If God calls us to go through a day of small things, then we must be faithful to him during those times. We will use the day of small things as an excuse. We will still try for all we are worth to win every soul we can, and we will not compromise our methods. If God calls us to live in a day of persecution or difficulty or hardship, we must be faithful to him in that day. We must not try artificially to make it a day of revival when it is not. We pray for revival and we long for it, but we cannot engineer it for ourselves.
How can people compromise when we read here of the anger of God towards compromise? Obviously it is a loss of belief in the word of God. ‘We feel uncomfortable. We are in a day of difficulty. We are in a day when people will not listen to us. What can we do? We do not trust prayer meetings anymore. We do not trust the word of God and the gospel alone. We do not trust our sacred culture of the church, as it were, which is different from the world. We will develop our own culture.’ That is a lack of faith in the word of God and in his promises.
But why do people compromise? It may be something very basic – they have little real communion with God in their own lives. They do not have rich times of personal devotion; they are not close to the Lord and it is easy for them to compromise. For some it may be that a low quality of result is good enough. I would rather have the numbers than the quality, they say. I would rather feel the thrill of a church being full, than to know for certain that any or all of those people have really come under conviction and known Holy Ghost conversion. Quantity not quality. That is how some people think. It may be that for some of the compromisers, they see something for themselves in this. ‘Oh, it will make me feel better. It will get me a reputation. It will achieve this or that for me. If I can get the fastest growing church or a great crowd, no matter what it costs.’ For others perhaps it is just that their tastes are not mortified. There are all the things that go on in the world: some of the music and some of the culture may be very clever. It may have many desirable aspects to it, but it is wedded to a debased culture, an anti-god, an anti-authority culture, therefore it must be rejected. But there are some people, they have enjoyed that sort of thing, and they have not mortified those tastes and turned their backs on them for the sake of Christ. If somebody is a glutton, they have enjoyed certain things to excess. This is not a matter of self-imposed aversion therapy; that will not work. But you mortify the tastes. You say, ‘Those things are very nice to my taste but they are wrong for me to so indulge.’ It is the same for the things of this world. You are not being asked you to say there is no merit in them, but you say, ‘They are not appropriate for me and I mortify them; I put to death and dampen down my tastes in those things.’ Partial faithfulness is an offence to the Lord. Entire faithfulness: that is what called for in these letters.