Sunday was the worst day of the week because it was the day conscientious villagers had to spend an hour in church getting yelled at for their sins. “Death comes unexpectedly!” boomed the preacher from his elevated pulpit. The congregation flinched and the chandelier shook as he weaponized his voice and blasted his sermon at them. Eleanor Porter’s book, Pollyanna, was fiction, but she likely wrote from life.
When I was a teenager, I attended a mainline denomination church where there was a lot of well-intentioned yelling from the pulpit. “Repent, repent, repent!” urged our pastor, a product of homiletics gone wrong. An immature believer, I interpreted his directive as “You’re not really saved. Keep feeling as guilty as you can, you rotten sinner, and maybe someday you will be.” I wore out the center aisle carpet answering altar calls, hoping that this time salvation would “take.” After a while, I gave up. I knew there was a God but, according to the expert, He didn’t seem to want me.
It is usually with the best of intentions that pastors sideline grace when they present the gospel. The motivation behind frenzied pulpit drama is to awaken awareness of sin in people who are far from God. Pastors (God bless them!) are aware of so much congregational sin that it is no wonder that they sound furious. My problem was that the pastor was “preaching to the choir” –I’d been saved since I was ten, and I really wanted to know God. But the weekly fire and brimstone act indicated that I was farther away from Him than ever. All that pulpit pounding was counter-productive and it set me back a decade, during which time I decided that church definitely was not for me. But God, gracious as He always is, eventually cleared up my confusion when I simply asked Him to: He does the saving and, by-the-way, He’d heard me the first time I asked.
Of course, this is only my experience, but it has led me to wonder whether fear or love is the greater motivator– which is the fitter frame for the truth? For Christians living in a post-Christian era, this is no trivial question. For John the Apostle, the answer is love:
“For God so loved the world, that He sent His only Son. . .”
Watchman Nee wrote:
” We may be weak, but looking at our weakness will never make us strong. No trying to feel bad and doing penance will help us to be even a little holier. There is no help there, so let us be bold in our approach because of the blood.”
The blood of Jesus has cleansed us who believe. There is no need to flay ourselves because of the past or to be afraid of the future. We’ve been regenerated. That is done. What remains is to be grateful and to learn to abide in Him–for as long as we live.
