Four Things This Generation Must Hear — Rolfe Barnard

The Necessity of Old-Fashioned Gospel Preaching

We desperately need a revival of old-fashioned, old-time preaching of the great foundational truths that make up the bottom of the foundation upon which men shall stand and confront men and women of this generation with a living Lord who died on a gory cross outside the city of Jerusalem, whom God raised from the dead and put on a throne and turned the conduct of this world, men included, over to Him.

I do not believe that a revival will come to our land apart from this kind of preaching. The preaching of the gospel is God's own and only way of reaching men and saving men. Sometimes I hear a comment concerning a service.

The service was so good that Brother So-and-So didn't even get to preach. But what in the last analysis does this prove? I am afraid it proves that preaching is secondary and nothing more than a necessary conclusion of a service which we won't have to put up with if we can stop it.

But I say that this is completely ignoring God's sacred and sealed method of reaching men. And I am persuaded that revival in our day, if it comes, and God knows it must, we must not ignore the Bible imperatives and experience concerning preaching.

And this preaching must ring with a message which I believe is scarcely heard in our day. We are called upon to remember that Paul refers in the Book of I Corinthians, Chapter 1, to the foolishness of preaching, but he doesn't talk about foolish preaching.

The preaching that we need today must ring loud and clear with a message that leaves nobody guessing as to its truth and its dire implications. And I wish in this broadcast to suggest four things that this generation is not hearing and, God help us, it must hear before revival arrives.

The Sovereignty of God

The first great foundational truth of the Word of God about which the pulpit is so silent today is the sovereignty of God. What do we mean by the sovereignty of God? We simply mean that He is God, that He is not a pretender, that He is very God, very God.

Now, this generation has heard so much from every direction of the weakness and the spurious type love of God that it has not only put the Church to sleep, but it has left this generation in a state not unlike Noah's Day or the Day of Sodom, whereas the love of God as seen in the scriptures cannot be overemphasized and no one will wish to do this.

This generation has heard an artificial love preached until men and women think that God is a toy, the man upstairs, a living doll, as some Hollywood actresses say, that this generation thinks that God is some sort of a religious toy to be played with, and a God whose motherly type love is so sweet and sentimental that God wouldn't harm or flee, and if He wished to harm or flee, He doesn't have power to do so.

But there was the preaching of the sovereignty of God, that is, His supreme rule and His supreme authority and His supreme dominion, that kind of preaching which magnifies God's holiness and His glory and His power.

That kind of preaching would not only awaken, we hope, the Church, but would put on men a fear which would give our overworked judges and our jailers and our policemen a lot of time off, and that would be welcome today.

Preachers this one included, churches supporting preachers, must come to examine the teaching of the Word of God about the character of God, His utter totalitarian sovereignty, and begin to preach and proclaim and say unto the heathen, God reigns, that we need in these days to soak our souls afresh in these days, especially when salvation is preached as if God did part of it and man did the rest.

We need to bring men and women up shore to such scriptures as Romans 9, verse 15, where a sovereign, everlasting, living God humbles men, and if they'd listen to Him, it would make them come down off their high horse and tremble in His presence and bow at His feet and become supplicants for mercy and bankrupted sinners, begging for a crumb of bread rather than demanding their right.

We need to hear such scriptures again as God saying, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. The sovereignty of God is the only message that if preached and heeded and absorbed and chewed upon and believed and taken to our hearts, would save this nation from the awful ride of pessimism and almost fatalism in which we find ourselves now plunged.

The Utter Sinfulness and Helplessness of Man

The second basic truth that this generation so desperately needs to hear, and I'm afraid to hear so little of, is the utter absolute sinfulness of man. You know, I think this preacher is telling the truth when he says that this generation has heard so much about how man is basically good and how man is the master of his fate that now the biggest thing on earth to overcome in preaching is to get men and women to see their helplessness and their sinfulness.

When we try to tell men that they are dead in trespasses and sin and tell them that they are helpless, that makes men madder than hornets apparently today. God have mercy on the person who started the lie that man is a free moral agent.

The whole phrase is completely false. First, man is not free. The Bible says he has a will, but it's under the dominion of sin that he is a slave to sin that reigns in his mortal body. In the second place, man is not moral.

He is instead wretched and full of deadly poison. In the third place, man is not an agent. Man is dead. Only the Holy Spirit can wake men up and give them life. I know this truth is offensive, but it must be heralded in our day if we'll be true to the souls of men, and if not, we'll be swallowed up in our own whirlpool of Paradise.

Man is sinful. His only hope, his only hope, your only hope, my only hope, man's only hope, is not in himself. It is in God's mercy and sovereign grace. If God does not show mercy to dead, corrupt sinners, there is no hope for any man.

The Righteousness of Jesus Christ

The third basic foundational truth that this generation must share afresh with the anointing and anointing of the Holy Ghost is the supreme, unique righteousness of Jesus Christ. You know, I'm afraid we've almost lost sight of this saving and glorious truth, for the flesh continually yearns for the kind of security that will enable it to feel that we can earn our way toward eternal salvation by some righteousness or goodness or perfection that we can attain to in this life.

Men do not want to be in debt even to God, and unless a man is willing to be in debt to God, there is no hope of salvation. But if men could earn by anything they are a due salvation, if that were possible, then our Lord Jesus Christ need not have said, I have not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it, and because he fulfilled it perfectly, men may be saved and made righteous and given wisdom and redemption by his obedience in debt.

The phrase, it is finished, talking about the work, not of men, but of Jesus Christ, is that which men must find their faith in. That will save men. Nothing else will or can save men, but clothed in his righteousness is safety and security and security which will exceed the righteousness of the law, which itself cannot save.

The Lordship of Jesus Christ

My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus Christ as righteousness. And then that truth that permeates the entire Word of God, that so little talked about now, and if it is talked about, is added sort of as an addendum to our phraseology, that truth that must be preached to this generation, namely the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the Lordship of this one who hung on a gory cross.

We hear a lot of talk today about accepting Jesus as your personal Savior, but, dear ones, this language is not scripturally consistent. His righteousness saves, but there is more to the testimony of Christ than his being personal Savior.

He is Lord. He is Lord. Let all the house of Israel know, the Bible will say, that God hath made that same Jesus whom you have crucified both Lord and Messiah. He is the Lord God of heaven and earth. He is seated on a throne.

His work is a finished work, and his call is an effectual call, and his rule is total, or it is not at all. Therefore, when one meets the Lord Jesus Christ, he is given a new master and comes under a new rule.

Then that individual no longer lives that he pleases. He no longer lives to the pleasure of sin. He now lives to the glory of Christ. His theme song is, Not my will, but thine, be done on earth, even if it kills me.

That cry comes continually from the lips of him who has been enabled by God's grace to graciously bow to Jesus Christ as Supreme Lord. I am saying to you that the mission and the message of churches today must come to these issues rather than our trying to prove our own peculiar views about this and that, and if we do not, we need not expect revival.

The Church's Mission Amid Doctrinal Disputes

Men are dying and going to hell while we are trying to prove our little shibboleths and doctrines. The time has come now to open the Word of God and under the anointing of the Holy Spirit to bring men up short to the truths of the fact that God is sovereign, man is sinful, Jesus is holy, and he has been made Lord.

Do you know him? Under God bow to him is the prayer of this preacher.