The Teaching About Christ Series

Outsiders race ahead, considering their rush to be acceptable in the eyes of the world as progressive. Boasting of their great learning and of their advanced understanding of human nature and of God’s character, they only demonstrate that they are to be pitied since they have never known the grace of God in Christ the Lord. They want to be thought of as Christian, but they are not Christians. They want to speak of what they do not know, and they want to be teachers when they have never been taught.

I have in prior messages told of a Methodist preacher with whom I became acquainted in Texas. I have related how I began my preaching ministry in a prison farm near Kaufman, Texas. Each Sunday afternoon, I rode my 500 cc Suzuki the forty-five miles from the Trinity Temple Baptist Church to that prison farm, except for the fifth Sunday of those months that had five Sundays. On that particular day, a Methodist preacher who was also enrolled as a seminarian at Southern Methodist University, included as part of his circuit the prison farm.

I travelled to the farm one blustery Sunday when I was not preaching, just so I would be able to see what that preacher taught to the congregation I had adopted. Roland brought his guitar and sang some songs. I was astounded when he told those men that he knew they were good men; he knew they never really meant to hurt anybody. He urged them to try harder, saying that if they only tried harder, they could be good.

Later, I stood freezing in pelting sleet while Roland sat in the warmth of his car and we talked about the Faith of Christ. He professed to be intrigued how I, an apparently educated and intelligent man, could believe the truths I held dear. He did not believe that Jesus was God. He believed the Bible to be inspired in the same way as a Shakespearian play might be inspired. He did not believe there was any such event as being born from above—salvation was what you made of life. He did not believe that man was held accountable before the Lord Christ. For him, there was no heaven or hell.

I was astonished! I had never met a real, live infidel before. Moreover, this infidel was a preacher, professedly in the tradition of John Wesley! I don’t believe that Wesley would have tolerated such unbelief among his preachers. I reminded Roland that he had taken vows before a Methodist bishop, and that in those vows he had confessed Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour. I asked that preacher how he could now say that he did not believe what he had confessed to believe at an earlier time. He said that he had taken his vows with mental reservations. Somehow, this man had gone on ahead and he no longer remained in the teaching of Christ, if he had ever truly been born from above.

It is of no consequence how many degrees an individual holds, it is of no significance how polished an individual’s perorations, if that one does not confess Christ as Lord, he or she is a deceiver and antichrist. Such people think they are advanced in their thinking, but their wickedness is as ancient as the serpent’s hiss in the Garden.