My theme is "The Grace of God," and to deal with it I am going to focus on a very short story. It is a moving one, but I do not intend to leave you on an emotional high. That would be bad for you and for me too. To avoid that I want to finish with some applications that will bring us back down to earth.

On March 8, 1740, Gilbert Tennent, Presbyterian minister, delivered a sermon in the Presbyterian Church in Nottingham, Pennsylvania, titled "The Danger of An Unconverted Ministry." It caused a great uproar among the colonial churches. Yet I should like to show in this brief essay that Tennent's sermon was both correct and appropriate for his time, and it is still so for ours.

Recently, in a rather exciting and interesting Sunday school class designed to allow nonbelievers to voice their questions and opinions, I listened with attention to various views expressed with considerable passion. The view which kept coming up again and again was the idea that sometimes bad things happen to good people, and thus how can we honestly speak of a God who is both good and powerful? We plainly see in the Christian Scriptures that God allows (ordains is the more accurate theological term) bad things which occur in this world. Why? And if man is sinful, in fact "totally depraved" as the Reformed confessions are wont to put it, then how can we account for human kindness and human advance in a world so radically flawed and fallen?

When I mention the term "evangelizing," I know what comes to your mind. It is the same sort of thing that comes to my mind: first is the word guilt, and second is the word fear. If I enlarge that a bit and say you are not only responsible to evangelize but you are responsible for evangelizing all nations (Jesus did tell us in Matthew 28 to make disciples of all of the nations) we have even more guilt and even more fear. There is a great weight of responsibility put on top of us. We know that we are inadequate and we know every time we speak of Jesus Christ we flounder for words and cannot seem to get our thoughts together. We don't seem to have a feel for what it means to share the gospel effectively. Yet God has said that He has given us this message and He has given us this responsibility.

There is a fabricated story I heard years ago about the life of Jesus. He had lived, died, and returned to heaven. An angel came to Him and said, "What did You do?" He answered, "Well, I lived a perfect life on the earth. I obeyed everything that the Father told Me to do. I did it up to the very last moment. As the perfect Lamb, I sacrificed my life on the cross so that men's sins could be atoned for, satisfying My Father's wrath. I was buried, was raised, and ascended to be here. I have charged eleven men to carry the message of salvation through My name throughout the known world in such a way that it will continue to reproduce itself throughout all generations until I finally come back and the work is finished." The angel looked at Him with incredulity and said, "What if Your plan fails?" Jesus replied, "I have no other plan."

Starting from those original eleven men, God gave the responsibility to you and to me--He lays it on top of us. We have a tendency to feel very much under the pile about that sort of thing. But He has no other plan.