I promise you that if I felt for one minute that anybody was going to go to hell because, somehow, I failed to make the necessary adjustments in the message to persuade them to believe, I would have a very hard time sleeping. That’s a pretty heavy burden to bear. I don’t think we own that kind of attitude. I believe that all of us who are here are here because we are not motivated by the emotional rhetoric of bad theology. We’re motivated by the Word of God, we’re motivated by Scripture. ~ John MacArthur
But nonetheless, somehow the – the fault must be ours. Maybe there are other ways to do this. Maybe we’re out of touch with the trends or the sensitivities or the style or the psychology of our time. Maybe we – we’ve got to find another way. Maybe we need to recognize that people are motivated psychologically, they’re motivated materially. They’re motivated emotionally, as we heard last night. They’re motivated intellectually.
It’s that kind of thinking, that kind of fleshly thinking that essentially is behind all evangelical adjustments in the gospel that, somehow, we’ve got to overcome the sinner’s resistance. And we do that by creating a message that the sinner doesn’t resist as much packaged in a style that is familiar to the sinner and with which he is somewhat comfortable. And by the way, the message needs to be both friendly and it helps if it’s also funny. So the church has always suffered from a sort of parade of entrepreneurial types who offer to change the results by changing the message. And I think that that must have been at least in the back of the minds of the disciples. Are we really going about this the right way? ~ John MacArthur
Read more