CHAPTER five
CHAPTER five
The Preacher and His Message
The Sermons That Changed the World
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You have heard about the crowds. You have heard about the open fields, the coal miners with their white-streaked faces, the Boston Commons pressed to danger with thirty thousand souls, the Cambuslang revival that shook Scotland to its foundation. You have heard about the controversies and the crossings and the cost. Now I want to take you inside the sermons themselves — inside the actual content of what I preached, the theological substance that drove every response, every tear, every transformed life. Because the crowds were not the point. The message was the point. The crowds were simply evidence that the message was reaching the people for whom it was intended.
I preached more than eighteen thousand sermons in the course of my ministry. Eighteen thousand. If you preached once every single day for nearly fifty years, you would reach that number. I did not preach once a day. I preached two, three, sometimes four or five times daily, in fields and churches and tabernacles and drawing rooms and market squares across England, Scotland, Wales, and the length of the American colonies. Each of those eighteen thousand sermons was, in its essential structure, the same sermon. Not in its words or its illustrations or its specific application, but in its substance. There was one thing I was determined to know and determined to preach, and that one thing was Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.
I want in this chapter to do something I have not done in the previous ones — I want to sit down with you inside the preaching itself. I want to walk you through the great themes that defined my ministry: repentance, the nature of the Almost Christian, the new birth, the knowledge of Christ, and the call to be not merely almost but altogether a follower of Jesus. These were not separate subjects to me. They were different angles of light falling on the same great truth — that every human soul is lost without Christ, that Christ is sufficient for every lost soul, and that the meeting between a lost soul and a sufficient Saviour is what the entire Gospel is about.
Let the Apostle Paul speak for me before I begin, for he expressed in a single sentence what I spent thirty-five years trying to demonstrate in every field and pulpit I ever occupied: (1 Corinthians 2:2 KJV) — "For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified." That was my determination. Not culture. Not social reform. Not theological system, however important theology is. Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. Everything else — every doctrine, every ethical principle, every pastoral application — flowed from that center and pointed back to it. Lose the center, and everything else becomes noise. Keep it, and everything else finds its proper weight and proportion.
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Sermon Theme I: The Nature of True Repentance
I want to begin where I almost always began in my preaching — with the human condition as it actually is, not as we prefer to imagine it. And the beginning of any honest account of the human condition is the reality of sin and the necessity of genuine repentance.
Repentance is one of the most misunderstood words in the religious vocabulary. Most people, when they think of repentance, think of a moment of regret — a brief, emotional twinge of guilt that passes as quickly as it came, leaving no lasting change. They think of a man who has done something wrong, who feels bad about it for an afternoon, who murmurs a prayer in the general direction of heaven, and who returns to exactly the same behavior the following morning. This is not repentance. This is what I called a counterfeit repentance — the form of remorse without the substance of genuine turning.
True repentance, as I preached it in every city and every field, is nothing less than a complete transformation of the dispositional nature of the soul. It is not the adoption of better habits. It is not the reformation of specific behaviors while the underlying nature remains unchanged. It is what the Apostle Paul described as being a new creature — a person in whom the old orientation of desire and will and affection has been replaced by a new one, worked by the sovereign grace of God through the instrument of genuine, Spirit-worked repentance.
I described the parts of true repentance as three: sorrow, hatred, and an entire forsaking of sin. The sorrow must be genuine — not mere regret that you have been caught, not self-pity over the consequences of your choices, but a genuine, deep grief at the reality of what sin is and what it has done. It is the sorrow of a person who has understood that sin is not merely a bad habit or a failure of willpower but an offense against a holy God who made you, loves you, and has every right to your whole-hearted obedience. When a soul truly grasps that — when the weight of what it means to have lived in rebellion against the Being to whom it owes everything finally lands — the sorrow that follows is not performed. It is real.
The hatred must follow the sorrow. Not a vague discomfort with the idea of sin in general, but a specific, settled, active hatred for the particular sins that have held you captive — a hatred that rises up in you when the temptation comes and says, no, I know what you are, I know where you lead, and I will not follow you any further. This hatred is not self-generated. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit, given to those who have genuinely encountered the holiness of God and understood the distance between that holiness and their own fallen nature. You cannot hate sin truly until you have seen it clearly. You cannot see it clearly until you have seen God's holiness. And you cannot see God's holiness except by the illumination of His Spirit working through His Word.
And then the forsaking — the actual, practical, behavioral change that is the evidence and not the cause of genuine repentance. I was always careful to say that forsaking sin does not save you. It is not the forsaking that purchases mercy. But genuine repentance always produces genuine forsaking, because you cannot truly hate what you continue to embrace. A man who claims to repent of drunkenness while going straight back to the tavern has not repented. He has performed a ritual of emotion that his behavior immediately contradicts. (Luke 13:3 KJV): "I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." The stakes are that high. There is no neutrality. There is no middle ground between genuine repentance and perishing. This is not my invention. It is the plain declaration of Jesus Christ Himself, who spoke those words with the full authority of the Son of God who would one day judge every soul. Repent, or perish. The invitation is merciful. The alternative is terrible. And the choice is yours.
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Sermon Theme II: The Almost Christian — A Warning From the Text
Of all the sermons I preached in thirty-five years of ministry, the one that provoked the most immediate and the most sustained response was the sermon I called The Almost Christian, drawn from the twenty-sixth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. I preached it in London churches and in American fields, in Scotland and in Wales, in drawing rooms and in market squares, and it never failed to cut through the comfortable numbness of religious performance and lay bare the dangerous distinction between religion as a social habit and religion as a life.
The occasion for the text was the examination of the Apostle Paul before Festus and King Agrippa. Paul, defending himself against false accusation, spoke with such compelling power about his own conversion and about the Gospel of Jesus Christ that Agrippa — a man of intelligence and some religious awareness, not a fool or a brute — was moved to make one of the most poignant and most dangerous confessions in all of Scripture: Almost thou persuades me to be a Christian.
Almost. That single word contains a world of spiritual tragedy. Agrippa had heard the most powerful preaching of the most gifted evangelist in the first-century church. He had heard the Gospel presented with the full force of Paul's extraordinary mind and his burning personal conviction. He had been moved. He was, in his own honest assessment, almost persuaded. And that almost — that remaining sliver of distance between where he was and where he needed to be — was, in the economy of eternity, the same as an infinite gulf. Almost saved is not saved. Almost persuaded is not persuaded. Almost Christian is not Christian. And yet how many people occupy exactly that position — close enough to the Gospel to be familiar with it, close enough to be genuinely affected by it at times, but not close enough to have made the total surrender that genuine faith requires.
Let me describe for you who the almost Christian actually is, as I described him in those sermons. He is not a bad man by the world's standards. He is not the flagrant sinner, the obvious reprobate, the person whose life is visibly disordered by vice or crime. The almost Christian is, in many cases, a thoroughly respectable person — honest in his business dealings, decent in his family relationships, moderate in his personal habits, regular in his church attendance. He has good instincts about religion. He knows that spiritual things matter. He has, at times, been genuinely moved by a sermon or a passage of Scripture. He is not indifferent. He is not hostile.
But he is halting between two opinions. He would reconcile God and the world — give God enough of his time and attention to satisfy a vague sense of religious obligation, while keeping back the deep center of his life for his own purposes. He depends heavily on outward ordinances — on baptism, on church attendance, on the sacraments, on the general fact of his belonging to a Christian community — as though these external associations could substitute for the internal transformation that the Gospel actually requires. He is, as I said, fond of the form but has never experienced the power. He attends the means of grace year after year, but like Pharaoh's lean Kine, he is never the better for them — and sometimes, by habituating himself to the form without receiving the substance, he grows harder and more resistant to the real thing than if he had never attended at all.
The danger of being an almost Christian is precisely that it is so easy to mistake for the real thing — both from the inside and from the outside. From the outside, the almost Christian looks like a respectable religious person. From the inside, the almost Christian feels like a religious person. He has enough of the form to satisfy the scrutiny of his neighbors and enough of the feeling to silence, most of the time, the quieter voice of his own conscience. He is not alarmed. He does not feel lost. He feels, on the whole, rather well-positioned. And that sense of being well-positioned, when the position is false, is the most dangerous place a human soul can occupy. (Revelation 3:17 KJV): "Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked." Knowest not. That is the most chilling phrase in the whole terrible portrait. He does not know. The almost Christian does not know the true state of his soul. He has the language of Zion without its life. He has the form of godliness without its power. He is on his way to a judgment he is entirely unprepared for, and the thing that makes him most unprepared is his absolute confidence that he is prepared.
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Sermon Theme III: The Altogether Christian — What the Real Thing Looks Like
Having described the almost Christian with what I hope was enough clarity to disturb the comfortable, I always moved in these sermons to the positive description — the altogether Christian, the genuine article, the soul that has not merely been moved by religion but has been transformed by grace. Because my purpose was never merely to alarm. Alarm without invitation is cruelty. My purpose was to alarm and then to invite — to show the dangerous ground and then to show the way off it and onto something solid.
The altogether Christian is distinguished not by the external markers of religion — not by church attendance or doctrinal knowledge or moral respectability, though all of these will be present in a genuinely transformed life — but by the internal reality of a new nature. He is a person in whom God's own life has been planted, in whom the Holy Spirit has taken up residence, in whom the deepest desires and the deepest delights have been genuinely reoriented toward God. He is not perfectly holy. He does not live without sin. He stumbles, he fails, he grieves over those failures in a way the almost Christian never quite manages to do. But the direction of his life is settled. The orientation of his heart is toward God and not away from Him.
The altogether Christian loves the Word of God — not as a duty but as a delight, because in its pages he meets the One who saved him, hears His voice, is instructed and corrected and comforted and inflamed. He loves prayer — not as a religious obligation to be dispatched and checked off, but as the natural breathing of a soul that has found the One it was always looking for and cannot bear to be long without His presence. He loves other believers — across denominational lines, across social lines, across all the divisions that the world considers important — because he recognizes in them the same Spirit that dwells in him, the same grace that has claimed them both, the same Lord who is all in all.
And the altogether Christian obeys. Not the grudging, calculating, minimum-required obedience of a servant who is doing only what is necessary to avoid punishment. The obedience of a person who has been genuinely loved and who genuinely loves in return — who says, with the Apostle John, that the commandments of God are not grievous, because they flow from a relationship of love and lead back to it. This obedience is not the basis of his salvation. He knows perfectly well that he is saved by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. But the obedience is the evidence of his salvation, and its presence or absence tells the truth about the inner state of the soul in a way that no amount of outward religious performance ever can.
I pressed this application home in every sermon, and I press it here: which are you? Examine yourself honestly. Not with the examiner you present to the world, or even to yourself in your more comfortable moments, but with the examiner that God Himself will apply when you stand before Him. Is the life of God genuinely present in your soul? Are you walking in the light, not perfectly, but really? Is Jesus Christ actually Lord of the deep center of your life — not merely acknowledged in theory but genuinely obeyed in practice? (2 Corinthians 13:5 KJV): "Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?" This examination is not meant to destroy you. It is meant to save you — to catch you, if you are in danger, before it is too late, and to press you toward the only remedy that has ever worked for any of us: coming to Jesus Christ with empty hands and a hungry heart and receiving what He freely gives.
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Sermon Theme IV: Jesus Christ, and Him Crucified — The Center of Everything
The sermon I loved to preach above almost all others was drawn from the second chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, where the Apostle Paul declared his single-minded determination: I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. These words were the motto of Paul's apostolic ministry. They became, in a very real sense, the motto of mine.
I want to explain carefully what it means to know Jesus Christ, and Him crucified, because the word know is doing heavy theological work in Paul's sentence. He does not mean a mere historical knowledge — knowing that a man named Jesus of Nazareth was executed by crucifixion outside Jerusalem in approximately 30 AD. That kind of knowledge is available to anyone who reads ancient history. It does not save anyone. The devil himself knows that much, and it has done him no good. Paul means something far more personal, far more transformative, far more demanding than bare historical awareness.
To know Christ is to know Him as prophet — as the One who speaks God's truth into your life with an authority that no human teacher can approach, whose Word is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, cutting through all the pretenses and self-deceptions that you have constructed to protect yourself from having to face what you actually are. To know Christ is to know Him as priest — as the One who has made the only atonement that heaven will accept for the sin of a human soul, who has offered Himself as the sacrifice that ends all sacrifices, who stands at the right hand of God making intercession for His people every hour of every day. To know Christ is to know Him as king — as the One whose rightful authority over every dimension of your life is not a tyranny to be resisted but the most liberating fact in the universe, because the King who has the right to command you also has the power and the will to save you.
And Him crucified. Not just the risen Christ in His glory, though He is risen and His glory is real. Not just the coming Christ who will judge the living and the dead, though He is coming and that judgment is certain. The crucified Christ — the Christ of Calvary, the Christ whose hands and feet were pierced and whose side was opened, the Christ who cried from the cross in a darkness that no sun has ever matched, the Christ whose last words included that devastating, world-changing cry, It is finished. This is the Christ I preached. This is the Christ whose cross is the only meeting point between the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man, the only place where justice and mercy embrace, the only ground on which a guilty soul can stand before the throne of God and not be consumed.
The cross is not a footnote to the Christian life. It is not one doctrine among many. It is the center — the hinge on which all of history turns, the point from which every true understanding of God and man and sin and salvation radiates outward. Remove the cross and you have a religious philosophy, perhaps a useful one, perhaps an admirable one, but not the Gospel. The Gospel is precisely and specifically the announcement that the Son of God took the sins of His people upon Himself at a specific time and place, bore the wrath of a holy God in their stead, and in doing so opened a way of access to God that no human effort or human goodness could ever have provided. (1 Corinthians 1:18 KJV): "For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God." The power of God. Not a power. The power. There is no other. Every human power — philosophy, morality, education, social improvement, therapeutic wisdom — is useful in its proper place and utterly helpless in the face of the one problem that actually needs solving: the alienation of a guilty soul from a holy God. Only the cross solves that. Only the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin. This is not theology. This is the testimony of every genuinely converted soul that has ever walked the earth.
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Sermon Theme V: The New Birth — God's Work in the Soul
The new birth was not simply my favorite sermon topic. It was the theological center of everything I preached, the lens through which every other doctrine was refracted, the test by which every soul's standing before God was ultimately measured. I preached it in every city and in every field because it was the thing that every person I ever addressed most urgently needed to hear and understand.
Let me state as plainly as I know how what the new birth is and what it is not. It is not baptism. Baptism is an important ordinance, an outward sign of an inward grace, a public declaration of belonging to the covenant community of God's people. But baptism does not save. A person can be baptized in infancy, confirmed in adolescence, attend church for eighty years, receive the sacrament every week, and still be entirely unregenerate — entirely without the new nature that genuine salvation produces. I know this is uncomfortable to say. I said it anyway, in the churches of England and the meeting houses of New England, and the discomfort it produced was precisely the point.
The new birth is not moral reformation. It is not the decision to live a better life, to break bad habits, to become a more respectable person. A man can reform his behavior in very significant ways through nothing but willpower and social pressure, without any work of the Holy Spirit in his soul whatsoever. Moral improvement is not new life. It is the rearrangement of a dead person's furniture. It makes the corpse look tidier. It does not make it breathe.
The new birth is, precisely and specifically, the implantation of the divine life in a human soul by the sovereign operation of the Holy Spirit, through the instrument of the Word of God, in response to genuine repentance and genuine faith in Jesus Christ. It is a change not of behavior but of nature — a change in what the soul fundamentally is, what it loves, what it desires, what it finds its joy and its sorrow in. The new birth produces new desires, new delights, new habits of heart. It produces a genuine love for God and for the people of God. It produces a hunger for the Word and a delight in prayer that no unregenerate person can manufacture, however sincerely they try.
I described the new birth, in my most famous sermon on the subject, as a fundamental change in a person's dispositional nature — a change in the orientation of the heart and life. Before the new birth, the deep gravitational pull of the soul is toward self and away from God. After it, that pull is reversed. Not perfectly and not without constant struggle — the old nature does not simply disappear at regeneration, and the battle between the old and the new continues throughout the Christian life. But the direction has changed. The dominant orientation has shifted. And that shift — that reversal of the soul's fundamental gravity — is the mark of the new birth, and nothing less than it is sufficient.
I asked every congregation I ever addressed: have you been born again? Not — are you religious? Not — are you a church member? Not — are you a decent person? Have you been born again? Has the Holy Spirit of God done this specific, radical, supernatural work in your soul? Because without it, I told them plainly, all the religion in the world will not help you when you stand before God. (John 3:3 KJV): "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." These are not my words. These are the words of Jesus Christ — words spoken not to a notorious sinner but to Nicodemus, a Pharisee, a teacher of Israel, a man who was by every external measure one of the most religious people in his society. You must be born again. There is no way around it, no substitute for it, no religious performance that can compensate for the absence of it. You must be born again. And it is freely available to every soul who will come to the One who spoke those words, in genuine repentance and genuine faith, and ask for the gift that only He can give.
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Sermon Theme VI: Justification by Faith — The Solid Ground
Beneath the new birth, as its ground and foundation, stands the doctrine of justification by faith — the great Reformation truth that a sinful soul stands righteous before God not on the basis of its own moral performance but on the basis of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, imputed to the believer through faith alone.
This is the truth that had rescued the church from its medieval captivity and that, in the eighteenth century, had been so thoroughly buried under layers of moralism and formalism that many churchgoing people had never heard it stated clearly in their lives. Justification is not a reward for good behavior. It is not the prize at the end of a course of religious achievement. It is the free gift of a sovereign God to a bankrupt sinner who has stopped trying to earn what he cannot earn and has opened his empty hands to receive what Christ freely gives.
I preached it this way: you owe a debt you cannot pay. Your sin has created an obligation before God's justice that no amount of good works, no length of religious observance, no depth of personal improvement can discharge. The debt is infinite because the offense is against an infinite God. And you — finite, fallen, imperfect — have nothing in your account with which to meet it. This is the human condition in its starkest form, and there is no softening it without destroying the Gospel.
But here is the Gospel: Jesus Christ paid the debt. He lived the perfectly obedient life that you owe and could never live. He died the death that justice demanded for your sin — not His sin, He had none, but yours, which were laid upon Him at Calvary with the full weight of divine wrath. And the righteousness that He earned, the perfect obedience of the Son of God to the Father's will, is credited to the account of every person who comes to Him in faith. Not given to those who earn it. Not offered as a reward to those who partially deserve it. Freely given, as a gift, to those who simply receive it.
The Apostle Paul expressed this with a precision that I spent my whole career trying to communicate to my congregations: (Romans 5:1 KJV): "Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." Peace with God. Not merely peace of mind, though that will follow. Not merely the absence of guilt feelings, though those may subside. Peace with God — the actual, forensic, settled reality that the enmity between your soul and its Maker has been removed, that the wrath that your sin deserved has been exhausted in the body of Christ, that you now stand before the God of the universe not as a condemned criminal but as a beloved child. That peace is not something you work toward. It is something you receive, through faith, the moment you trust the finished work of Jesus Christ and stop trusting in anything of your own. It is, in my experience and the experience of everyone who has genuinely received it, the most wonderful and most solid ground in the universe to stand on.
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Sermon Theme VII: Obedience and the Conditional Nature of Salvation
I have spoken, in these pages and in every sermon I ever preached, of salvation as a free gift received by faith. And I want to be absolutely clear about that — it is free, it is by grace, it is not earned. But I have also spoken, from the very beginning of this account, of salvation as conditional. And I want to be equally clear about that, because these two truths belong together, and separating them produces either despair on one side or presumption on the other.
Salvation is conditional upon faith. Real faith. Not merely intellectual agreement with a set of propositions about Jesus Christ — the devils believe and tremble, as the Apostle James observed, and it does them no good. Real faith is the act of the whole person — mind, will, and affection — in coming to Jesus Christ in genuine reliance on Him as Saviour and Lord. It is not a feeling, though it often involves deep feeling. It is not a momentary emotional experience, though genuine conversion often involves intense emotion. It is the settled, decisive, persevering orientation of the soul toward Jesus Christ as the only foundation of hope.
Salvation is also conditional upon repentance. Real repentance. Not the remorse that lasts until the emotional intensity fades. Not the confession that is not accompanied by forsaking. Real repentance — the turning of the whole person away from sin and toward God, the change of mind about sin and about Christ that produces a genuine change of direction in the life.
And salvation is conditional upon continuing obedience — not the obedience that earns, but the obedience that evidences. A person who claims to have been saved but who shows no fruit of transformation, who continues in deliberate, unrepentant rebellion against what God has revealed to be His will, has very little grounds for confidence in the genuineness of their conversion. Not because obedience purchases salvation, but because genuine faith always produces obedience. Always. The faith that does not produce any obedience is not genuine faith. It is the form of faith without its substance — the almost Christian's substitute for the real thing.
I told my congregations plainly: I cannot give you false comfort. I cannot tell you that a prayer prayed in childhood and a baptism performed in infancy and a confirmation received in adolescence are sufficient guarantee of your standing before God, regardless of the state of your soul today. What I can tell you is that if you are genuinely in Christ — if you have truly repented, truly believed, truly surrendered the deep center of your life to His Lordship — then you are safe. Completely, eternally, irrevocably safe, as long as you follow and obey Christ. Not because of your performance, but because of His. (Hebrews 5:9 KJV): "And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him." Unto all them that obey him. The obedience here is not perfect obedience — if it were, none of us would qualify. It is the obedience of faith, the obedience of a person whose life is genuinely oriented toward Christ, who is genuinely walking in the light, however imperfectly. That person — that genuinely repentant, genuinely believing, genuinely obedient person — is safe. And nothing in heaven or earth or hell can pluck them from the hand of the One who has claimed them as His own.
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Sermon Theme VIII: The Marks of a True Believer — How to Know You Are Born Again
One of the most pressing pastoral questions I encountered in every city and every field was the question that genuine seekers asked in the aftermath of a powerful sermon: how do I know? How do I know whether what I have experienced is genuine? How do I know whether my faith is real or counterfeit? How do I know that I am not simply an almost Christian who has had an emotional experience and mistaken it for the real thing?
These were not foolish questions. They were honest ones, and they deserved an honest answer. I gave one. Not to produce a checklist that people could use to reassure themselves falsely, but to provide genuine markers of authentic spiritual life that could be tested in the experience of the daily walk.
The first mark of genuine new birth that I always described was a changed relationship with sin. Not sinlessness — I was never so foolish as to teach that the new birth removes the capacity for sin in this life. But a changed relationship. The truly converted person cannot continue in deliberate, comfortable, untroubled sin. Sin troubles him. It grieves him. When he fails — and he will fail — he does not shrug and move on. He is broken by it. He repents of it genuinely and specifically. He hates it in himself with a hatred that comes not from wounded pride but from genuine grief over having dishonored the One who has loved him so extravagantly. The person who claims conversion but sins without this grief, without this brokenness, without any apparent desire to change, has not understood what has been done to them in Christ.
The second mark was a genuine love for the people of God — not a theoretical, doctrinal love for the concept of the church, but a real, warm, active love for actual believers, including those whose backgrounds and temperaments and theological expressions differ from one's own. When a soul has been genuinely born again, it recognizes in other regenerate souls a kinship that transcends every human division. The coal miner and the countess, if both are genuinely in Christ, have more in common with each other than either has with the unregenerate person of their own social class. That recognition — that felt solidarity across every other line — is one of the most reliable marks of genuine spiritual life.
The third mark was a hunger for God Himself — not merely for the benefits of religion, not merely for the comfort of forgiveness or the relief of guilt, but for the person of God. For His Word. For His presence in prayer. For the experience of His nearness in worship. The genuinely converted person finds that the things that once satisfied the soul — the pleasures and distractions of the world — have lost something of their grip, while the things of God have gained an attraction they never previously held. This does not mean the struggle disappears. The world is still attractive. The flesh still pulls. But there is now a competing attraction — stronger and deeper and more enduring — toward the things of the Spirit. And that competition, that inner war between the old nature and the new, is itself one of the marks of genuine regeneration.
The fourth mark — and I pressed this in every sermon — was a life of active, practical holiness. Not perfect holiness. Not holiness without struggle or failure. But the consistent, genuine, visible effort to live as a person who belongs to Jesus Christ. To speak truthfully. To deal honestly. To give generously. To treat every other person — however different, however difficult, however low in the world's estimation — with the dignity that belongs to an image-bearer of God. (1 John 2:3-4 KJV): "And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him." A liar. Not a struggling believer. Not a weak Christian. A liar. The man who says he knows Christ and keeps not His commandments — not the one who struggles and fails and rises and repents, but the one who makes no genuine attempt at all — that man's claim to know Christ is not a claim that truth supports. The evidence of genuine faith is always a life that is moving, however imperfectly, in the direction of Christhkeness. Where that movement is absent, the faith it supposedly proceeds from deserves serious examination.
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Sermon Theme IX: The Urgency of Now — Preaching to the Present Moment
One of the things that distinguished my preaching from the conventional preaching of the eighteenth century was its urgency. Most sermons of that era were delivered in a tone that implied, however unintentionally, that the matters being discussed were interesting and perhaps important, but not particularly pressing. The congregation could hear them, consider them at leisure, and act on them at some future time more convenient than the present. My sermons could not be received that way. I would not allow it.
The urgency came from a conviction that has never left me: every person I ever addressed was one breath from eternity. They did not know which breath would be their last. The farmer in the third row might not live to see sunrise. The fashionable lady in the gallery might die before she reached her carriage. The young man in the back with the skeptical expression might be dead before the week was out. This is not a morbid exaggeration. It is the plain, statistical truth about every congregation that has ever assembled anywhere at any time. None of us knows the hour of our death. And if the message I was preaching was true — if the stakes were genuinely as high as the Gospel declared them to be — then deferring was not a neutral act. It was a choice with eternal consequences.
I pressed this with everything I had. I told my congregations that the road to hell is paved with good intentions — with the perpetual intention to repent tomorrow, to seek God next week, to make the decisive surrender when circumstances are more favorable. Tomorrow is not promised. Next week may not come. And the God who is so patient with human delay is also a God of justice who will not be mocked forever. The door of mercy is open now. It may not be open forever. The Spirit who is drawing you toward God today may not draw you tomorrow with the same intensity — conscience, like every other faculty, grows more calloused with repeated neglect, and the man who has hardened his heart a hundred times against the Gospel's appeal will find it increasingly difficult to respond at all.
I developed this theme most fully in a sermon I preached many times on the words of Jesus in Luke's Gospel, where He speaks of the rich man who built bigger barns and died before he could enjoy them — the man whose final night on earth found him making plans for a future he would never see, with a soul that was entirely unprepared for the eternity that was already rushing toward him. That man was not a monster. He was not a violent criminal. He was a successful businessman, comfortable and prosperous, who had simply assumed that God and eternity could wait. They could not. They cannot. They never could and they never can.
I ended almost every sermon with a direct, personal appeal. Not as a rhetorical technique — I was always suspicious of the preacher who manipulates emotion for its own sake, and I tried to guard against that in myself. But as a genuine, earnest, from-the-heart appeal to every person in the crowd to stop deferring and to come to Christ now, in this moment, while the Spirit was moving and the Word was fresh and the door was standing open. (2 Corinthians 6:2 KJV): "Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation." Now. Not at a future date more convenient to your schedule. Not when you have arranged your affairs to a more suitable state. Not when you feel more ready or more worthy or more spiritually prepared. Now — exactly as you are, with all your sins and all your failure and all your half-formed intentions and your long history of delay. Now is the accepted time. Now is the day of salvation. Come now. I could not then and I cannot now say it in any simpler or more urgent way. Come now. Every moment you wait is a moment's distance between you and the only peace that lasts.
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Sermon Theme X: Holiness of Heart and Life — The Goal Beyond Conversion
In my earlier years of preaching I was sometimes accused — not entirely without justice — of preaching conversion without adequately addressing what came after it. The charge was that I set people on fire and then left them to burn without tending the flame. I took that criticism seriously, and as my ministry matured I gave increasing attention to the life that follows genuine conversion — to what it looks like and what it requires to grow in Christhkeness over the long haul of a Christian life.
I preached what I called holiness of heart and life as the ongoing goal of the believer. Not a holiness that could be achieved once and then rested in — I had no time for the doctrine of sinless perfectionism that some in the revival claimed to teach. The idea that any person on this side of glory had so thoroughly conquered indwelling sin as to be beyond the reach of temptation or the possibility of failure struck me as both theologically mistaken and practically dangerous. It encouraged precisely the kind of spiritual complacency that produced the almost Christian — the person who had convinced themselves they had arrived when they had, in fact, merely begun.
Real holiness is progressive. It is a direction and a journey, not a destination achieved in this life. The believer grows in Christhkeness over time — not at a uniform rate, not without setbacks and failures and seasons of apparent stagnation, but genuinely and measurably over the arc of a life lived in submission to the Holy Spirit and in constant engagement with the Word of God. The person who is genuinely born again will not be the same person in five years that they were at conversion. The rough edges will have been smoothed somewhat. The dominant sins will have lost some of their grip. The virtues that were barely visible at conversion will have grown more substantial. This is not automatic. It requires the disciplines of prayer and the Word and fellowship and self-examination. But it is real, and its absence over a long period raises serious questions about whether the conversion it supposedly followed was genuine.
I also preached the necessity of what I called denying self — the daily, active, ongoing refusal to let the self-centered impulses of the fallen nature have their way. This was not asceticism for its own sake. I had tried that in my Oxford seeking days and had nearly killed myself. It was something more specific and more targeted: the deliberate, repeated choice to say no to the demands of self-will wherever they conflicted with the will of God, and yes to the disciplines and the obedience that genuine faith requires. To wake up and give the first of the day to prayer rather than to the newspaper. To open the hand when the instinct is to close it. To speak truth when a comfortable evasion is available. To persevere in the calling when everything in you wants to stop. This is what denying self looks like in practical daily life, and it is both costly and necessary.
The goal of all of this — the goal of every sermon I ever preached, every exhortation I ever gave, every pastoral letter I ever wrote — was not merely that people would be converted, important as that is. It was that people would be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. That the character of the Son of God would be reproduced, however partially and however gradually, in the lives of those who belonged to Him. That the world would look at men and women who had been genuinely transformed by the Gospel and would see in them something that it recognized as the life of Jesus — the love, the compassion, the courage, the truthfulness, the generosity, the joy. (Romans 8:29 KJV): "For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren." Conformed to the image of His Son. That is the ultimate goal of salvation. Not merely to escape hell. Not merely to arrive at heaven. To be made like Jesus Christ — to bear His image in the world, to reflect His character in the ordinary days and the difficult ones, to become, over a lifetime of grace and struggle and growth, a person in whom others can see something of the One who saved them. That was the vision I had for every soul that came to me weeping in a field, or sat trembling in a church, or fell to their knees at a revival meeting. Not just conversion. Transformation. Not just a decision. A life. The whole, full, magnificent, costly, joyful life of a person who belongs entirely to Jesus Christ and is being made, day by day, more like Him.
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The Preacher Behind the Sermons
I want to close this chapter by saying something about the man who preached these sermons — not in order to focus attention on myself, but because I think it matters for you to understand that the preaching did not come from a detached, theoretical theologian who had worked out a system in a study and was presenting it to an audience. It came from a person who had been broken by the very truths he preached, who had experienced in his own soul the transition from almost to altogether, who knew from the inside what it felt like to be lost and what it felt like to be found.
Every sermon about repentance that I preached was colored by my memory of those Oxford months — the fasting, the cold vigils, the desperate seeking of a man who had seen his own emptiness and would not rest until he had found what he lacked. Every sermon about justification was colored by the memory of that May morning in 1735 when the weight of guilt lifted and the peace of God flooded through a soul that had been straining under its own efforts for so long. Every sermon about the new birth was the testimony of a man who had been born again and who knew, from the most intimate personal experience, what that birth felt like and what the life it produced looked like from the inside.
I preached what I knew. Not merely what I had studied, though I had studied deeply. Not merely what I had been taught, though I had been taught well. I preached what I had lived — the desperation of the seeking, the wonder of the finding, the daily reality of a life transformed by grace and sustained by the mercy of a Saviour who does not give up on His people. And that lived quality — that first-person, experiential authority — was, I believe, a significant part of why the preaching carried the weight it did.
You cannot preach genuinely what you have not genuinely received. You can perform it. You can approximate it. You can produce a skilled imitation that moves people emotionally without ever touching them at the level of genuine conviction. But the real thing — the preaching that the Holy Spirit inhabits and uses to do His sovereign work — comes from a preacher who is not merely presenting a message but bearing witness. A witness to what he has seen and heard and experienced in the interior life of his own walk with Jesus Christ.
This is why I could not stop preaching. Not because I was constitutionally unable to rest — though there was truth in that too. But because a witness who has seen something extraordinary cannot simply decide to be quiet about it. The weight of what I had seen, the weight of what I knew to be at stake, the weight of the millions of souls on both sides of the Atlantic who had not yet heard the word that had set me free — that weight pressed upon me every morning when I woke and every evening when I lay down, and it sent me out again and again to the fields and the squares and the tabernacles and the drawing rooms. Not for my own sake. For theirs. And for His.
I also want to say, before we leave this chapter on the sermons themselves, that the content of those sermons was not original to me. I did not invent the Gospel. I did not discover the doctrines of grace or the necessity of the new birth. I stood in a long line of witnesses stretching back through the Reformation to the Apostles themselves, and I preached what that line of witnesses had always preached: that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. My contribution, if I may call it that, was simply to preach that old message with a freshness and an urgency that the settled, formal Christianity of my era had largely forgotten. To go to where the people were — the fields and the streets and the commons — rather than waiting for the people to come to where the church had decided preaching was appropriate. To speak as one person to another, with genuine passion and genuine personal urgency, rather than as an official representative of an institution performing a prescribed duty.
That is what I was, and what I tried to be, in every sermon across thirty-five years of ministry. A witness. Not an expert. Not a performer. Not a professional religious communicator. A witness — a man who had encountered the living Jesus Christ in an Oxford room in 1735, who had never recovered from that encounter, and who spent the rest of his days trying to describe what he had seen to anyone who would listen. (1 John 1:1-3 KJV): "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life... that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ." That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you. That is the preacher's calling in its most essential form. And that is what I have tried to do in every page of this account — to declare to you what I have seen and heard, that you also might have fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ, and that your joy, like mine, might be full.
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The Voice of the Great Awakening
— George Whitefield —