One Friday afternoon, while I was serving as the assistant pastor, I sat in my office reading a section of a sermon by Charles Spurgeon. I was fascinated to see that the “Prince of Preachers” did something I had never seen before. He used God’s Law—the Ten Commandments—to cause his hearers to tremble. He said:
“There is a war between you and God’s Law. The Ten Commandments are against you. The first comes forward and says, ‘Let him be cursed. For he denies Me. He has another god beside Me. His god is his belly and he yields his homage to his lust.’ All the Ten Commandments, like ten great cannons, are pointed at you today. For you have broken all of God’s statutes and lived in daily neglect of all His commands. Soul, thou wilt find it a hard thing to go at war with the Law… What will you do when the Law of God comes in terror… when the great books shall be opened and all your sin and shame shall be punished? Can you stand against an angry Law in that Day?”
I remember thinking, “Wow…that’s a little different from ‘God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.’” I mentally filed it away.
A few days later, I was reading Galatians 3:24. But instead of reading, “the law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ,” I subconsciously read it as, “the law was a schoolmaster to bring Israel to Christ.” Then it hit me: Was it legitimate to use the Law, as Spurgeon did, to bring sinners to Christ today, just as it brought Israel to Him? The thought nearly took my breath away.
I closed my Bible and immediately set out to find someone on whom I could “experiment.” When I found a man open to the gospel, I took him through the Ten Commandments before sharing the cross with him. I didn’t speak of a wonderful plan, or the peace or joy I possessed as a Christian. I just talked about sin, righteousness, and judgment. He stood to his feet and said, “I’ve never heard anyone put it so clearly in all my life.” It was as though a light turned on—for him, and for me.
This man had understood the gospel, and I began to grasp the important principle that the Law reveals the knowledge of sin and shows the sinner why he needs a Savior.
I started researching men like Wesley, Spurgeon, Whitefield, Moody, and Luther—those whom God used throughout history—and found that each warned about the danger of preaching the gospel without first using the Law. If the Law isn’t used to prepare the heart, false conversions will fill the Church.
So, I began crafting a message I originally called “Evangelical Frustration.”
It opened with statistics I had found and told a story about a youth who broke a speeding law and couldn’t pay his fine. When he was put in prison, his father came and paid it for him. I reasoned that if the youth had been told the good news before he understood he had broken the law, the good news would have seemed meaningless.
Modern evangelism has made that very mistake. It preaches the good news (the fine being paid) without first convincing the sinner that he is a lawbreaker. No wonder so many reject the gospel—it makes no sense to them. Without the Law to drive them to the cross, the message of salvation is reduced to a shallow promise of “happiness.” That not only distorts the gospel—it perverts the motive of conversion.
