As a boy I once had an English master (actually a Welshman) who, at twenty-one, had been a junior officer in the First World War. He told of how he volunteered at the outbreak of war with twenty or so other young men who had been at university together. They had just started their careers, but felt they should serve their country, knowing it might mean loss of life or limb. There is a very famous documentary film clip of a boyish 2nd lieutenant nervously pacing to and fro in a trench, then waving his pistol and leading his men ‘over the top’, out of the trench. Such junior officers were so often the first to be cut down by enemy fire, and my English teacher was the only one among his friends to return from the war. They knew the risks, but they were ready to volunteer for king and country. Yet here are we today, children of the eternal King, called to a spiritual warfare, and yet so few will come forward to regular service in many churches. We have lost sight of the effort and injury of the war analogy, with all its sacrifice, cancelled home leave, and crawling about for days on frozen ground or in flooded trenches. The far more comfortable rigours of regular Christian service are unthinkable for so many reformed Christians.

I have known a number of people who had to move to a new location and a new church, where they observed there was no Sunday School. These were nice churches, with a good ministry and dear people who gave the new members warm encouragement when they wished to begin Sunday Schools. People said, ‘What you are doing is wonderful and we are so grateful to you. We are with you in this.’ And no doubt they were faithful in prayer, but (and this is a situation I have heard from a number of people) no one ever lifted a finger to help in a practical way.

Just recently I met a couple who went from the Tabernacle to a provincial town nearly 25 years ago, and since then have faithfully operated a Sunday School in a sizeable reformed church of good reputation. But after all this time, when they go away on holiday, the School has to close because they have no helpers. What is wrong in our churches, whereby, when the Lord gives them a zealous couple who get down to work, they provide no challenge or training to others to join with them in the battle for souls? Is such spiritual indifference to the work of the Gospel authentic Calvinism? Of course not.

We should reflect the spirit of Acts 20:16, where the apostle Paul rushes to Jerusalem to take advantage of the Day of Pentecost, and the greatly swollen population of the city – people who could be reached with the Gospel. Where is the hunger for conversion today, apart from a desire for revival, when, it is hoped, God will do all the work for us?