The mouth, pride, sin & Aggressive Christianity

He who guards his mouth and his tongue keeps himself from calamity.
Proverbs 21:23

I’ve been reading CB’s ‘Aggressive Christianity’ again, below are some familiar extracts.

"Go ye". Don't wait for people to come to you. Go to them, where they are. "Seek them out; run after them, wherever you can get at them....Wherever you find a creature that has a soul, go and preach the Gospel to them....That is the meaning and the spirit of the commission.Am I to wait till an unconverted Godless man
wants to be saved before I try to save him....Am I to let my unconverted friends and acquaintances drift quietly down to damnation, and never tell them about their souls... Is this anything like the spirit of early Christianity? No...Verily we must make them look--tear the bandages off, open their eyes, make them bear it, and if they run away from you in one place, meet them in another, and let them have no peace until they submit to God and get their souls saved. This is what Christianity ought to be doing in this land....Don't let your relatives, and friends, and acquaintances die, and their blood be found on your skirts!!!

I know that this was for then and not necessarily for now but the spirit that bubbles within me is not urging me to be God’s sniper selectively picking off individuals I am by nature and possibly by calling too a weapon of mass destruction.

I can be incredibly tolerant and gentle with those outside of the kingdom but I have little patience when it comes to those who purport to be within it! Like Jesus I want to make friends with the woman caught in adultery and attack the Pharisees with a whip. This means that sometimes I need to be restrained. It would be very easy for me to do a Saul and charge into battle, win a victory, build a monument to myself and then wonder why God rejected me as any kind of spiritual leader?

Recognising the pride that leads us into rebellion can often (though not always) result in humility.

I recently deliberately rebelled against my better nature by contributing to the Salvation Army’s international discussion forum – this (albeit brief) sojourn did me few favours.

I have been here twice before and on both occasions I was led out just as surely as I was misled in. When Jesus warned against casting pearls before swine he wasn’t hurling insults at the gentiles but simply reminding us that we need to think before we lay God’s treasures before a potentially unappreciative audience.

Still – ‘all things work together for good’ and I have made some friends on the forum and have been encouraged to discover that there are many ‘out there’ who agree with our message and that is encouraging. The detractors speak for themselves and declare much more through their postings than they think.

Set a guard over my mouth, O LORD; keep watch over the door of my lips.
Let not my heart be drawn to what is evil, to take part in wicked deeds with men who are evildoers; let me not eat of their delicacies.
Psalm 141: 3- 4