Legalistic Preaching Is Defective Preaching

Defective preaching is preaching that has LAW but no gospel: This is preaching that aims to convict men of their sins. It tells them what the law of God says and it tells them how they have FAILED to do what the law says. It tells them they are rebels and that they deserve Hell. But then it says, “so DO BETTER! Stop committing those sins and keep the law! Live a moral and godly life!”  And what happens is that people hear it, and many are convicted and they do try to put away some of their bigger sins and start living a better life, and so they try to stop sinning for little while but find that they keep falling back  into sin again and again. This method of preaching will never produce any real fruit because there has been no real change in the sinners heart – there is no new life, no grace, and they are still under the dominion of their sins. Spurgeon described the situation this way:

“A sinner without grace attempting to reform himself is like Sisyphus rolling the stone up hill, which always comes down with greater force. A man without grace attempting to save himself, is engaged in as hopeless a task as the daughters of Danaus, when they attempted to fill a vast vessel with bottomless buckets. He has a bow without a string, a sword without a blade, a gun without powder. He needs strength. I grant you, he may produce a hollow reformation; he may earth up the volcano, and sow flowers around its crater; but when it once begins to stir again, it shall move the earth away, and the hot lava shall roll over all the fair flowers which he had planted, and devastate both his works and his righteousness. : he cannot deliver himself from his sins.”

This kind of preaching prevailed during the time of Charles Finney in the 19th century. With his blazing eyes Finney transfixed his hearers and called them out as sinners, sometimes by name even, and told them that they had the power to stop being sinners and live lives pleasing to God. But when they tried to follow his instructions, they failed miserably, and the areas that experienced this kind of preaching became especially hardened to the gospel. By God’s grace, this kind of preaching has grown very rare and we shouldn’t mourn it’s passing.

Andrew Webb
"Building Old School Churches"