What words these are, and they are words which paint for us a marvellous picture of the whole way of salvation. Now the context of these words is the preaching of John seeking to bring people to repent of their sins, and seek forgiveness.
We see this, that the mission of the Christian church is not to be involved in politics, or anything of the kind. The mission of the Christian church is fundamentally to bring men, women, and young people to find God, to repent of their sins. If there is a church which has stopped doing that and is preaching other things, it has ceased to be a true church of God. The commission of God to his people is to preach this gospel, and no other message. It is true that, purely as a side effect of the Christian gospel, the Christian church has produced in secular life some of the greatest social reformers ever known. It is fair to say that no great reform along a social level would ever have been carried out, but for the fact that there in the beginning was somebody saved by the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, somebody who had been changed by the power of God so that he no longer thought and lived for himself, but began to have a conscience about the needs around. But that is not the fundamental purpose of the Christian gospel. This world is not going to get better. This world is going to get worse and worse, says the gospel, and the message of the Bible is this: that men and women need to be brought to a living relationship with their God.
Bishop Hall said this: ‘If the great way maker’ – that is the Lord Jesus Christ who made a way of salvation – ‘do not cast down hills and raise up valleys in the hearts of men, then there is no passage for him. Never will Christ come to a soul where the herald of salvation in repentance has not been before him.’