In 1961 my father, at the age of 46, became a follower of Jesus Christ.
Within a week my mother stood at his side, having been converted at an evangelistic business dinner.
My father led us back to the local Presbyterian church at which his grandfather had been a foundation elder. My dad was soon to become an elder at that church and was in the vanguard of promoting involvement in the forthcoming Billy Graham meetings in Sydney in 1968.
However, such was the state of the church, enduring a long history of liberalism, involvement in the Graham meetings was opposed and any advertising of the event was resisted.
The minister at the time was an immigrant whose English was not good, and though orthodox, was not influential and was overshadowed by other more liberal leaders in the church.
I heard many preachers at that time whose theological commitment was liberal and was greatly helped to recognise it for the poison it was and to resist it, by our local youth leader.
Here is what I remember about it:
It sounded good; as orators, the liberals could deliver a message pleasing to the ears.
It sounded true enough; the speaker could refer to the cross and resurrection but didn’t really believe in the true meaning of either. The cross became an example, rather than the place of the atoning sacrifice for sin; the resurrection was not the triumphant bodily raising of Christ, paying no concession to death, but became a spiritual event in which the spirit of the dead Christ somehow lives on.
It was heavily moralistic; the fruit of the Spirit was preached without presenting each quality as though it was a fruit of having the Holy Spirit indwell the believer.
The Bible was treated as an irrelevance and, if referred to at all, a literal understanding was discounted and sometimes openly mocked.
The gospel was an exhortation to pull oneself up and try harder, to be good and shed light by one’s example. One particularly influential liberal preacher in Sydney at the time gave weekly pop psychology talks: engaging, contemporary, but powerless.
It was all so powerless and empty, it had the sound of something substantial but no substance. It was when I heard true faithful Bible preaching that I realised that listening to the liberal preachers was as satisfying as sitting down to a meal of fairy floss, it looks good, delicious, but it is vacuous!
Tragically, this spiritually destructive preaching seemed to sweep many of my generation away, either to embrace it and so kill the new life in Christ, or take its victim into spiritual disinterest.
Being a student first at SMBC and then Moore College, reading ‘God has spoken’ by JI Packer, being taken through Hammond’s, ‘In Understanding be Men’ by DB Knox, listening to the preaching of Keith McPhail, John Chapman, Graham Miller, Marcus Loane and of course, Billy Graham, all were used by God to bring me into His Kingdom and to have settled, Bible-honouring convictions.
What are these convictions?
The conviction that God is a saving God and he saves people through hearing His gospel of the perfect life, substitutionary death and bodily resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ.
That the ministry of preaching is to broadcast this gospel at every opportunity and whenever standing to preach, to always preach God’s powerful Word, the Bible. Exposition must not be occasional but constant.
That no matter the direction of society or what becomes culturally acceptable, to keep declaring truth as it is found in the Bible, for there, God has spoken and continues to speak.
And the last conviction I have is that liberalism is like a persistent cancer; it never really disappears; as unlikely as it seems now, it is only one generation away, it requires diligence to guard against its return.
Pray for preachers to be focused on Scripture, empowered by the Holy Spirit.
Give thanks for faithful pastor/ preachers who do not hesitate to declare the truth, no matter the consequence.
Pray for Bible and Theological colleges to be places where the truth of God’s true and trustworthy word is honoured.
‘I think the greatest weakness in the church today is that almost no one believes that God invests his power in the Bible. Everyone is looking for power in a program, in a methodology, in a technique, in anything and everything but that in which God has placed it – His Word’. RC Sproul.