(Sorry if you have read this on Facebook, but sending it via WordPress too for those who avoid Facebook like the plague!)

Thanks for asking yet again Facebook, “Kenny, what is on your mind?” Well here is what I have been thinking: that believing that God calls and justifies a person (as the Apostle Paul clearly believed is the case from what he wrote in his letter to the Romans) does not mean that we fail to do what he said he did in his second letter to the Corinthians: to plead with men and women on Christ’s behalf, “Be reconciled to God.” If you are a preacher, in the Sovereignty of God’s grace this coming Sunday may well be the first, only, or last time someone in your congregation will have to hear about Jesus and to be encouraged by your Holy Spirit given pleadings to come to Him.

If Christ Himself is pictured by Paul as begging and pleading with people to be reconciled to God, is it time to throw caution and good taste to the wind and beg and plead too, whether in preaching or witnessing? When I say that, I am not talking of a dramatic display of feigned emotion, rather my mind is going back to a newspaper item I read about the Orkney Revival of the early 1860’s. The reporter spoke of seeing a little girl saying to an old spiritually distressed man, “Oh sir, won’t you come to Jesus. Can’t you see Him? Please let me help you to Jesus.” Being thought of as “cool” maybe needs to be let go of as an acceptable aim for a preacher of the gospel or a witness of Jesus Christ.  His cross is not a “cool” image. May lambs be born into the Kingdom of God throughout Scotland and beyond  by the power of God’s Word and Spirit.  May preaching, our witnessing, our pleadings be the midwife helping to bring God given life to birth.

God Bless

Kenny