The intent of a gospel preacher is certainly not to offend people. Paul wrote, “Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man” (Colossians 4:6). Words can motivate someone to do the right thing, or they can drive people away, depending on how they are spoken or written. Thus, we must choose our words carefully .

While some preachers and teachers of the gospel may not be as considerate in what they say as they should be, there are those who go to the opposite extreme. Some preachers are way too concerned about what others think. Their main goal, sometimes, without even realizing it, is to sooth the itching ears of those they are trying to teach. Paul warned Timothy about this (2 Timothy 4:1-5). While offending others should never be our purpose, we do not do anyone any good by sugar-coating the truth or watering-down the gospel.

I recently listened to a gospel preacher spend five minutes on his television program complaining about how most preachers today wrongly package the gospel. He claimed that we are too negative, and that we spend too much time telling people what they cannot do. While it is certainly true that preachers can become too negative, whenever I hear a preacher spend too much time emphasizing how negative we are, I immediately begin to listen closely to see how positive that preacher is. You see, while we can be too negative in our preaching, we can be too positive as well. This particular preacher definitely went down the latter road.

As he sat in his office and spoke into the camera for his television program, he began to speak about heaven and hell, only he never actually mentioned hell. He spoke of how wonderful heaven is and then he referred to hell as “the other place.” That caught my attention since he spent so much time emphasizing how we should package the gospel and avoid being so negative. Evidently, calling hell by its name is too offensive. Better that we just refer to it as “the other place.” We certainly do not want to offend anyone.

While I agree that we should be careful with our speech, I feel even more strongly that gospel preachers must avoid excluding any biblical topic from their teaching and be willing to call Bible things by Bible names. Simply referring to hell as the other place takes the sting away from the doctrine of eternal punishment, and make no mistake about it, the Bible teaching on hell is meant to sting.

It is not just the topic of hell. There are preachers throughout this land who are now avoiding almost all the doctrines that make the truth distinctive in nature. There are those who will not teach on the church in any substantial fashion. People in the world today need to able to see the difference between the church that Christ built and denominational churches that are human in origin. Again, some teachers of the gospel will not touch the issue of marriage, divorce and remarriage with a ten foot pole because they view that issue as too negative and controversial. There are even those in the church who refrain from telling the truth about the place and importance of baptism in God’s scheme of redemption because most people today believe that we are saved by faith only and we certainly do not want to offend them.

I would encourage all of us to go back to the Bible and read some of the sermons that were preached by Jesus, Paul and the rest of the apostles. To be consistent, the preacher I referred to earlier would have to conclude that they were too negative in their preaching. I have pointed out before that we have more recorded statements from Jesus about hell than we do about love.

This business about positive preaching is not only overrated, it is downright unscriptural if one is concluding that we avoid some portions of truth. Paul was willing to declare the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:20-27). Positive-preaching and sugar-coated teaching might attract crowds and increase the numbers of a local church, but it does not meet the true responsibility of an evangelist. Paul told Timothy to do the work of an evangelist (2 Timothy 4:5), a part of which was to engage in the negative acts of reproving and rebuking.

We should never purposely offend people. But, if people are offended by the unperverted gospel of Christ, so be it. The truth must be told.