No Come Uppers

Years ago, I was at Stephen Alfred's funeral in Memphis, Tennessee, and Adrian Rogers was leading the ceremony. When it was over, I was standing in the hallway of the church, and Dr. Rogers came up to me and he made a startling statement. He stood there facing me with his arms folded across his chest and a serious look on his face, and he asked me a question.

He asked, do you know what concerns me? And I said, no, Dr. Rogers, what concerns you? And he said, what concerns me is I see God calling up men like J. Sidlow Baxter and Stephen Alfred, and I look around, and I don't see any comeuppers. Well that's what the old boy said, no comeuppers. Through the years and since that time, I've given much thought to Adrian Rogers' words, for it wasn't long after he said them that I was standing over his own coffin.

God's been calling up our spiritual leaders one by one. In the Bible, God would clear the ground for judgment. He got Lot and his family out of Sodom before burning it to the ground.

The fact that God is calling up our spiritual leaders one by one and not replacing them is a cause for great concern to me. We may be sitting on the very verge of destruction. Oh, there are men still coming into ministry, but they are not comeuppers.

They're not the men cut out of the same cloth as these other men. D.L. Moody was a comeupper. Sam Jones was a comeupper.

Mordecai Hamm was a comeupper. Rolf Barnard was a comeupper. Men who could shake entire towns with their preaching.

I believe somewhere in the last 60 years or so, we turned the work of evangelism more into a business that ran more on money and manpower rather than by prayer and Holy Ghost power. I like to think, though, that God still has a young man out there somewhere in the shadows that he is preparing, ready to thrust them into the limelight of activity to push back the darkness by powerful revivals as the youth of George Whitefield or Evan Roberts. Our desperate need in the land today is for some godly comeuppers, men like these.

The Apostle Paul, Luther, Wesley, Whitefield, Knox, Edwards, Finney, Spurgeon, Moody, each shared a common denominator, a fire in their belly. They each were so eaten up with the gospel and thirsty for Christ and filled with the Holy Ghost, they could not stand idly by while others perished. They saw nothing but eternity, worshiped the Holy God and served the risen Christ, living not for earth nor its gains, but living only for heaven and its rewards.

When they preached, they linked the devil with sin and the cross with salvation. They preached hell and its fire and Christ and Him crucified. Not one of them feared king, queen, or pope, and not one of them sought the compliments of men.