Recently, a gentleman died: his name was Arthur Blessitt. He was the so-called evangelist from America who had made himself a huge wooden cross and whatever country he went to, somehow he persuaded the airlines to take this slightly dismantled wooden cross, and he would re-erect it, and he came through the streets of London carrying his cross. In fact, because the long bit of the cross had a little wheel on the end, it actually ran along the ground; he didn't carry the whole weight of it. But anyway, it was a spectacular thing to do. And his slogan and phrase – which didn't come from the Bible, though he claimed to be an evangelical preacher – was, ‘Smile, Jesus loves you.’ Ransack the book of Jeremiah, and see if you can find that. That line of reasoning – ‘Smile, Jesus loves you’ – is not Biblical, yet that is the policy of some people.
There used to be a movement – it has fizzled out now – mainly among men, and before that among students: Campus Crusade for Christ. It grew very, very big in America. And its slogan was ‘God has a wonderful plan for your life’. That was their evangelistic approach. ‘You come to Christ; he will make you happy.’ That is true. He will make you happy; he will lift you up; he will give you a better life; he will save your marriage; he will do wonderful things. But in vain would you listen to Campus Crusade for a message which said, in any shape or form, ‘You are a sinner, and you need a Saviour, and you have to repent and yield your life, so that he can change and work within you.’ All you heard from this group was the benefits without any mention of sin or the need for repentance. This message is still big today, but it is not what we learn from Jeremiah.
Also, we don't just wave the flag. Martyn Lloyd Jones used this phrase in a pastor’s fraternal around 1964, 1965. He said there are too many preachers: all they do is wave the flag of the gospel. They will say to you, ‘You are a sinner, and you need a Saviour, and Christ is that Saviour. Come to him. Well,’ he said, ‘that is not really the gospel. It is, and yet it isn't enough, because all you have done is take the bare bones, and state the very basic facts. You have waved the flag. You haven’t reasoned with anyone. You haven’t persuaded anyone. You haven't convinced them they need it, or explained the whys and wherefores. That is not enough. Again, you come back to, say, Jeremiah, and you see the rich reasoning. His message has a negative side, and as we go on you see it has a powerful positive side too. It is all there: reasoning with people to turn to the Lord. We have just got a glimpse of in this chapter. But this is equipment for witness, for preaching.