There is the challenge. And today, there are too many voices who seem to say either that we don’t have enough preaching of holiness and so let’s diminish the doctrine of justification so we can uphold holiness or that we should preach a doctrine of justification separate from a serious, passionate call to holiness. God does not say to us, be justified and live the way you want. He says, be justified in My Son and then draw closer and closer to being conformed to the image of My Son and the holiness that He lived out.

And John Calvin rightly states in his commentary that there is only one way to know the holiness to which God calls us. And that is by the study of His Word, by the Law of God. This, too, seems to be something so much diminished among us. Where is the passion to know how God would have us live? Where is the passion to conform our lives to the Son? Where is the church planter who goes out today and says: “One of the things I really want to communicate to those poor, lost people is that once they are alive in Christ, they are privileged to keep the Sabbath day holy.” But some argue, “Oh no, don’t mention the Sabbath day. That’s a terrible impediment to evangelism.”

I remember we used to go to an Orthodox Presbyterian Church up in the mountains. As you drove out of the church parking lot there was a big sign that said, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” Well, is the Sabbath an embarrassment? Is the Sabbath a legalistic burden? Or is it one of the privileges of the people of God? To rest from all our work, some of it good, much of it wasteful, and have the day with the Lord and with His people and with His Word.

I sometimes fear that too many church services in America today have become like the Sunday football game…all hype and excitement. Then the next day most people can’t even remember who played or what the score was. It is ephemeral. Even the most rabid football players, after the game is over, hardly care about it. The loss of the Sabbath becomes an illustration of a problem we’ve gotten into in our culture. We say: let’s make it simpler for people. Let’s reduce as much as we can of the Word of God to some minimal core, as if that will make good Christians. This reminds me of Spurgeon’s famous line, “Sermonettes are for Christianettes.”

The character of the way you’re going to preach the Word will determine the kind of Christians we have. We have to preach the pattern of God’s Word. We have to preach the whole counsel of God’s Word. We want people to know, not only the promise of God in all its richness and fullness, but the pattern that God calls us to for our own good in Christian living.

Further, we don’t want to miss, then, in this wonderful verse, the plea of God’s Word. “Come! Come! Seek!” Or, as Ezekiel put it, “Turn! Turn! Why will you perish?” When Isaiah and Ezekiel preached, beloved, they were not Arminians. And we are not genuine Calvinists if we can’t preach the way they did.

Somewhere along the line, I think in the late 17th century, Calvinism began to move from the dynamic, aggressive, confident movement, one might almost say “missional movement” it had been. Of course, there are a lot of complicated reasons for this. Some of them we can learn from social scientists. Calvinism became a movement less confident, more introspective, and began to draw, I think, the illegitimate conclusion, from the doctrine of regeneration, that all you could really preach is that people had to wait until God acted. You’re sinners, Christ came for sinners. He might have come for you. Just wait and see. That’s not the way Isaiah preached. It’s not the way Ezekiel preached. It’s not the way Jesus preached. It’s not the way Paul preached. It’s not the way Calvin preached. It’s not the way Beza preached. We need to preach pleading with people.

We had Alistair Begg speak on campus about a year ago. He quoted Professor John Murray, who was once asked: What is the essence of a sermon? And Professor Murray answered, “A sermon, in its essence, is a personal, passionate plea: Be reconciled to God.”

And our preaching has to have that quality. It has to have a plea and it has to have passion. We’re not playing games when we look at a lost world. We, as Calvinists above all, when we look at a lost world, need to see how helpless it is, how hopeless the world is, left to itself. We have to see that it is the Word of God, that Christ has given us, that holds up a light in this dark world. And it is, therefore, with passion that we have to communicate to the lost the glories of what we have in our Savior, Jesus Christ.

And when we look at the history of the church, what do we discover? Who have been the successful evangelists? Who have been the successful missionaries? “Successful,” I mean, in the sense of faithful to the Word and used by the Lord. It has been passionate preachers who plead with people to be reconciled with God, who preach the promises of God and preach the pattern of holy living that God has given to us. They were confident in the Word.

Now sometimes we can say, “But we don’t seem to see the kind of fruit that they saw.” Well, that’s really in the hands of the Lord, isn’t it? Now, the Lord can do whatever He wants, but He ordinarily works through His preachers, and through His people who communicate in a dark world the light of the Gospel. And we need to be restored, you see, in that passion, in that conviction, in that confidence in God’s Word. When we talk about being passionate, we have to be careful. That’s not the same as just yelling all the time. We have to seek ways to communicate that are appropriate and thoughtful. We do need to try to develop cultural sensitivity. I’ll always remember those Franciscan missionaries in the late 16th century who went to China and preached in Latin. In light of what they were saying it was probably just as well, but that shows a measure of cultural insensitivity. So we want to be thoughtful about the contexts in which we are ministering. We want to be careful and sensitive. We also have to be aware that we can never escape our own cultures. I can never go to China and be Chinese. I can maybe go to China and come to understand the language and culture enough to be helpful. I can never become un-American enough really to understand all the ways I have been blinded by my own culture. This is all the more reason why we have to be confident in the Word. That’s the only place we can turn that we know is clear and reliable and true altogether.

It is easy to get discouraged in our time. We ask, “Why are our churches so small? Why don’t we see more success?” It’s easy to get frustrated and we can make long lists of all the things that are wrong with our churches and wrong with us. But we must not be passive. We need to be seeking after godliness for ourselves and seeking after the sharing of the wonder of the Gospel with others. Has the wonder of the Gospel still gripped us as it ought to do? This is what it means to be Reformed. To stand in awe and say “Glory to God for all that He has done and all that He has revealed.” And when we do that, then there is no tension between mission and confession. They are not just friends, they are one!

I will always remember the story of Martin Luther, sitting in the beer garden with Philipp Melancthon, thinking about the Reformation. And people, for years, had been giving him advice about what he ought to do. And Luther said, “You know, I could have plunged Germany into civil war long ago if I’d wanted to do that. But, you know, I just sat back and the Word did it.”

The Word did it. The Word is still doing it. Only the Word can do it. And we need to be filled with confidence in that Word.