Revival's Golden Key by Ray Comfort Page B

is an extended version of my response.
    The first thing to note is that this church and its ministers haven’t diluted the gospel or lowered their standards. The church is one of the best in the country with gifted, godly leaders. They fearlessly preach a no-compromise gospel and are even better at nurture than they were years ago. Yet an increasing number of their numerous converts fail to show evidence of moral change in their lives.
    Again, even a “no-compromise gospel” will not awaken sinners. That’s not its function. Author and Bible teacher Paris Reidhead , in remarking about the ministry of Charles Finney, wrote:
    Finney was in Rochester, New York, where a blue-ribbon committee of outstanding citizens was appointed by Henry Ward Beecher to study the converts who, a decade earlier, had come to Christ under Finney’s preaching. It was found that eighty-five percent of those who had made professions of faith under Finney’s preaching were still faithfully living for Christ.
    In contrast, it is being reported that only one-half of one percent of those who make decisions for Christ in our evangelistic meetings today will be living as Christians two years from now. This should give you some idea of how far we’ve strayed from the Word of God (Finding the Reality of God). 4
    Perhaps you are thinking, “But I didn’t have the Law preached to me when I came to Christ.” Let me ask you a few questions. When you came to the Savior, did you have a knowledge of sin? You must have, or you would not have repented. He who repents turns from sin, and “sin” is transgression of the Law (1 John 3:4).
    What then was your sin? Was it lust, adultery, or fornication? If so, then your sin was that you transgressed the 7th Commandment. Did you steal (8th), hate (6th), lie (9th), or blaspheme (3rd)? Were you covetous (10th)? Were you selfish or ungrateful to God? Did you realize that God should be first in your life (1st, 4th)? Or maybe you suddenly discerned that God was nothing like you thought He was (2nd). Did you feel bad about your attitude toward your parents (5th)? How did you know that you had sinned against God? Wasn’t it because you knew of the Ten Commandments? Someone, somewhere, somehow had said to you: “You shall not kill, you shall not steal,” etc., and your con-science bore witness with the Law. Like Paul, you too can say, “I would not have known sin except through the Law” (Romans 7:7).
    Impersonal Statistics
    On a Saturday sometime in 1998 near Davis, California, a female student from Sacramento and a skydiving instructor (who had made about two thousand jumps) leaped from a plane at ten thousand feet. Both were in their twenties. Tragically their parachute failed to open and their reserve became tangled in the main chute. Witnesses said that they heard the young woman screaming for help, and felt the impact about two football fields away. It was the woman’s first jump. Needless to say, it was her and her instructor’s last.
    I have related this true story to bring a personal note to the horror of seeing someone entrust her life to a parachute, and having it fail. One would never forget the sound of a terrified young lady screaming, nor the experience of feeling the earth shake as her fragile body hit the ground. The cold statistic that one in a hundred thousand jumps ends in death somehow loses its reality, but (depending on your tenderness of heart) the details of one young woman’s death is heartrending. In the same way, we can speak about how many hundreds of thousands fall away from the faith, and lose sight of the reality that we are speaking about the salvation of individual human beings.
    I can’t put into words the heartbreak of seeing so many spurious converts who have left the Church, and the multitudes of false converts who stay w ithin the Church. A. W. Tozer wrote, “It is my opinion that tens of thousands of people, if not millions, have been brought into some kind of religious