“So with many other exhortations, 

he proclaimed the good news to the people.”

–Luke 3:18

One day during my North Carolina pastorate, our Clerk of Session invited me to accompany him to a golf tournament called the Masters. It’s held each April in Augusta, Georgia. I had ridden by the course many times as a boy while visiting my  grandmother, but had never been inside the gates. So when our Clerk asked me to join him for the opening round in 2002, I did not hesitate to accept.

We left Charlotte early and exiting the interstate a few hours later, began to see all kinds of signs related to the tournament. Restaurant and hotel marquees welcomed out-of-town guests. Markers at shopping center entrances quoted a daily parking rate. Scalpers held aloft a piece of paper declaring a hope to buy or sell tournament badges while youth groups waved posters announcing the price for bottled water. 

All of those signs are normal for major sporting events in the U.S., but there was another one that got my attention. It was a hand-printed message on cardboard attached to a stick, held by a man who stood on a corner that golf patrons had to pass. Crossing the street, I saw that the sign read “Repent or Perish.” As I drew closer, he turned it and on the opposite side, it read “Turn or Burn.”  Unlike all of the other signs I had seen, that man was not talking about golf, but eternal things, as he called individuals to commit their lives to Jesus Christ. I prefer to think he displayed one side or the other randomly and not due to the message he thought I most needed to hear! In either case, he stood there silently calling on people to change their ways.

It was fitting for me to receive such a word in Augusta as the man who first taught me about salvation–my father–was born and raised there. He went to the Masters many times as a boy and we have a small book with the autographs of such luminaries as Bobby Jones and Sam Snead. In his ten-year-old scrawl, it also contains the signature of one Lee Willingham. Dad became a Presbyterian minister, too, and while I’m confident he never told persons to “turn or burn,” he did speak of what it meant to be saved in a 34-year-career that brought hundreds of persons to faith.       

That cardboard sign reflects an approach like that of John the Baptist in preparing the way for Jesus. In the line cited above, Luke says with such “exhortations [John] proclaimed good news to the people,” but earlier verses show the Baptizer had a fire-and-brimstone style. He called them a “brood of vipers” and when depicting them as trees warned, “every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”  That’s the tone of the silent message bearer near Augusta National Golf Club, too. Perhaps John the Baptist was the primary source for his devotional life.  I don’t know. Yet I do know that fear is no basis for lasting change and growth.    

As the fear of being embarrassed can make a student do her homework, but it rarely results in a passion for the subject. An intimidating boss can cause employees to tow the line, but it will not motivate them to become creative thinkers. And despite professional colleagues of mine who preach otherwise, I’m convinced that fear is no lasting basis for the kind of change God seeks from us either. 

For it is out of love that God calls us to turn from that which is not divine and towards the kind of life for which we’ve been made. To be sure, such a message won’t fit easily on a handheld sign. Still it’s far more likely to result in a deep and life-giving faith.   

Keeper of Souls, thank you for not choosing to frighten us into believing, but rather inviting us to follow.  Help us to stay on that path, too, not due to fear, but gratitude. Amen.