The text of Dr. John C. Stevens' last Chapel address as president, Aug. 14, 1981.
Thank you, John Tyson, for leading us in that prayer. Thank you, John York, for the good songs. Thank you, Ed Brown, for a generous introduction.
This is my last speech as president. The next speech I make in chapel I suppose will be as chancellor. I don't know whether a chancellor's speech is any different than a president's speech. I may be like the person who said, "How can I know what I think until I've heard what I have to say?" Well, we'll find out about that. But I'm looking forward to continuing to work with president Bill Teague and the administration in the building of Abilene Christian University.
The main object that you'd be interested in I think is the future of the kingdom of God, the growth of the church, and the spreading of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I call your attention to Jude the third verse; a verse that I think it would be most appropriate for us all to think about as we end this semester of chapel.
"I am very eager to write to you of our common salvation. I found it necessary to write, appealing to you to contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints."
Contend for the faith. Don't go out into life as a person who is quiet about his faith. Don't be a passive onlooker. Be one who contends for the faith, as we expressed in the prayer, take a stand. We need to take our stand. We need to let people know that we uphold the Lord Jesus Christ and we believe that he has the answers to the problems of humanity. He offers salvation. He alone offers salvation. Paul said in I Timothy 6:12, "Fight the good fight of faith.” And in Ephesians 6, "Put on the whole armor of God, having done all to stand."
But let me say that while you are contending for the faith, teaching the word, preaching the gospel, exhorting, pleading with people to come to Christ, let me advise you and admonish you to stay away from the business of passing eternal judgment on your fellow man. My people, my family have been members of the Churches of Christ for generations. According to our family traditions, my great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother and grandfather were baptized by Alexander Campbell. But I’ve seen so many people passing eternal judgment when we shouldn’t have been doing it. And we have the reputation in some quarters of being the people who say that everybody's going to hell.
I want us to get away from that and say that we’re the people who are in favor of taking everybody to Heaven. Let me remind you of what the apostle Paul said about this in I Corinthians 4:3, "To me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or any human court. I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself. But I am not hereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore do not judge before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart." Then every man will receive his commendation from God.
So here are the things that I'd like you to remember:
Number 1. The Great Commission did not command you or me to go out and judge, but to teach and preach.
Number 2: We are not God. And we must not ever make the mistake of assuming that we can fill the role of the God of heaven.
Number 3. We do not have sufficient information or wisdom or evidence to pronounce eternal judgment on human beings.
Number 4. We make enough foolish statements trying to be smart. Why should we make foolish statements when we know we’re foolish. Don’t try to distinguish. Now you say how are we going to deal with these people? Then how are you going to preach to the lost? I have a suggestion on that. Assume that everybody is lost without the gospel of Jesus Christ. Preach to everybody. Don't say here are the people who don’t need preaching and there are some who do. Everybody needs it. It always has been a little bit of a shock to me to hear someone say, "When I went to the island of Madagascar there were only two Christians on that island." I always wonder how you don’t know everybody on Madagascar? How could a person possibly say there are only two Christians in Madagascar? And secondly how does he know for sure that the two persons he thinks are Christians are Christians? He doesn’t know their hearts.
Well I don’t know why you have to make statements like that. Why do you have to say that anyway? Why don't you just say, "I went to Madagascar to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to every living soul that I could possibly reach"?
Let me remind you of what we did about the disease of poliomyelitis. And I realize that probably the majority of you didn't know that there was once such a dreaded illness. But prior to 1954, people dreaded poliomyelitis. People by the thousands were afflicted and crippled for life. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a cripple who, when he was a 37-year-old man, became a victim of poliomyelitis. His lower limbs were useless, wasted. Fortunately the press didn't make a big show of it during his 12 years as president of the United States. They didn’t even take pictures showing the useless lower limbs. They did't show the 22 pounds of steel he used to brace himself when he stood. But I don’t suppose the press today would observe that kind of restraint in dealing with the problem. But fortunately I don't necessarily think that people today would hold that against the president if he were crippled or diseased. I think we're more prepared perhaps to take things as they are, but at that time, we thought that people thought that the president of the United States ought to be completely sound in body and didn’t want everybody thinking he was a crippled man. But he had been a victim of polio. And countless thousands of others had been victims of this disease.
But in 1954 Dr. Jonas Salk came up with the Salk vaccine, which consisted of the poliomyelitis virus, inactivated by formaldehyde, and I remember what was said then by Mrs. Olveta Culp Hobby who was the first secretary of HEW under the Eisenhower cabinet. When they ran out of the vaccine, everybody in the U.S. of a certain age bracket was to be vaccinated and we ran short of the vaccine and I remember Mrs. Hobby's statement. She said we could not possibly have foreseen the demand. And I remember how the press ridiculed that statement. When someone had come up with a miracle drug that the demand would be universal, you might have just said that however many people there are, that would be how many capsules of the vaccine you would need.
But I suggest that you all preaching the gospel might assume that everybody in the world needs the gospel. Why not just assume that everybody in the world needs the gospel just as everybody in the U.S. needed the Salk vaccine at a certain age. Then you see you are relieved of the responsibility of having to make judgments, eternal judgments concerning the souls of men and women. Furthermore you do not antagonize and alienate people by taking a posture that some should call arrogance and others would call self-righteousness. And so if somebody asks you, "Do you think you're going to heaven or hell?" Why not just respond that none of us have a chance to go to Heaven without the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and the benefit of Christ's death.
I found out 40 years ago preaching in east Texas that if somebody came to me and said, "Well now, my good mother died without having done all the things you said; now where do you say she is now?" I found out that in the first place if I said that she was lost that didn’t really mean that she was lost, and in the second place if I said that she was saved that didn’t mean that she was saved, so that just wasn’t within my jurisdiction.
The best thing that I could say was, "This is all up to the Lord God of Heaven. The judge of all the earth will do right. Meanwhile let’s you and me study the Word of God together to see what our duty is before God and we’ll try to do the best that we can."
I commend this thought to you. We need people who are zealous, who are alive with the gospel. Who want to preach the Word of God, but let us remain within the terms of the Great Commission. Let us remain as people who teach and who preach and exhort and pray for our fellow man. But remember that we are not the people to pass final eternal judgment.
Furthermore, we don't ever give up on anybody. We keep preaching to people until the day of their death. It's never up to us to determine when it’s too late. That's surely in the hands of the Lord God almighty. We trust that in this we can continue to expand the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ during our lifetime.
