The urgency which is stimulated by the knowledge that men go either to heaven or hell at their death has been given poignant expression by William Carey in one of his sermons—to his hearers in India:
“I tried to explain to them the nature of heaven and hell and told them that, except our sins were pardoned we must go to hell. They said they would be like the prisoners in the Dingepore gaol. I said, no; for in prison only the body could be afflicted, but in hell the soul; that in a year or two a prisoner would be released, but he would never be freed from hell; that death would release them from prison, but in hell they would never die. I then told them how that God sent His own Son to save sinners; that He came to save them from sin; that He died in the sinner’s stead; and that whosoever believed in Him would obtain everlasting life, and would become holy. They said they were all pleased with this …”
These are touching words: “They were all pleased with this.” They were comforted to learn that in a situation of personal peril God had provided a way of deliverance through Christ. I know that Carey himself said he was “much cheered” by this evangelistic encounter.
The same compassionate urgency is found in Jesus’s weeping over a Jerusalem teetering on the edge of eternal destruction and in the Apostle Paul’s remarkable profession of willingness to become “accursed for the sake of the Israelites” so that they might be saved. I have felt touches of this myself. As I have stood on the corner of Broad and Olney in the Logan section of Philadelphia, I have joined with my fellow preachers in weeping over men and women passing by and casually passing into eternal death without a thought being given to their soul’s readiness.
Generally people do not expect such urgency from a person with my particular theological background. When I tell them that I have been with a Westminster Seminary student from one of my classes [who] presented with such intensity and concern in the open air in Philadelphia that he fainted, they find it hard to believe. What they expect from people in our theological tradition is to be laid back and certainly not all broken up over the prospect of sinners perishing in hell. After all, we seem pretty sure that we are the elect and that God one way or another will gather in the rest without much help from us.
But I think that is a wrong way of reading those who truly stand in the great tradition of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin.
It is true that hyperCalvinists tend to look upon the lost as stocks and blocks and at least sometimes to be indifferent to the biblical urgency. But there is a doctrinal reason why those who believe in the absolute supremacy of grace must have an attitude of missionary urgency. We do take seriously that men are “dead in their trespasses and sins.”
Just because we do see men without any ability to come to Christ on their own we are the more urgent. What does human inability mean? Why do we preach the sinfulness of sin? Our reason is that man in utter weakness is in peril. He has neither strength nor righteousness to bring to Christ. He cannot take a single step toward Christ without grace. If he were somewhat neutral as some believe, then later he might have another opportunity to turn to Christ in repentance and faith. But in the moment I speak to him he feels the Spirit striving with him and convicting him of sin. Now is the hour for him to turn to Christ. Is he helpless? Yes, he is. He is both spiritually dead and ready to perish eternally. Then let him look away from himself to Christ. All he needs is an eye of faith to look and be saved.
It is for this reason that we urge upon people their human inability in its various aspects—in order to encourage the right kind of despair: total despair in self driving people to faith in Christ. We are not trying to plunge men into a Kafkaesque abyss, but like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield, we want men to face the reality of Christ’s helping power and ordinarily they will not do that without some sense of their peril and their own incapacity to save themselves. It is pretty hard to understand the reality of Christ’s love unless you have been gripped by your own position under the wrath of God.
Taken from C. John Miller, “Building a Missionary Consciousness in the Local Church, The C. John Miller Manuscript Collection, PCA Historical Center, St. Louis, MO, unpublished (no date).
