An experience of the love of God must have certain results – results which are mandated in Scripture. Otherwise it is a counterfeit experience, a sham, a travesty, and ultimately a bitter disappointment to all concerned. We must, as a convention and as individuals, face the implications of God’s love: An experience of the love of God that will make us clean… will make us care… and will lead to commitment.

It is this response of love, this commitment which abandons one’s self to the will of God and to the service of others – it is this which may well determine the historic usefulness of this convention in years to come.

“My little children,” says the Apostle John, “let us not live in word, neither in tongue: but in deed and in truth.”

The commitment of love will affect the home. It will call for parental training deliberately slanted toward Christian morals standing against easy heathen compromise under pressure. Only a resurgence of biblical morality can check the rising tide of broken homes. Love’s commitment will demand Christian values instead of sophisticated selfishness… genuine Christian experience versus second-generation professors of religion who are first bored, then critical, then cynical, then bitter, then despairing. Love’s commitment will place the home, the job, but most of all, the children on the altar of dedication where one prays, “Lord, make my child a missionary!” The commitment of love will point the family toward sacrifice for the winning of the lost at home and abroad, and will put a stop to the dreadful process of training the young merely to move successfully toward social security while failing in eternal values along the way.

The commitment of love will affect the church. Evangelicals must decide where their priorities lie. Are they primarily interested in organizational survival and the protection and preservation of the donor dollar, or in the holy excitement of proving that their miracle faith is real? Love calls for new priorities, new honesty, new power, manifested by a new breed of people who are not afraid of love’s awful cost! World evangelism is either a glorious possibility in this generation, or else it is a cruel hoax perpetrated upon the young, and upon the lost peoples of the world. Love is asking the church: Are you serious about reaching the lost, and if so, what are you doing about it?

The commitment of love will affect the community and the nation. Because love cares, it will stand up and speak up when scriptural values are threatened. Real love can be tender and compassionate, but it also has steel in its substance and muscle in its ministry.

A number of resolutions offered at this convention deal with moral issues, abortion, capital punishment, integrity in government, for example. However, beyond the convention and its united voice speaking on great issues, there must be a willingness on the part of every individual among us to do his own part in “speaking the truth in love,” to his own community and to his nation!

The commitment of love may well lead the individual to clean out the pornographic material on the corner newsstand which is visited daily by neighborhood boys and girls… to see to it that his local TV station does not air questionable material and X-rated movies… to start a Gospel-oriented ministry for victims of drugs in his community… to speak out against the invasion of occult beliefs and practices… to join the local PTA and to be active at the public school level… to register, and vote, yes to run for office and to win!

The commitment of love – love for God and for people – will deepen concern for the individual and his needs; and will remove the spirit of prejudice so often found in the human heart.

The commitment of love will force us to face the connection between the presently eroding American freedoms and the corresponding loss of Christian opportunity at home and abroad. You lose some of your opportunity as a Christian when you lie down on the job as a citizen!

Other nations have said, “It cannot happen here,” while they went their careless, selfish ways. Ask any of the citizens of such nations now – now that they have fallen, how much opportunity there is for Gospel witness, for evangelistic meetings, for missionary endeavor, even for the expression of a personal opinion. Ask them, and remember the commitment of love – your commitment – in the USA! Evangelicals do have a responsibility for their nation under the mandates of Christian love. To run for office, to be active at the local level, to be vocal on great issues, to stand for God and for His truth in every relationship of life, and to do so within the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution!

Francis Schaeffer says that the status quo is dead, and that we should now teach the young to be revolutionaries of revival and honesty. It should be clear to all of us by now that stated services on Sunday and Wednesday in our churches or even all the busy-work with which we surround our own particular version of the status quo, will not change our country or our world.

Only people who know the love of God, and who manifest it every day, can do that!

Loved, We Will Love!