Let’s stop watering down words
we use to convey truth of gospel

For some time I’ve wondered why so many people flocked to hear John the Baptist. He dressed oddly, ate insects, lived alone and shouted religiously incorrect epitaphs—such as “You brood of vipers!”—at specific people.
He was considered strange in his day—as he would be to us now. More than amusement had to keep attracting people to see a man some thought less than sane.
Could some divine purpose be behind this perceived madness?
No advance Madison Avenue hype trumpeted his coming. Any notice was by word of mouth. “Come see the odd one!” was the cry.
However, the crowd turned somber when John spoke a message that struck at the very core of human hearts.
Repentance became a requirement for personal salvation. John spoke with such confidence and abandon that people looked beyond what he was wearing to hear what he was saying as though they had discovered an essential spiritual force.
John uttered words in the Jordan River that shook the religious world. Such words have since been systematically boxed and shelved by too many pastors in mainline denominations, including The United Methodist Church. There has been both an absence of query and presence of silence on the part of bishops, district superintendents and lay leaders in what has occurred.
What people hungered for in John’s day is what they hunger for today. They want Truth as conveyed by words that carry their full meaning, not a watered-down version to spare feelings. If the word “repent” was good enough for Jesus and John the Baptist, it should be good enough for Methodist pastors.
What are some of those words and phrases? Sinner, saved, repent, judgment.
When was the last time you heard a Methodist minister say from the pulpit, “You and I are sinners in need of repentance”? Try to recall when you heard any mention of hell from a Methodist pulpit.
How can a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, who has sworn to uphold the tenets of the Christian faith, adequately explain the full impact of the cross without presenting the reason Jesus volunteered to submit to its cruelty?
Jesus’ primary motivation for going to the cross was to spare us eternal damnation, and it was his love for us that made his sacrifice possible. Pastors shouldn’t assume everyone in their congregations is cognizant of that. It is the reality of this sacrifice that must precede all the good works for which our denomination is known. Otherwise, all works are done in vain.
Both heaven and hell are part of the picture, but sans the latter, there’s no logic to what we say we believe.
How much concern do our clergy members have for lost souls, and how much is this concern manifest through word and deed? Jeremiah 23 makes it rather plain as to God’s intent.
Let’s begin to look anew at Holy Scripture and in-depth prayer to see how God wants us to make maximum use of this instrument called The United Methodist Church. At the same time let’s relegate The Book of Discipline to its original intended purpose, i.e., to establish and maintain administrative order, per se, throughout our connectional system.
This latter point would preclude transferring events in Holy Scripture into the Discipline, creating a quasi-scripture that renders man as the author rather than God, thereby justifying in the minds of some the altering of specific passages to make them more politically palatable.
It is issues such as those above to which our General Conference should give primary attention for the foreseeable future. I believe John the Baptist and John Wesley would be proud of such an undertaking.