Brothers and sisters, souls are dying, hell is gaping, an awful doom awaits the perishing. We have been entrusted with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Go and tell it on the mountains, over the hills, and everywhere.

Is your Christian life too private, too indoorsy?

“You are the light of the world,” our Lord declares. “A city set on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14). Some of us, it seems, mean to test that claim.

We can yell about Jesus as loudly as we want in our homes and church buildings — but we must keep it behind those walls. Public life is off-limits. The good of society requires it, you see. How can a multicultural, multireligious community flourish with the Christians insisting that all other gods are false and that Jesus is the only way to heaven? What about the atheists? Muslims? Jews? Our lofty ideals tell us to leave all the high places intact.

Though the heavens cannot contain him, though earth is his footstool, do we — his grasshoppers leaping upon his lawn — try to cage the living God in church buildings and around dinner tables? They say he is too wild and transgressive to be unleashed into the community. They are not wrong. He came to bring division: light from dark, the truth from the lie, his sons from Satan’s. Our God holds up his Son; his Son holds out his ring for all other gods and men to kiss. Refuse, and his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessing is only for those who take refuge in him.

Man does not like a God who lays claim on everyone and everything. And we, his ambassadors, too quickly grow tired of discipling them to observe all that he commanded. We comply with society’s red tape above our Savior’s red letters. Sheep, too happily sheepish. The Sunday gathering soon becomes the one (and virtually only) place for overt Christianity. Christ must be left out of malls, sports, restaurants, workplaces, and anywhere else he is unwanted. We quickly feel we have done enough to huddle once a week in that fenced green pasture. We are well-fed, happy enough, and sleepy.

Will Stones Cry Out?

Charles Spurgeon, a man who went to the people in open-air preaching and evangelism, states my main burden well:

We ought actually to go into the streets and lanes and highways. . . . Sportsmen must not stop at home and wait for the birds to come and be shot at, neither must fishermen throw their nets inside their boats and hope to take many fish. Traders go to the markets, they follow their customers and go out after business if it will not come to them; and so must we. (Lectures to My Students, 224)

How do you bring the gospel to where the people are? Christ teaches us to be fishers of men, but do we drop our nets in the boat instead of the sea?

How much of Christianity is lived among ourselves, for ourselves? The gathering of God’s people is the most notable event a calendar can contain. Heaven and earth meet when the saints gather to hear from their Lord. Yet, as much as the church is an end, we also harness together to bring others in.

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