There is an earlier grace in our fallen world – even that promise made in Eden – and later periods of reviving grace are poured out on a nation. There can be in a family a person touched by the Christian message who can do many sacrificial things, caring, serving patiently, denying herself for others, creating, working in a serving profession. There is something precious of the divine image about him or her, a spirit of service and a clean conscience. We thank God for much of that observable in our grandparents’ generation in the UK. But with all of the momentum of an earlier grace, unregenerate persons cannot see the beauty of Christ the Saviour without the heart-work of the Spirit.
Geoff Thomas
‘Why do we preach the gospel of the love of God to dead men?’ It is in order that they should discover the demands of God and their own helplessness. Such preaching can become operative under God’s blessing to their salvation. ‘But the bondage of the will is a counsel for despair!’ the world says. But is the teaching and the reality true? Is that diagnosis of the human condition by Jesus, his apostles and prophets true? Then how can it be against the interests of evangelism to hide this prognosis from them?
A man with cancer will not bless a doctor who tells him he simply has a cold. He might like the news then but as the pain increases he will lament that cheap false comfort that he once received. Nothing is more inimical to the interests of evangelism than to encourage a vestige of hope that some day, some time, somehow a person will shrug and then decide it is time for him to become a Christian.
