Question: My son will attends church with me when I insist, but I know his heart is not in it. Should I even bother bringing him anymore?
Answer: By all means you should continue bring him! Please don’t ever underestimate the power of preaching!
I could literally offer hundreds of examples to prove that hearts can be changed under the preaching of God’s word, but let me here share one notable example cited by C.H. Spurgeon (1834-1892).
While preaching on the various and sometimes surprising means which God uses to restore sinners, he shared this example:
“The memorable case of Mr. Thorpe, a noted preacher of the gospel, rises to one’s mind here. He was, before his conversion, a member of an infidel club; in those days infidelity was more coarse than now; and this skeptical society took the name of the “Hell Fire Club.”
Among their amusements was that of holding imitations of religious services, and exhibiting mimicries of popular ministers.
Young Thorpe went to hear Mr. Whitfield, so that he might mimic him before his profane associates; he heard him so carefully that he caught his tones and his manner, and something of his doctrines.
When the club met to see his caricature of the great preacher, Thorpe opened a big Bible so that he might take a text to preach from it extempore after the manner of Mr. Whitfield; his eye fell on the passage, “Unless you repent, you shall all likewise perish.”
As he spoke upon that text he was carried beyond himself, lost all thought of mockery, spoke as one in earnest, and was the means of his own conversion. He was accustomed to say in later years, “If I was ever helped by God to preach, it was that very day when I began in sport but ended in earnest.”
He was carried by the force of truth beyond his own intention, like one who would play in a river, and is swept away by its current.
From a thousand instances I gather that a man is in the way of hope while hearing the word.”