The only
thing that will ever bring the natural man to listen to preaching is
when it insists upon something more-than-the-natural and calls him to
account regarding it; when it speaks of something different and better
for him than this world and what it can offer. "Take my _yoke_ upon
you" is the attractive invitation, "make inner obeisance and outward
obedience to something higher than thy poor self."
It is clear, then, that these observations have a bearing upon our
preaching of the doctrine of God. There is a certain illogicality,
something humorous, in going into a church, of all places in the
world, to be told how like we are to Him. The dull and average
personality, the ordinary and not very valuable man, can probably
listen indifferently and with a slow-growing hardness and dim
resentment to that sort of preaching for a number of years. But the
valuable, the highly personalized people, the saints and the sinners,
the great rebels and the great disciples, who are the very folk for
whom the church exists, would hate it, and they would know the final
bitterness of despair if they thought that this was so. Either saint
or sinner would consider it the supreme insult, the last pitch of
insolence, for the church to be telling them that it is true.
For they know within themselves that it is a lie. Their one hope hangs
on God because His thoughts are not their thoughts, nor His ways their
ways; because He seeth the end from the beginning; because in Him
there is no variableness, neither shadow that is caused by turning;
because no man shall see His face and live.
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