When you see the word “preacher” below, feel free to plug in your role(s) - are you a husband responsible for leading his family, a parent responsible for teaching your children, a baseball coach, a community group or Bible study leader, a high school teacher, or a Christian who wants to read their Bible better?

“A preacher should be a logician and a rhetorician, that is, he must be able to teach, and to admonish; when he preaches touching an article, he must, first distinguish it. Secondly, he must define, describe, and show what it is. Thirdly, he must produces sentences out of the Scriptures, therewith to prove and strengthen it. Fourthly, he must, with examples, explain and declare it. Fifthly, he must adorn it with similitudes; and, lastly, he must admonish and rouse up the lazy, earnestly reprove all the disobedient, all false doctrine, and the authors thereof; yet, not out of malice and envy, but only to God’s honor, and the profit and saving health of the people.”

-Martin Luther, Table Talk, pg. 264

In the last few years many people within the faith have critiqued Christianity - more in particular evangelicalism - for being more about ‘what they are against than what they are for’. There is some truth in that. It is always dangerous when a political party, social activism, or a cause becomes more important than the Gospel.

But at the same time, we do have to draw some lines in the sand. It’s not enough to be for ‘love’ without defining what we mean by that. It’s not enough to be for ‘community’ without defining what we mean by that. Sadly, in some cases it’s not enough to be for Jesus without defining what we mean by that. I came across these thoughts from Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones’ What is an Evangelical, written in the middle of the last century.

One of the first signs that a man is ceasing to be truly evangelical is that he ceases to be concerned about negatives, and keeps saying, We must always be positive. I will give you a striking example of this in a man whose name is familiar to most of you, and some of whose books you have read. This is what he has written recently: `Whether a person is an evangelical is to be settled by reference to how he stands with respect to six points’, which he then enumerates. His definition is by reference only to what a person is for rather than to what he is against. He goes on: `What a man is, or is not, against may show him to be a muddled or negligent or inconsistent evangelical, but you may not deny his right to call himself an evangelical while he maintains these principles as the basis of his Christian position.’

Now that is the kind of statement which I would strongly contend against. I believe it is quite wrong. The argument which says that you must always be positive, that you must not define the man in terms of what he is against, as well as what he is for, misses the subtlety of the danger.

What do you think; is it enough to positively state what we are for?

(posted by NDMB)