Pastors with Bloody Hands

This message is for my brother, Pastors, within the sound of my voice today. I have had my share of preaching at Pastors conferences, and I like preaching to Pastors. I count it a great privilege to do so.

And I recall the very first time I preached to a room full of Pastors. It was the second sermon I ever preached. And to top it off, Dr. Stephen F. Oldford was sitting on the front row, and I was as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

I approached Dr. Oldford before the meeting and told him how nervous I was, and I asked him to lay his hands on me and to pray. And he laid his hands on me, and he prayed a very solemn prayer. Then I got up there and preached to those Pastors, and I shared with them that I had only preached once before, and that was in a maximum security prison.

And the prison guard took me and another man to a room with a bolted door, and the guard left me in there with those prisoners. I was preaching out of Psalm 40, which describes the bottleneck prison. And as I looked around at those thieves and murderers, I was scared, and I told that group of Pastors that I was as nervous with them as I was with those bunch of criminals in prison.

They got a big kick out of that, and it broke the ice somewhat, and they received my message that day. In fact, one Pastor from New Orleans wouldn't leave me alone, wouldn't let me leave the podium until I handed him my sermon notes so he could preach that message next Sunday in his church. They received my message that day, and I hope you receive my message this day, friends, for it's a very solemn message, and you better pay close attention to it, for it concerns you personally, and it has an eternity effect attached to it.

The title of my message today is Pastors with Bloody Hands, and my text is found in the book of Ezekiel in chapter 3. You may turn in your Bibles there now. I will be in verses 17 through 19. I will read it to you now, and as I do, I pray that the Spirit of the Lord will be pleased to attend the reading of His holy word.

Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel. Therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me. When I say unto the wicked, thou shalt surely die, and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life.

The same wicked man shall dine his iniquity, but his blood will I require at thine hand. Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall dine his iniquity, but thou hast delivered thy soul. Dear friends, let me make a distinction here today from the vantage point of my being a research scholar in revival history.

When I study the sermons of men God has used in times of revival and religious awakenings, men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield and Gilbert Tennant and Jonathan Parsons, each of whom was greatly used during the great awakening. And I study men whom God used as preachers during the second great awakening, men like Ezehiel Nettleton and Charles Finney, and I study what they wrote and preached, and I look at what my contemporary preachers are preaching today in this country, and I see a vast dissimilarity between them. Those men, every single one of them, warned sinners of their great danger of dine in their sins.

They thundered the law in the ears of their hearers until they saw Sinai altogether on a smoke, and they preached up the utter strictness and severity of God's holy law until sinners heard the great rumblings of the terrors of an almighty God and were awakened to their lost condition. They preached up man's duty of repentance and the utter necessity of regeneration. They preached searching sermons which called on men and women and boys and girls to earnestly seek God for mercy and grace that a work of humiliation must be performed on the heart through compunction as man sought God's great mercy and favor.

And each of those men who were mightily used of God did not fear man and preached to man with one central purpose, and that was to snatch them out of the fires of an eternal hell. But we refuse to do that kind of preaching today. We call it old-fashioned and out-of-date, unpopular and not politically correct.

We'd rather be popular with our audience and gain their approval. So we preach nice little sermons to encourage them in their walk with God, or we preach up the attributes of God, or we preach church history to them to inform them of God. But we won't do what is necessary like Edwards did when he preached his famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

He preached that sermon in Enfield, Connecticut, to where the strong men in the congregation grew so alarmed that their shrieks and cries drowned out the end of his sermon. I've been to that patch of ground in Enfield, Connecticut, and I know some of you have as well. It's a sacred spot, isn't it? It's just an empty field now, which stands across the street from a Presbyterian church.

There's a stone marker which rises out of the grass and marks the ground where the old meeting house once stood, where Jonathan Edwards preached that search and sermon that night. I know many of you have studied that sermon, read it many times, but you refuse to preach what is in that sermon. You say it won't work today.

Man is different today. Listen, friends, man is the same today as he was in Edwards' day. He's a guilty rebel who has broken the strict law of God, and he deserves hell because the sentencing of the law must be carried out by a just judge who hates sin and must punish it.

But that's the problem with some of you today because you don't believe God is a God who must punish sin. You just don't believe that. And some of you don't believe your Bibles as you should.

You have doubts about some parts of it, and it keeps you from preaching it with conviction. You were fine before you went to seminary, but once you went to seminary, you drank of the doubting philosophies, and it has tainted your ministry and robbed you of your power. And some of you don't believe in the Holy Spirit as necessary for today.

You believe the Spirit was for the days of the apostles, but not in this dispensation. So you preach without an anointing. You rely on your education and your personality to get by.

But each of these won't affect you in eternity as much as this last aspect, which rests in our passage before us today, that if you fail to warn the wicked to turn from his wicked way, and he dies in his sins, then God will require His blood at your hand. Think of that, brother pastor. Think of that now.

I want you to take a moment and look down at your hands. Take a good look at them now. Turn them over and examine them to see how bloody they are.

Some of you have bloody hands. They are covered in the blood of the guilty whom you failed to warn. God will hold you personally responsible for your lack of preaching the full counsel of God.

You take your preaching too lightly. You cater to man's approval of your preaching, but you do not cater to his soul of dying in his sins. You have failed to warn the wicked.

Be honest. Look at your hands. They stand as an indictment against some of you.

Go on. Look at your bloody hands. How can you sleep at night with your bloodstained hands? If your neighbor's house was on fire in the night, and the smoke and flames caught your attention, you would run to his door, pound on it with your fists, ring his doorbell incessantly until someone answered the door to escape the consuming flames, wouldn't you? You wouldn't let that family burn to death, would you? But yet on Sunday morning, that same family sits before you in their sins, and you refuse to awaken them to their lost condition and warn them to turn from their wicked ways.

You refuse to warn them of their great danger of dying in their sins by failing to exercise repentance toward God and faith in Jesus Christ. You'd rather let them burn in hell than preach an upsetting message to them. Look at your hands.

Look at your hands. There is blood all over them. How can you ignore God's solemn word which speaks directly to you when I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die, and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way to save his life.

The same wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood will I require at thine hand. Now let me ask you a question. Do you believe that? Do you? Let me share a true story with you about a pastor who walked this path which we speak of today.

There's a big Baptist church in Memphis, Tennessee that you're all familiar with, and one of the former pastors was R.G. Lee. He's known for preaching that famous sermon called Payday Someday. Some of you may have read it or probably listened to it.

Well, there was a member in Dr. Lee's congregation, an attorney who had to be out of town on business frequently, but no matter where this lawyer went, he made sure to catch a train back to Memphis on Saturday night so that he could listen to R.G. Lee preach on Sunday. He loved to hear that man preach. Well, this lawyer got cancer and he was in the hospital.

He lay there dying, and he called for his pastor to come to his bedside. Dr. Lee entered the hospital room, whose window overlooked the Mississippi River. The lawyer told R.G. Lee, I want you to know how much I've enjoyed your preaching through the years, and I never missed a Sunday if I could help it.

I lie here dying with only a few days left to live, and I want to reprimand you, sir, for never telling me how to be saved. You never preached the cross to where I could see it. You never put the blood out there where I could reach it, and I am dying and will more than likely die in my sins, and I now chastise you, sir, for your lack of warning me of my great danger of dying in this Christless condition.

R.G. Lee left that man's hospital room with his head down, feeling berated and guilty as charged. It was now dark outside as he walked down to the banks of the Mississippi River. There he got down on his knees in the mud, getting his white suit pants dirty in the process, while he dipped his hands in the muddy river.

He just kept washing his hands over and over, dipping them in that dark, cool water, and contemplating what that dying man had told him. And right there and then he promised God from that point forward he would preach the cross so men could see it, and he would preach up the blood so men could get under it, and he changed his message that night. And in three weeks' time there was a move of grace at that church, and three blocks of downtown Memphis were shaken with revival.

You see, dear brothers, the heart that cares for the souls of men will be honest with them and warn the wicked of their great danger of dying in their sins if they turn not from them. We must ask ourselves today a question. We must ask the Holy Spirit to shine His light on our hands, place our hands and our ministry under His white, bright spotlight of purity, and see if there is blood on our hands from our lack.

Look at your hands. Look at your hands. Is there blood on them? Then do what R.G. Lee did.

Find you a spot to get along with God and confess your failure to warn men to flee from the wrath to come. Confess your fear of man. Confess your fear of failure.

Confess your great sin of not doing what you should and doing what is necessary and warning sinners to turn from their wicked way so they will not die in their iniquities and drop into a burning hell. Let us go to God now and seek Him in earnest for it's not too late to ask Him to change our preaching and to wash our stained hands. Go to Him now.