It is easy, I have found, to fall into a lull in preaching where I forget that souls are eternal and the body is quickly fading. Our country is in need especially of earnest preaching that reminds sinners every week that the temporal life will soon peel back like a stage background to reveal the eternal world (1 Cor. 7:31). Naturally the world and even Christians tend to think more about the temporal world than the eternal. This breads a host of problems and sinful thinking.
So back to John Angell James’ powerful book, An Earnest Ministry. This week we will look at the need of earnestness from the pulpit concerning specific topics of concern. I think it is especially important to note that James is not forgetting the Spirit’s work in all of this. He does not think earnest ministry alone saves and sanctifies. He understands earnest preaching as a type of serious preaching that the Spirit of God answers to and blesses (see pp. 190-191). Here then is the first reason that makes earnest preaching so needful: Worldliness.
“What can be sufficient but an intense devotedness on the part of ministers to make things unseen and eternal bear down the usurping power of things seen and temporal? Who but the man that knows how to deal with invisible realities, and to wield the powers of the world to come, can pluck the worldling from the whirlpool of earthly mindedness, which sucks down so many, or prevent the professing Christian from being drawn into it? If our own minds are not much impressed with the awful glories and terrors of eternity, we cannot speak of these things in such a manner as is likely to rescue our hearers from the ruinous fascinations of Mammon. How we seem to want a Baxter and a Doolittle; an Edwards and a Howe; a Whitefield and a Wesley, to break in with their thunder upon the money-loving, money-grasping spirit of this grossly utilitarian age!”
– John Angell James, An Earnest Ministry: The Want of the Times (Banner of Truth, 1847/1993) pp. 192-193.
“Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you” (Ps. 73:25, ESV).
him by doing my duty, who is not afraid to offend God by neglecting his? Shall I be afraid to save him who is not afraid to destroy himself? Or shall I be dismayed at the face and frown of a man, and neglect the wrath of God who can tear me in pieces? ‘Be not dismayed at their face,’ saith the Lord, ‘lest I confound thee before them’ (Jer. 1:17). Yet this boldness must be in a way of conviction and persuasion, without indiscretion and exasperation; that when we show our zeal against men’s sins, we may withal manifest our love to their persons, and that honor and reverend esteem which we owe to their dignities and conditions.”
Tony Reinke 