IT is ever a good thing to have the eyes opened to facts, even though the facts be distressing. To live in the imagination that all is going on well, when the absolute contrary is the case, is but to live in a vain show, to live life in unreality. God has done much latterly to open Christian people’s ears and eyes to the real state of the professing Church, and to prove to them that the boasted progress of today is, as far as Christian faith goes, progress towards the apostasy foretold in the Scriptures.
The most treasured of Christian truths are scorned, in not a few instances, even by ministers of the Christian religion, and truths once revered as the very holiest of all are defiled by the boldest infidelity. Twenty years gone by, it would have been deemed miserable croaking to whisper, that we should live to see men rejecting the truth of the atonement, permitted to hold high places in what are called orthodox Christian communities, or to find the protests of Protestants perishing as uncharitable speeches out of the land.
What will a few more years bring forth? The seeds of infidelity are sown broadcast over the land, and every fresh crop of weeds only multiplies a thousand-fold the awful and soul-destroying growth. “The time will come,” says the word of God, “when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;” and really it would seem that that dark day here foretold is present. The prophecy continues: “And they shall turn away their ears from the truth” —showing the willful character of the perverseness, and it closes: “and shall be turned unto fables” (2 Tim. 4:3, 43For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; 4And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. (2 Timothy 4:3‑4)). For the judgment of God lies upon the perverse, so-called Christians, who reject His truth. Men are already being turned to the fables of Buddha in our “Christian England,” while blank, dead No-God-ism is an accepted creed by many. “Benevolent agnosticism” merely tolerates the acceptance of the Christian faith in “weak-minded” men and women out of consideration for their feeble brains!
Christians in deed, and not in name, need arouse themselves. Every believer in God and His truth has a work to do, and probably but little time in which to do it. The same page which foretells what is now upon us, gives us our orders for the battle— “But watch thou in all things.” Be thou awake thyself in all things, arouse out of the easygoing, featherbed Christianity that prevails—for who can deny that the very privileges our forefathers won for us by their blood, have become but armchairs for us to repose in? Who can question that the favors of God to us in this our day of Christian liberty are too often made by us but a bed of ease upon which to lie? God calls us to the front, to labor, and to suffering, and such a life must be one of trial, and hence runs the order of the day, “Endure afflictions.”
The indifference of believers, and of the day, is to be met by a wakeful spirit; its ease, by the endurance of afflictions; its infidelity, by the evangelist’s labor, “Do the work of an evangelist.” The scornful men, still called Christians, who believe in no God, require to hear the gospel of God. Or, if they have so turned away their ears from the truth that they will not listen to it, or if because of their perverseness, God has in judgment turned their minds to believe fables, then their scholars and their dupes require to hear the truth. “Do the work of an evangelist,” then, fellow Christian. Labor for souls, for that is the evangelist’s work, and for this work, heart, not gift, is requisite.
“Do the work of an evangelist!” Be the sphere of the work where it may, be you man or woman, rich or poor. Let the field of labor be that of the large congregation, the Sunday school, or, more important still, the private circle and the home life— “Do the work of an evangelist.”
Remember what an evangelist is, one sent from God to proclaim His heart of love to perishing men. The affectionate appeal, the loving testimony, the witness to what Jesus is, and to what He does for souls, have in them such winning power, that nothing this day’s religion offers, can approach unto. There is power in the gospel that infidelity cannot withstand; there is might in the truth of God, that no lie of the devil can resist—labor then for souls.
Meet modern infidelity by doing the work of an evangelist; meet the agnostic by the truth of the love of God; meet the remorse that the service of sin produces in the soul in the slave of sin, by the truth of the preciousness of the blood of Christ; meet the blank, dead creed of no future existence, by tears such as Jesus shed over the refusers and rejecters of God’s grace. “Do the work of an evangelist.”
Modern infidelity must be met, as all infidelity has to be met, in God’s way, by God’s power. The heathen are converted to God from their idols by the truth of God’s gospel; the practical heathen in our own cities and villages are converted to God in the same way, and so are the educated, the refined, the learned, who ridicule the word which in their souls they do not comprehend.