The Primacy of Preaching the Gospel

1 Corinthians 2:2
For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

These days there is a major attack amongst "professing" Christians on the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Many of these people who deny Scripture (and consequently the Gospel) are commonly referred to as the "Emergent Church"; a movement within Christendom that denies gospel preaching and replaces it with "sensitive conversations," and replaces the goal of repentance with good deeds. They are not the only ones, nor the first who are involved in this heresy. No, this attack is nothing new, indeed, the Pastor and Theologian Martyn Lloyd-Jones said in the nineteen sixties, "So I would lay it down as a basic proposition that the primary task of the Church is not to educate man, is not to heal him physically or psychologically, it is not to make him happy. I will go further; it is not even to make him good. These are things that accompany salvation; and when the Church performs her true task she does incidentally educate men and give them knowledge and information, she does bring them happiness, she does make them good and better than they were. But my point is that those are not her primary objectives. Her primary purpose is not any of these; it is rather to put man into the right relationship with God, to reconcile man to God. This really needs to be emphasized at the present time, because this, it seems to me, is the essence of the modern fallacy. It has come into the Church and it is influencing the thinking of many in the Church- this notion that the business of the Church is to make people happy, or to integrate their lives, or to relieve their circumstances and improve their conditions. My whole case is that to do that just to put it palliate the symptoms, to give temporary ease, and that it does not get beyond that."

What a dreadful and stupid thing it is to try to comfort dead people. Unconverted people are dead in their trespasses and sins; it does no good to speak of any subject, other than Jesus Christ and him crucified!