First preach the Law…
Psalm 19:7 – “The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul…”
“The first duty of the Gospel preacher is to declare God’s Law and show the nature of sin, because it will act as a schoolmaster and bring him to everlasting life which is in Jesus Christ.” [Martin Luther]
“Before I preach love, mercy and grace, I must preach sin, Law and judgment.” [John Wesley]
“Preach 90 percent Law and 10 percent grace.” [John Wesley]
“They will never accept grace until they tremble before a just and holy Law.” [Charles Spurgeon]
“Evermore the Law must prepare the way for the Gospel; to overlook this in instructing souls is almost certain to result in false hope, the introduction of a false standard of Christian experience, and to fill the church with false converts.” [Charles Finney]
“The highest service to which a man may attain on earth is to preach the Law of God.” [John Wycliffe]
“God being a perfect God, had to give a perfect Law, and the Law was given not to save men, but to measure them.” [D.L. Moody]
“Satan, the god of all dissension, stirreth up daily newsects and last of all, which of all other I should never have forseen or once suspected, he hath raised up a sect such as teach…that men should not be terrified by the Law, but gently exhorted by the preaching of the grace of Christ.” [Martin Luther]
“The true function of the Law is to accuse and kill; but the function of the Gospel is to make alive.” [Martin Luther]
“People will never set their faces decidedly towards Heaven and live like pilgrims, until they really feel that they are in danger of Hell… Let us expound and beat out the 10 commandments, and show the length, and breadth, and depth, and height of their requirements. this is the way of our Lord in the sermon on the mount. We can not do better than to follow His plan.” [J.C. Ryle]
“We cannot come to Christ to be justified until we have first been to Moses to be condemned. But once we have gone to Moses and acknowledged our sin, guilt and condemnation, we must not stay there. We must let Moses send us to Christ.” [John. R.W. Stott]
“I never knew but one person in the whole course of my ministry who acknowledged that the first motions of religion in his own heart arose from a sense of the goodness of God, ‘What shall I render to the Lord who has dealt so bountifully with me?’ But I think all besides who have come within my notice have rather been awakened to fly from the wrath to come by passion of fear.” [Isaac Watts]
“If I had my way, I would declare a moratorium on the public preaching of “the plan of salvation” in America for one or two years. Then I would call on everyone who has use of the airwaves and the pulpits to preach the holiness of God, the righteousness of God and the Law of God until sinners would cry out, “What must we do to be saved?” Then i would take them off into a corner and whisper the gospel to them. Such drastic action is needed because we have gospel-hardened a generation of sinners by telling them how to be saved. Don’t use John 3:16. Why? Because you tell a sinner how to be saved before he realized that he needs to be saved. You have gospel-hardened him.” [Paris Reidhead]
“It is a great mistake to give a man who has no been convicted of sin certain passages that were never meant for him. The Law is what he needs…Do not offer the consolation of the Gospel until he sees and knows he is guilty before God. We must give enough of the Law to take away all self-righteousness. I pity the man who preaches only one side of truth – always the gospel and never the Law.” [D.L. Moody]
“Few, very few, are ever awakened or convinced by the encouragements and promises of the Gospel, but almost all by the denunciations of the Law.” [Dr. Timothy Dwight]
“So it is with the work-righteous and the proud unbelievers. Because they do not know the Law of God, which is directed against them, it is impossible for them to know their sin. Therefore also they are not amenable to instruction. If they would know the Law, they would also know their sin; and sin to which they are now dead would become alive in them.” [Martin Luther]
“The only way we can know we are sinning is by knowing His moral Law.” [Jonathan Edwards]
“First then, before you speak peace to your hearts, you must be made to see, made to feel, made to weep over, made to bewail, your actual transgressions against the Law of God.” [George Whitefield]
“Ignorance of the nature and design of the Law is at the bottom of most religious mistakes.” [John Newton]
“I do not believe that any man can preach the gospel who does not preach the Law.” [Charles Spurgeon]
“The Law cuts into the core of the evil, it reveals the seat of the malady, and informs us that the leprosy lies deep within.” [Charles Spurgeon]
“Unless we see our shortcomings in the light of the Law and holiness of God, we do not see them at all.” [J.I. Packer]
“The first duty of the Gospel preacher is to declare God’s Law and show the nature of sin…we would not see or realise it (what a distressing and horrible fall in which we lie), if it were not for the Law, and we would have to remain forever lost, if we were not again helped out of it through Christ. Therefore the Law and the Gospel are given to the end that we may learn to know both how guilty we are and to what we should again return.” [Martin Luther]
…and then the grace of God