I was in Seminary when I first read an entire sermon preached by George Whitefield.  I was struck by the fact that I had never heard a sermon like that in my life.

If you don’t know who Whitefield was, let’s take a moment to acquaint ourselves with this remarkable evangelist.  He lived from 1714-1770.  He was an English Anglican Evangelist who, for a time, was closely associated with John Wesley.  He was a key figure in the Evangelical Revival that fundamentally changed Great Britian, as well as in the Great Awakening in America.  His role in an evangelical awakening that transformed the English-Speaking world is well known.  He was a key leader in one of the greatest revivals in history.  Furthermore, the 18^th century – 1700’s – are the birthplace of the modern evangelical movement.

But getting back to my response to reading one of his evangelistic sermons.  It struck me, while reading Whitefield, that I had never encountered such a clear explanation of how each person has broken both the law written on our hearts and the revealed law that came from Sanai.  I had never read such a dire warning of the judgment that awaits us for our sins, nor such a clear plea to flee to Christ for mercy.

I was raised in an era in which Evangelicals were told that without Christ, life was meaningless.  That there was a restlessness in our souls, that we all knew there was something missing in our lives.  “Accept Christ as your personal saviour”, we were told.  If we did, we would gain purpose and meaning.  The abundant life we all wanted was being offered to us.  Come to Christ and have a full, rich, meaningful life, we proclaimed.  But the horror of having broken God’s law, and of one day standing before His judgment, was hardly ever mentioned.

Whitefield’s message, and that of the other leading figures in the 1700’s, carried a sense of deep alarm for the judgment that awaited sinners and the desperate need for a Saviour. It was so different from the message I had grown up hearing.  The call to missions during that era led William Carey, the father of Protestant missions, to proclaim the gospel in India.  By the 1800’s, Hudson Taylor was going to China.  The rallying cry was clear: the peoples of the world were lost without Christ, and both compassion and urgency demanded that the gospel be taken to the world, regardless of personal cost.

By the 20^th century, Jim Elliot, mistaken for an enemy, was speared to death by the Auca (Waodani) tribe in Ecuador.  His last journal entry in his diary contained the now-famous words, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”  Those words echoed Jesus’ own in Matthew 16:25 (ESV): “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Elliot’s life was given for the same reason countless missionaries have laid theirs down: to bring the hope of salvation to the lost and dying.  And if it cost us our lives, it was a small price to pay so that salvation would come to those who were condemned without it.

Somewhere along the way, Evangelicalism lost its way.  While I was in Seminary, the church growth movement was at its zenith.  We were being told it was offensive to refer to those outside of Christ as lost. Instead, we were trained to call them “the unchurched”. But if they are unchurched rather than lost, the solution to their condition changes dramatically.  Churches began scrambling to appear more relevant to the “felt needs” of people.

The thinking was that if people recognized the church was addressing their needs, they would return. In the end, all that happened was that weary and aimless Christians went to more relevant churches, and those who were not part of a Christian church were not drawn.  The old adage proved true: “what we win them with, we have won them to.” And in the process, our understanding of what it meant to be evangelical was transformed.

Today, it is more likely that the estate of those outside of Christ is the subject of philosophical debate, rather than the call to sacrificial giving and going.  Urgency has been replaced by complacency.

From this, I conclude that as important as it is to hold ministers accountable to ethical sexual conduct, this all pales before the necessity of rediscovering the gospel. There is no greater urgency for the church and for individual Christians than to recover a true understanding of the gospel and what it means to be genuinely converted.