Is it loving to give a cup of cold water without any reference to hell or salvation to a thirsty person?
I’ve started reading a book about evangelism that coincides with a study that my church is about to go through. I can’t help but notice that talk of hell and the wrath of God is (almost if not completely) absent in much of this talk about the gospel. More emphasis seems to be on getting people to church than to Christ. Is that really the gospel? Is that even Christian? Is that even loving? Getting people to church and neglecting to telling them about the coming wrath of God? Even in my own church, many people squirm at the idea of telling people that without Christ they are damned to hell. We would much rather forget about that “inconvenient truth” and simply talk about God’s love for us. “Part of the biblical gospel is now preached as if it were the whole of that gospel; and a half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth.“ (J.I. Packer)
Today while I was thinking about these matters after skimming through Bill Hybel’s “Just Walk Across The Room” I couldn’t help but think of a recent quote from John Piper during a 9marks interveiw in answer to the question: Is it loving to give a cup of cold water without any reference to hell or salvation to a
thirsty person?
It is not ulitmately loving if you have no design for their salvation. I don’t mean that you stop giving it to them if they don’t believe. I mean that when you give them the cup and you don’t care whether it leads them to eternal life or not you’re not a loving person, I don’t care how thirsty they are…I can’t argue that everytime you give your enemy a cup of water you must mention the Gospel verbally. But I can argue that if your whole approach towards culture transformation or suffer amelioration isn’t aimed and designed and tailored, which would include a lot of speaking, tailored towards delivering people from ultimate suffering you don’t love them. You simply don’t love them. You say you do but you don’t believe in hell or whatever. So the way I like to talk at Bethlehem is we are about alleviating all
suffering, especially eternal suffering. And the alleviating of the short-term suffering is a means to awaken them to the kind of God who died for them so that they might be saved from eternal suffering. -John Piper