I found thearticles by Martin Foord and Simon Manchester in December’s Briefing very helpful. It’s always good to be reminded of the seriousness of sin both in our own relationship with God and in speaking to others. However, shortly afterwards, I read two other articles by Jim Packer and Ray Comfort that made me wonder if there was something missing from what Martin and Simon had said.
Martin ends his article with the helpful reminder that “Becoming a Christian doesn’t mean you bypass the horror a sinner experiences before a holy God. We find this horror in the pre-modern saints … [but it] is now so foreign to late modern conversions.” Jim Packer and Ray Comfort forcefully argue that the biblical way to produce this experience is to use the law in evangelism to show the seriousness of sin and the futility of salvation by works. They highlight that it was the law that produced this horror in the pre-modern saints like Luther and Bunyan, and that these saints always used the law in their own gospel preaching.
If this is so, I wondered why the law wasn’t mentioned in either of the Briefing articles. I am also aware that I have never been taught to use the law in any training that I have been to on evangelism. Is the use of the law in evangelism an issue that has been considered and then rejected on biblical grounds, or is this something that we have forgotten and desperately need to recover?
