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Soaked with Blood and Singed with Fire

That is my longing for our day—and for you.   That God would raise up thousands of broken-hearted, Bible-saturated preachers who are dominated by a sense of the greatness and the majesty and the holiness of God, revealed in the gospel of Christ crucified and risen, and reigning with absolute authority over every nation and every army and every false religion and every terrorist and every tsunami and every cancer cell and every galaxy in the universe.

God did not ordain the cross of Christ or create the lake of fire in order to communicate the insignificance of belittling his glory.   The death of the Son of God and the damnation of unrepentant human beings are the loudest shouts under heaven that God is infinitely holy, and sin is infinitely offensive, and wrath is infinitely just, and grace is infinitely precious, and our brief life—and the life of every person in your church and in your community—leads to everlasting joy or everlasting suffering.   If our preaching does not carry the weight of these things to our people, what will?   Veggie Tales?   Radio?   Television?   Discussion groups?   Emergent conversations?

God planned for his Son to be crucified (Rev. 13:8;   2 Tim. 1:9) and for hell to be terrible (Mat. 25:41) so that we would have the clearest witnesses possible to what is at stake when we preach.   What gives preaching its seriousness is that the mantle of the preacher is soaked with the blood of Jesus and singed with the fire of hell. That’s the mantle that turns mere talkers into preachers.

Preaching the Cross
Mark Dever, J. Ligon Duncan III, R. Albert Mohler Jr., C. J. Mahaney
pg. 105-106

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