It is a thrilling, noble enterprise. It demands and deserves every atom of a man's being in uttermost self-commitment.
"To go down to the world of men." That thrusts upon us this crucial fact—that our work as preachers has to be done in the actual setting of a contemporary situation.
The Gospel, it is true, stands unchanged from age to age. It remains yesterday, to-day, and for ever the same. In the twentieth century, it is the identical message which was sent by the Lord to former generations through the mouths of His servants Spurgeon and Wesley and Latimer and Xavier and Chrysostom and the apostles. No protean fashions of thought can alter it. No ebb and flow of the tides of history can prevail to modify it. It is as immutable as God Himself.
But while the basic message thus remains constant and invariable, our presentation of it must take account of, and be largely conditioned by, the actual world on which our eyes look out to-day. The Gospel is not for an age, but for all time: yet it is precisely the particular age—this historic hour and none other—to which we are commissioned by God to speak. It is against the background of the contemporary situation that we have to reinterpret the Gospel once for all delivered to the saints; and it is within the framework of current hopes and fears that we have to show the commanding relevance of Jesus.
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