Preaching Requires Boldness | The Whole Counsel

I want to read a statement that Roberts makes about his fearless preaching. He says this, a fearless preacher

Frelinghuysen said, I little care what is said behind my back by ignorant carnal men who desire to substitute their own perverted order for God's truth.

They are greatly deceived if they imagine that they will thus put me to silence for I would sooner die a thousand deaths than not to preach the truth.

And Roberts kind of gives some editorial comments there, and he says that he notices that many men would, unlike Frelinghuysen, would have come to a new country and spent a lot of time maybe getting to know the culture, befriending the people in the new area, before he really delivered, you know, the harder truths of the gospel, and he said, but not

Frelinghuysen, he immediately went right to plowing the ground, and when people were their feathers were ruffled, he continued to preach, and God used him to bring so many into the kingdom.

This sermon is entitled Dead Works. When you hear that, you might think of a passage that is in the book of Hebrews about repenting of dead works, but that's not really what this passage or sermon is about.

It is taken from 1st Peter 4 18, where we're told, if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?

And the sermon has more to do with, it's really a death knell to easy believism, or to any kind of passivity in salvation, than it is about that kind of idea of dead works that we see in Hebrews.

When I read the sermon, I thought back to part of Mr. Roberts' introduction to the book, where he asked those questions about who is right.

He asked that several times, several different examples. I'll just mention one, the first one. Who is right? The preacher who insists that nothing is easier than becoming a

Christian. All you have to do is accept Jesus Christ into your heart. You can do that right now. Or Jesus Christ himself who made the way of salvation so difficult that even his disciples asked, who then can be saved?

And if you read those for the first time and you're not familiar with that kind of thinking, Mr. Roberts' statements there could really be jarring.

But this sermon is kind of the answer to why he says those kinds of statements. He shows us that while salvation is of the grace of God, and we're not meriting salvation, it's not easy and it's not cheap.

So he sets out to show that and how the righteous are scarcely saved.

He does this with two overarching points, and I think we'll probably spend most of our time as he does on the first one, which is that the state of the righteous is that they are saved, but scarcely.

The second point, the wretched state of the ungodly. That's what the righteous are then. What state is the ungodly in?

Under that first point about them being scarcely saved, he divides it into three further sub points.

They are righteous. The persons who are righteous, what do they look like? What's declared of them that they are saved?

And then the manner in which they are saved, which is scarcely. And then he points out,

I think, 14 different kind of obstacles or situations, elements of this that show why it is so difficult for a person to become a

Christian or how it is impossible from our human side to become a Christian. It is the work of God.

And then a couple of applications. As we read this, I think we should also keep in mind, you know, kind of a question in the back of our mind of whether or not we've adopted a truncated gospel, one that is maybe short and pithy, but not really complete.