Dear Sir,
Having read Professor Macleod’s article ‘Do we all come the same way?’ in the March issue of EN, I would like to remind him that both John the Baptist and Jesus himself began their ministries with the word ‘repent’.
We may not all begin our spiritual journeys like the coal-blackened miners listening to George Whitefield with tears streaming down their faces; children, especially, often start by being attached to Jesus and wanting to follow him. But at some stage we must, like Peter, cry out, ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man’. Most of the people I meet, if they believe in God at all, think of him as a God of love, who will forgive us, as one Frenchman famously said on his death bed, because it is his nature to forgive. And this, the first half of John 3.16, is what they mainly hear from the churches. There is no warning that we all deserve to perish and will do so unless we accept the way out offered through the cross, which, as John 3.16 goes on to say, leads to eternal life.
