also a misunderstanding of the deepest necessity of the times in which we live and serve. When a man tells me the next revival will be ethical, does he mean to say that the last was not? If the great movements under Wesley, Whitefield, Finney, Moody were not ethical, what were they? They were movements that took hold of vast masses of men, and moved them out of back streets into front ones, and if that was not ethical, surely nothing can be so. Beginning with the regeneration of the man, they changed his environment, and made him a citizen of whom any city might have been proud. That is the true ethical note. In approaching a constructive statement concerning the evangel, I must ask you to take two things for granted: first, the finality of Christianity; and secondly, that the New Testament is the authoritative interpretation thereof. By the finality of Christianity I mean that the writer of the letter to the Hebrews is correct in his estimate as declared in his opening sentences. God speaks to man. He has spoken to men in the past in divers portions, and in divers manners. All the messages of prophets, seers, and psalmists, of rites, ceremonies, and symbols were but broken lights of essential truth. But He has spoken unto us by His Son, and He has no more to say to men than He has said in Jesus Christ. That does not mean for a single moment that we have perfectly understood the message of the Son yet. I believe that there is more light and truth to break out from the words of Jesus, and from the fact of Christ in the world, than men have ever seen. But God has said everything He has to say, and any new so-called revelation in conflict with that spoken by God in His Son is thereby proven to be not of the Spirit of God, but from beneath and of the devil. In the second place it must also be accepted that the New Testament is the authoritative interpretation of Christianity. I hear a good deal today about the Christian consciousness as the true court of appeal in matters of faith and practice. I am searching for that Christian consciousness. Is it that of the Pope, or my own? Is it consensus of opinion? Then where shall I find it expressed? I decline to accept it as expressed in any creed. Where then is it? The fact is that the Christian consciousness is a variable quantity according to differing experiences, and is therefore wholly unreliable as a criterion of creed or character or conduct. The Christian consciousness must ever be judged by a standard, and that is to be found in the New Testament. If you once take away the New Testament as the final court of appeal in matters of faith and practice, you will lose the Christian consciousness in half a century. It has been done once. The New Testament was lost to the churches in the dark ages. Then Luther arose, and following the restoration of the New Testament there came back the Christian consciousness. The court of appeal is the New Testament.

What is the Christian evangel? There is a preliminary question which I shall first attempt to answer. What is an evangel? This word evangel has come to us from the Latin evangelium, which simply means a gospel, for the word was introduced to the language during the ecclesiastical period. So we must pass back behind this word as it came to us from the Latin, and find it as it stands upon the pages of our Greek Testament. There it simply means a good message. A good message! There is no note of sadness in an evangel. There is not a tone of terror in an evangel. An evangel is good news. An evangel is a good message. In the New Testament the thought is invariably that of glad tidings, of good news, of a message that ought to fill the hearts of those who hear it with hope and gladness and joy. The word, and cognate words, are used by the writers of the New Testament who deal specially with the subject of the work of Christ in its first application to the needs of men. And these words are singularly absent from those writings which deal with the deeper truths of Christian experience. Take the Gospels, which we speak of as synoptic, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and you will find the words recurring all the way through, evangel, or evangelist, or some cognate word. But in the Gospel of John, the word is never used simply because the Gospel of John deals with the mystery of Christ’s Person, and this can only be appreciated by those born again. The evangel is the wicket gate of the kingdom. So also with the other writings. Paul, and Peter in his first epistle, and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews have these words, and this because they are in all these writings dealing with the initial facts. But they are signally absent from the writings of John and James and Jude, and the second letter of Peter. All this indicates the principal thought of evangelism, and the value of the word as it lies in the New Testament. The evangel is not denunciatory of sin. It is not pronunciatory of punishment. It is annunciatory of salvation. That is its great value. This is not to say that the preacher will not have to discuss the subject of sin, will not have to proclaim the punishment of sin. But it is to say that the preacher who deals with and denounces sin, will never end his message with such denunciation. He proclaims God’s evangel when he announces the fact that Christ is able to save from sin, and consequently from its penalty. So also the evangelist may have, and indeed will have to deal with the severer aspects of truth. He will have to tell men that to such as have heard the evangel, to such as have been confronted with the claims of Jesus Christ, there can be no escape if they turn their back upon that which is God’s uttermost in the way of saving men. But he will never proclaim that alone. He must super-add the great and glorious and hopeful declaration that their sins were borne by the One Who hung on the tree, and being so borne, in the infinite mercy and justice of God they may go free. An evangel, therefore, is good news to such as need it. Joy is in it, the note of hope, of optimism. It comes to a man in the darkness, and brings him light. It comes to a man in bondage, and announces the way of escape. It comes to a man under the sentence of death, and tells him that the sentence has been remitted.

What then is the Christian evangel as revealed to us in the New Testament? It has four essential notes. The first is that of a vision; the second, that of a value; the third, that of a virtue; and the fourth, that of a victory. The evangel proclaims first, the Lordship of Christ; secondly, the Cross of Christ; thirdly, the resurrection of Christ; and finally an indwelling Christ by the Holy Spirit.

First, the Lordship of Jesus. Now you may say to me, But have you put these in their right order? Is it not true that the first business of the evangel is to preach the Cross of Christ? I do not think so. I believe that the first note of the true evangel is that of announcing to men the Lordship of Christ. I am quite willing to grant you that very largely that has been omitted from much evangelistic preaching which has been blessed by God, and yet I am profoundly convinced that the evangelist who is going to take hold of the masses must return to the old apostolic method of preaching Jesus as Lord first. But it may be objected He cannot be Lord of a man’s life until the man is saved. Quite true, but the vast majority of people will never begin to feel their need of His salvation until they have been brought to stand in the light of the claim of His Lordship, and so I insist upon the putting of this first. This was the apostolic method. In Acts 2:1-47 we have the first sermon preached in the power of the outpoured Spirit, which is a perfect pattern for true Christian homiletics to the end of time. It is from first to last an appeal to the men who were listening. Peter was not preaching in front of the people and wondering whether they would like it. He was preaching to them. And the difference between the preaching that does nothing and the preaching that does something is the difference between preaching before people, and preaching to people. Let us look at its structure. It has two divisions. First, “This is that.” Secondly, “He hath shed forth this.” “This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel,” the present manifestation set in its relation to old time prophesying. This day of Pentecost is the fulfillment of the past. “He hath shed forth this.” The past was fulfilled through Jesus. He was the centre, and heart, and life of the first sermon. And the final word of the sermon, to which everything led up was, “Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly, that God hath made Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus Whom ye crucified.

Thus on the day of Pentecost Peter was proclaiming the Lordship of Christ. Confronting blind belief, and flippant scepticism, and idle curiosity, and surging sorrow, and blinding sin, and masterful passion, and everything else, he said “Jesus is Lord.” That was the first note. The evangelist, therefore, has first to confront this age and say to it, There is one King, one Lord, one Master, one seat of authority, one tribunal to which men may make their appeal. One Who upholds in His hands the balance of justice, from Whose verdict there can be no appeal, and Who is at this moment the Lord Jesus Christ. This is not a small theme. Start in to preach that, and you will find you will not finish it next Sunday morning; no, nor in a month’s sermons. Buddha and Confucius will have a great rest, and Browning and Tennyson and all the others with their rush lights will not allure you from the great essential light, the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

We have not merely to claim that Jesus is Lord, but we have to demonstrate that He is Lord. We have to show to this age in the light of a new century, with all its advance, and progress, and civilization, that Jesus Christ is Lord not merely because God has appointed Him King—though that is true—but because of His inherent royalty. God did not appoint Jesus to Kingship capriciously. He appointed Him to Kingship because He is King in the very fibre of His nature, in the very fact of His personality. We challenge the world today, and we say that the Jesus of the New Testament, the Jesus of the virgin birth, the virtuous life, the vicarious dying, and the victorious resurrection, stands amid this age, with all its fierce light, its boasted civilization, and its new psychology, facile princeps, the crowned Lord because of the supernal glory of His own character. But you tell me that these things are not authentic, that you have abandoned the Gospel of John, that Matthew and Mark and Luke are not to be trusted, and that in all probability that Man never existed. Very well. Then my business is to find the man who imagined this Man, for the man who imagined Him must be as great as the Man imagined. You do not get away from the Person revealed when you think you have done away with the books. He stands out in the midst of this age, our Master and Lord, and there never has been one like Him. And you and I have to tell men to test all sides of their nature by Jesus Christ. They have to bring up to His royalty their intellect, their emotion, their will. They have to test their creed, their character, their conduct by Him. He has moved into this new century with all its electric gaudiness, with the supernal loveliness of the King of men. And no man dare come into the presence of the Man of Nazareth revealed in the Gospels, and say, I am mightier or better than Thou, or, I know more than Thou knowest, O Man of Nazareth. He is the Lord of men, and our business is to proclaim it, to insist upon it, to die for it if need be. But if you stop there you are not preaching the Gospel. See what follows. If Jesus is indeed preached as Lord, there must always be as the issue of it an application of the truth to individual needs. No man ever yet stood searched by the light of that revelation of life without having to bow his head with shame, and say, I am a sinner. To preach the living Lordship of Christ is to create the necessity for His Cross. Do we sufficiently realize this?

If I said that the first note of the evangel is the Lordship of Christ, I am quite willing to grant that the heart of the evangel is the Cross. This age is peculiarly characterized by a loose sense of sin amongst men. We have today to preach to people who are not really willing to admit that they are sinners: pleasant, refined, cultured people, whom we hardly feel inclined to tell that they are sinners, and who, if we did, would not feel quite like believing it. There are people who will never have any consciousness of sin as long as we keep them at Mount Sinai. But there is not a man but that, if you bring him into the presence of Jesus Christ, and say That is your King, His law is your standard, His realization of life is your ideal, will go down in the presence of that and will say, I am a sinner. I have the profoundest sympathy for the young man in the Gospel who said, “All these things have I kept from my youth up.” I was born in a Christian family, and through that gracious fact—never to be undervalued—was strangely and wonderfully delivered from many of the more vulgar methods of sin, and I want to say to you, in all honesty, and all sincerity, I never trembled when I heard the law of Moses. But when I came into the presence of the radiant loveliness of Christ, when I heard his teaching, when I saw His perfection, then I said, If that is what I ought to be, O my God, how have I sinned! I stand in the presence of an external ethical code such as that of Moses, and I do not tremble. But whenever I come near the Incarnate Purity, into the presence of the Incarnate Love, I am ashamed, debased, bowed in the dust. Brethren, we must preach Christ as Lord, and there will come to our people a sense of sin, a consciousness of inability, of failure, of breakdown. There is no other way of bringing men into this consciousness.

Then, thank God, we have the next note of the evangel. Oh, how shall we tell it? May God keep us living so near to it that it shall always be to us an element of astonishment! Were the whole realm of Nature mine,
That were a present far too small,
Love so amazing, so Divine,
Demands my life, my soul, my all.

“Love so amazing!” Are we amazed at that Love? Are we astonished at that Love? Think of it, that ideally perfect One, that infinite Lord and Master, went down to death. If you are only preaching His Lordship, that is not enough. If all you have to preach to men is His example, that is not enough. Unless there is all that the New Testament claims there is in that death, then that death is the severest reflection upon the goodness of God that the world has ever seen. Unless there is a meaning in it, such as the New Testament declares to be in it, then in the presence of the Cross, I lose my faith in God. If death is simply the tragic ending of so beautiful a life, and nothing more, then God has done nothing when He ought to have done something. But when I take the New Testament, and see what Christ says about His own death, and what the inspired writers of the New Testament say, and when there comes superadded to the Christ’s estimate and the estimate of the apostles, the answer of my heart to the inner meaning of the Cross, then I know that the Cross is the heart and centre of a great evangel. We are to tell men we fail, but the One Who never failed took our place. You cannot get away from the words vicarious atonement. The Cross is supremely the heart and centre of our great evangel. But I am told today that there are men so cultured and refined that they do not care to talk about blood; men who cut out from the singing of the Church such hymns as, “There is a fountain filled with blood,” who object to sing, Not all the blood of beasts.

Why do you object to those things? You say they lack refinement? Refinement! Do you go to the Cross for refinement? You go to the Cross to see what sin is. Is blood objectionable? Of course it is. Is the brutal murder of a perfect man awful? Certainly it is. But why was it necessary? Because of sin. Sin is not refined, and I come to the Cross to know the meaning of my own sin. I find my sin when I stand in the presence of the light of the Cross. But I never know its meaning until I see the Lord Christ crucified. Certainly there is no refinement in it. We must get back to the Cross to know all its ruggedness, to know all its brutality, its blood-baptism. It is only there that the heart finds the conscience cleaned. I am going to put this superlatively. I am talking out of my deepest conviction when I say that if God would forgive me without the Cross then I never can be satisfied with His forgiveness. My own conscience is not at rest. There is that sin in the past, and if God says, I will forgive on the basis of pity, that is not enough, for it is there still. But when God says to me, It is not there, He, the Son of My love took it. He in Whom was no sin, was made sin, and in the passion of His death, in the agony of His baptism, in the blood of the brutal Cross, all of which had no place in His life, He was dealing with your sin, then my heart begins its song, the song that will never end while eternity lasts. My conscience demands this Cross, and God answers that deepest human consciousness of mine, which He Himself had made. We must be very suspicious of any new evangel that has no Cross in it.

There is yet another thing, and I am trying to trace them as they come in the order of experience. A man stands erect until he sees the vision of the Lord Jesus Christ, and then he is afraid until he sees the value of the Cross of Christ, and he says, I am a sinner forgiven. Now what else? I have to live in the same place, in the midst of circumstances against me, suffering the same temptations, still within the midst of forces which will entice me to sin, though I am forgiven. Then we must preach the value of the resurrection, that He “brought life and immortality to light,” that men may have life, not merely eternal life, but life as a force and virtue, a power and possibility in the life. I like my Lord’s words better than any other, “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly … I lay down My life for the sheep” and if I “lay it down,” I will “take it again.” And that is what He did, He laid it down in death, and took it again in resurrection. If righteousness is imputed to me because He died for me, holiness and a new righteousness are imparted to me because He lives in me. And that is the great message we have to bear to men today. There are thousands of men who will hardly thank you for the doctrine of forgiveness unless you can tell them there is salvation from the slavery of sin. And yet once again. A man will say, I saw the vision, and I knew I was a sinner. I have received the value and am forgiven by the Cross. There has been imparted to me its virtues, and I am enabled to do the things I could not do. But what other forces are there? Must I fight this battle alone? And there comes the crowning declaration of the evangel, never to be put off as a second subject, as a second blessing, or anything else. Right here in line is the coming to man of Jesus by the Holy Spirit, that Spirit to be the Paraclete, the Advocate, the One Who in the life is the dynamic, the force that shall produce the coming victory in the man.

What then shall I say to the men to whom I preach the evangel? One thing only, Submit to the Lord Christ. And if a man do that what then? Then the Lord Christ by the Holy Spirit will make over to him the value of His dying, will communicate to him the virtue of His living, will pour into him the victory of the indwelling Spirit. These three things are the necessary consequence of the submission of life to His Lordship. Men will not be saved by understanding the atonement. Men will not be saved by explaining the mystery of resurrection. Men will not be saved by explanation of the mystery of how the Spirit comes. They will just be saved by yielding to the Lord Christ. In the moment of yielding, He makes over to them all the virtues and values.

I have attempted to speak of the New Testament evangel. Let me close by saying, the evangel is the only one that meets the essential needs of human nature in any age. It is ageless. You cannot say it is old or new. It must be zealously guarded from addition or subtraction. To add conditions to the evangel of the New Testament, or to curtail it, is to make it valueless and vicious. To deprive the evangel of any note is to make it inoperative. If you are preaching an evangel with no vision of the Lord Christ, it is emasculated. If you are preaching an evangel without the value of His death, it is ænemic. If you are preaching an evangel with no virtue in it, it is sentimental. If you are preaching an evangel with no victory, it is hopeless.

If we have this great whole, the vision of the Lord, the value of His cross, the virtue of His life, the victory of His indwelling by the Spirit, you have yet to find me the city, the village, the nation, the people, the man, or the child, that will not have such good news as they are waiting for, and apart from which there can be no hope.