Earnest Words for Earnest Souls

“BELOVED, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of ‘the common salvation,’ it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” (Jude 2.)

God’s salvation is for lost man, but the difficulty lies in this, that man will not believe or own he is lost. The great effort of the day is to improve man; to gild, varnish, and dress him up, so as to make him appear what he is not.

Now God proposes not to mend or improve man, but to save him. A man overboard, struggling with the waves, and unable to swim a stroke, needs a lifeboat. A culprit in prison, under sentence of death for murder, needs not to be told to amend his ways; he wants pardon. A house is on fire, the inmates are well aware of their condition; who would be guilty of the idle mockery of telling them to sit down and weep over the state they are in? Their pressing need is deliverance. A man has lost his way in a dense forest; I meet him, beg him to sit down and listen to an essay on self-culture: what will such an one say? Will he not exclaim in his distress, “I am lost I pray tell me how I can find my way out of this terrible forest?”

And you too are as surely lost: whether you are noble or pauper, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, old, middle-aged, or young, you have not to go to hell to be lost; you are born lost, and are therefore in need of salvation, and God has provided it for you.

In Matt. 18, where children are the subject, the Lord says He “is come to save that which was lost;” but in Luke 19, where a man is the subject, He says that He “is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” Whether man or child, both are alike lost, the only sad difference being, that man is not only lost, but GUILTY.

Now, as we are all in the same condition, we need a salvation that suits itself to all, and such you will find God has provided in the gospel.

If you will turn to the Scripture given at the head of this paper, you will find three words, “the common salvation,” which shows that Christ’s death is not for a class, but for all. “We thus judge that if one died for all, then were all dead.” To say that His death is only for a few, is to say that only a few were dead, and is to be guilty of a very grave error indeed. Scripture says, “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men.”

When the blessed Lord came into the world, He found all lying under the penalty of death, and in grace He went into death for all; and Scripture goes on to say that “He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him who died for them, and rose again.” (Rom. 5:12; 2 Cor. 5:14, 15.)

Here we have a class of persons who, raised from among the mass of the lost and dead, have got life through faith in His name. The common salvation makes known the will of God and the work of Christ; God as a Savior, who will have all men to be saved, and the “Man Christ Jesus,” who gave Himself a ransom for all. Thus I am taught that the will of God and the work of Christ are co-extensive, that they cover the same area, that the remedy is equal to the ruin.

The common salvation of God is free to the needy and helpless; as free as the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the sun that shines upon us. Have you found out that you are lost? Have you confessed it to God? Have you accepted His remedy? Do you ask what it is? It is Jesus. “Neither is there salvation in any other; for there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.” Have you taken Him into your arms by faith, like dear Simeon of old, saying, “Mine eyes have seen thy salvation”?

Have you welcomed Him to your heart and home, and heard Him say, “This day is salvation come to this house”? Have you ever allowed Him to take a seat alongside of you, and to say to your soul, “I am thy salvation”? If not, “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” (Acts 16:31.)

May “the common salvation” of God be yours, consciously, confessedly, and everlastingly.

“Salvation! oh, salvation!

Endearing, precious sound;

Shout, shout the word ‘salvation’

To earth’s remotest bound.

Salvation for the guilty,

Salvation for the lost,

Salvation for the wretched,

The sad and sorrow-tossed.”

Present Salvation

“Behold, Now is the accepted time; behold, Now is the day of salvation.”—2 Cor. 6:2.

I HAVE traveled considerably on both sides of the Atlantic, but I never met a man who wished to go to the lake of fire, there to endure the “eternal judgment” of God. All hoped to be saved some day, and to escape that dreadful doom.

There is a story told of a young man coming to a good old professor of a college (a Christian), and asking him how long before death he thought a man ought to be ready for it. The professor’s answer was, “A few minutes.” The youth, glad of this reply, determined to have his fling, sow his wild oats, see life in all its aspects, and then, a few moments before death should close his selfish career, ask God to have mercy upon him!

“But,” asked the professor, “when are you going to die?” The youth replied, “I cannot tell.” “Then,” said the dear old man, “GET READY NOW, for you may only have a few moments to live.”

There are many persons who would like to be saved, but they say they are waiting God’s time. Surely God knows the best and proper time for a man to be saved, and He says it is NOW.

There is no promise in God’s word that a man shall be saved next week, month, or year, or when he comes to a deathbed, or at the eleventh hour, as some people foolishly and unscripturally say.

God pledges His word to save a man when he believes on the Lord Jesus Christ; not when he says he believes, but when he does believe. His word is, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” (Acts 16:31.)

“The time is short,” eternity is near, the dark clouds of judgment are gathering and are about to burst upon a Christless, guilty world, in all their crushing and grinding power. But ere this takes place, the word of God rings clearly out: “Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”

There is a verse in Isaiah 50:18 which is unequaled in Scripture for tender graciousness. “Come Now, and let us reason together, saith, the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” God’s word is “COME;” but He says when you are to come; it is “Now.” And He says how you are to come; it is “JUST AS YOU ARE.” And then He concludes the magnificent verse with the promise of cleansing you from all your sins, and making you like His Son. (Daniel 7:9; Rev. 1:14.)

There is another strikingly earnest verse in Job 22:21, which says, “Acquaint NOW thyself with Him, and be at peace: thereby good shall come unto thee.” Again the word “Now” confronts us, and tells us, that THIS IS THE MOMENT to make the acquaintance of God by Christ Jesus, to be at peace with God through Christ, having made peace for us with His precious blood, and that then and thus good shall come to us in Christ Jesus.

The invitation of Jesus is, “Come; for all things are NOW ready.” (Luke 14:17.) There is nothing left for the poor, helpless sinner to do in the matter of the soul’s salvation but to believe. Christ did all that the glory of God required to be done on the cross, and then said, “It is finished;” and lie is in glory today as the proof that it is finished, and that God is satisfied, and can now make known to you by the Holy Ghost through the Scriptures His present salvation for all lost sinners.

A touching story is told of a miner who attended a gospel meeting in Cornwall. At the close of the meeting he remained for some personal conversation with the preacher. The miner, though anxious to be saved, was anxious to put it off to a future time; but God’s word being quoted to him, “Behold, NOW is the accepted time; behold, NOW is the day of salvation,” he bowed to God’s word and time, and accepted salvation from God as His gift to faith, and went home praising Him for it.

Early in the morning he went to his work in the mine, but he had not been long at his work when a large portion of the roof fell in and buried him. Loving hearts and willing bands soon removed the rubbish, and brought him to the mine’s mouth, when his lips were seen moving. An ear was bent to catch the dying man’s last words, which were, “THANK GOD I WAS SAVED LAST NIGHT.” He accepted the “present salvation” of God, and in less than twelve hours after he was absent from the body, and present with the Lord.

Dear reader, do thou “Take salvation, Take it now and happy be.”

The devil tempts people to put off the salvation of the soul until tomorrow; but tomorrow is too late, for tomorrow is death, the grave, the lake of fire, the eternal wail of a damned soul. God would not say “now” so frequently in His word if He did not mean it, or if there was not awful danger in delaying, or if tomorrow would do. It may be now or never with you. God grant that it may be now.

“Salvation now, this moment;

You may not see tomorrow,

Then why, oh, why delay?

Now is salvation’s day.”

The Eternal Salvation

“And being made perfect, He became the author of ETERNAL SALVATION unto all them that obey Him.”—HEB. 5:9.

THERE are millions of people in this world who do not know what it is to be saved, but they all hope to be saved.

Then there are others who will tell you that they hope they are saved. There are others who believe that they are saved, but who say that they are only saved so long as they believe; and, lastly, there is a fourth class who if asked whether they are saved humbly reply, “By the grace of God !;” and if asked for how long, readily answer, “Forever! my salvation is as secure as God in His love and power could possibly make it.”

As to the first class, they being in their sins, in Adam, out of Christ, on the road to “ETERNAL JUDGMENT,” ready for it, and deserving it, God says that such are without Christ, having no hope, and without God in the world. The second class are Christ-less religionists, who are clutching as with deathless grip the oil-less lamp of an empty, formal profession; or they may be badly instructed, having been taught that it is humility to hope and presumption to know—the teachers of such do cause them to err; God has a word for them, as they will see before they finish reading this paper.

The third class, who say that they are saved, but that their salvation only lasts as long as they believe, do, without being aware of it, give the whole credit of their salvation to their faith, instead of to Christ.

If persons are only saved whilst they believe, suppose they were to die when they were asleep, what would become of them, for they are not believing then? And now we will examine the belief of the fourth class in the light of Scripture.

First, they tell us that they are saved; and, secondly, that their salvation lasts forever. SALVATION is looked at in three ways in Scripture: first, as something we possess upon believing in Christ; secondly, as something we are getting nearer to every day; and lastly, as something that we shall get at the end of the path of faith.

A few Scriptures will soon make these points quite clear.

When the Philippian jailor cried, “What must I do to be saved?” he was told, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” Paul said to the Ephesians, “By grace ye are saved;” and the same apostle in his second general epistle to Timothy says, “Who hath, saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.” And in his epistle to Titus he says, speaking of salvation, “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us.”

Once more Peter says, in his first epistle, “Receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation, of your souls.” (Acts 16:31; Eph. 2:5; 2 Tim. 1:9; Titus 3:5; 1 Peter 1:9.) All these Scriptures show that salvation is a present thing, not obtainable by our works, but received by faith.

Then as to the second aspect of salvation, we are looked at as getting nearer to it every step we take; for “now is our salvation nearer than when we believed” (Rom. 13:11): this refers to the salvation of the body. We are also exhorted to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling; mark you well we are not told to work for salvation, but to work out that which is already our own. (Phil. 2:12, 13.)

The third aspect of salvation puts it as something to be hoped for, something that we shall not get until the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ: “Ourselves also, which have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.” (Rom. 8:23.) “For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself.” (Phil. 3:20, 21.) This will be the consummation of salvation.

Now even Christians have to bear about in their bodies the marks of the dishonor that sin has done to God in this world, but then we shall have bodies free from sin, disease, ache, or pain. “It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory.” (1 Cor. 15:43.) Faith is connected with the salvation, of the soul, which is instantaneous upon believing in the person and work of Christ; hope is connected with the salvation of the body, which all true believers will have at the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And this salvation is an eternal one, of which Christ is the author, to all who having trusted Him are now found obeying Him.

We are saved, not by our obedience, but to obey. “Wherefore He is able also to save them to the uttermost [or evermore] that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth, to make intercession for them.” (Heb. 7:25.) “Because I live ye shall live also.” (John 14:19.) Christ died to save us, He lives to take care of us, and He is coming to glorify us.

“I give unto them ETERNAL LIFE, and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand. I and my Father are one.” (John 10:28-30.)

It is most clear, from the blessed array of connected Scripture which we have adduced, that salvation is to be possessed NOW; that we are to KNOW we are the present possessors of it; and that it is ETERNAL.

Many confound between salvation and the joy of it; now salvation itself never can be lost, but the joy of it is soon lost.

The psalmist said, “Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation.” (Ps. 51:12.) He asked not to have salvation restored; for when once God gives it, He never takes it away again; what he asked and longed for was the joy of it.

A circumstance that occurred in telegraphy will illustrate this point. One friend wanted to send a telegram to another; when he handed it in at the office the telegraph operator said that he was unable to transmit the message, something having happened to the wire, and thus communication was interrupted, but he hoped to be able to send it on in an hour or so. A man was dispatched from each end of the wire to find out the cause of the obstruction; they met on the road, and found that a huge bough of a tree had been broken off by the violence of a storm, and had fallen across the wire, and the electric fluid had gone into the bough instead of traveling along the wire, A ladder and saw were obtained, the bough sawn from the tree and removed from the wire, and the wire straightened. This done, the operators signaled to each other, and the sentences were flashed from end to end at once. Communication was restored, and the message was transmitted. No new wire was needed, but the impediment to communication had to be removed. So likewise, though it is impossible to break the eternal wire of salvation, yet if its possessor sin and think lightly of it, or if he fail to confess it to his heavenly Father, he forfeits communion.

“If we” (saved persons) “confess our sins, He is faithful and just (to Christ) to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9.)

Are you saved, dear friend? If you are, it is by the grace of God, and you ought to know it and to thank God for it; and if you are saved, it is to wait for God’s Son from heaven, and to work for Him until He comes.

Oh, do not rest another hour without knowing that you are the present happy possessor of “ETERNAL SALVATION!”

So Great Salvation

“HOW Shall we escape if we neglect so GREAT SALVATION!”

HEB. 2:3.

A MAN is dying of some deadly disease, the best possible medical advice is procured, the only medicine known to cure such a disease is prescribed and placed alongside of the patient; he does not refuse to take it, but he neglects to do so, and dies, and thus has to pay the penalty of his folly. Whose fault is it?

A house is on fire, the inmates of the burning building are aroused, a fire-escape ladder is wheeled to one of the windows where escape is possible; a man is seen looking out of the window, he does not refuse the ladder, but he neglects it, and as the floor beneath him gives way, he falls with it into the flames below and is burned to a cinder. Who is to blame?

A man has fallen overboard, he is unable to swim a stroke, a lifebuoy is thrown to him and falls within his reach; he refuses it, thinking he is able to swim to the ship from which he has fallen; he neglects the only means whereby he could be saved from a watery grave, and is drowned. Where does the fault lie?

And you are a dying sinner, and God’s remedy is salvation. You are not in a burning building, but you are exposed to the everlasting flames of the lake of fire, and God’s way of escape for you is salvation. You are overboard, struggling and sinking in the surging sea of death; but God has a lifebuoy for you, and that is His salvation. Now, do you receive it or refuse it?

“I do neither,” you reply; then you are guilty of neglect; and God’s question to such is, “How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?” You may say, as many are saying today, “But I am not wicked; I am not such a sinner as many around me; I have been baptized and confirmed, and am a regular and devout communicant at the place I usually attend.”

All this may be quite true of you, and yet you may be a neglecter of salvation all the time. God does not say, How shall we escape if we “break the Sabbath,” get drunk, steal, tell lies, and don’t go to “a place of worship.” No! We may be most moral, may go to “church” or chapel or meeting, and be a member of one of such places, and still be neglecting “so great salvation.”

The great sin in this day of widespread profession is NEGLECT. Neglect is the God and Christ and Holy Ghost dishonoring sin, the heaven-forfeiting, hell-filling, and soul-damning sin of this privileged moment in which we are living. And whilst you remain in this guilty state of indifference and neglect, there is no way of escape. You may look forward and behind you, on the right and on the left of you, but the words NO ESCAPE will stare you in the face; and most certainly there is no way of escape in ETERNITY, for there is no blood in hell! no Savior pleads with souls there! and no salvation is offered there!

But, thank God, NOW there is a way of escape. Oh, flee to the outstretched arms of Jesus! flee to the rich mercy of God! flee to the great love of God! flee to the exceeding riches of God’s grace! There is a way of escape now from sin, death, and judgment. Oh, avail yourselves of it without another moment’s delay, by accepting the “so great salvation” of God.

But it is not only that men are neglecters, it is what is neglected, “so great salvation,” that makes them so guilty and responsible.

Why is it called “so great salvation”? Because it saves me from my sins, from myself, from Satan, from the world, and from the lake of fire. It saves me to be a child of God, a member of Christ’s body, a temple of the Holy Ghost, an heir of God, and a joint-heir with Christ. Think of the incomparable, unpardonable guilt of neglecting such a salvation, But it is called “so great salvation” because it is Christ Himself.

When the patriarch Simeon held the holy child Jesus in his arms, looking at Him adoringly and confidingly, he exultingly exclaimed, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen THY SALVATION” (Luke 2:29, 30); and when Jesus walked into Zacchaeus’ house (Luke 19:9) He did so saying, “This day is SALVATION come to this house.”

JESUS is the salvation of God, and to neglect Jesus is to be guilty of neglecting the “so great salvation” of God; and what possible way of escape can there be for those who do it? “Neither is there salvation in any other; for there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12.)

But you ask, “How am I to receive Him?” In John 1:12, 13 it says, “As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, to them who BELIEVE on His name; which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”

You may have neglected Him in youth, manhood, and old age. You may have neglected Him in health and sickness, in poverty and plenty. You may have neglected Him long weeks, months, and years.

Oh, do so no longer! receive Him now in all the love of His heart, in all the efficaciousness of His blood, in all the power of His arm, in all His finished work, and in all the glories of His adorable and matchless person. Yea, receive Him just where you are, just as you are, and just now, by simply believing on Him, and you will at once and forever be in the possession of God’s “so great salvation.”

AT the close of a gospel fleeting in a town in Worcestershire, I observed a young woman retiring from the meeting, with a look of great distress upon her face. As she was passing me, I spoke to her about her soul, and inquired the cause of her sadness, when she told me that she was anxious to be saved but could not see her way clear.

I asked her if she had been anxious any length of time—if she believed she was a poor, lost, helpless, and hell-deserving sinner; and with tears in her eyes she answered: “Yes!”

I then asked her what she was doing to get relief. She informed me that she was doing the best she could, and asking the Lord to forgive her.

“But,” I replied, “Christ has done a complete and sufficient work upon the cross, and then said, IT IS FINISHED and has also borne the sins of all who believe in Him; and has put them away forever.”

She assured me that she believed all this, but that it brought her no happiness.

I then turned to 1 Peter 2:24, where it says, “Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree;” and endeavored to show her from this Scripture that Christ had all our sins upon Him on the tree; that if He had not then, He never would, for He would never be there again; that He then put them all away with His blood; and that if He did not then, He never would, as He could not again shed His blood, having shed it when He was down in this sin-stained and guilty world. I then asked her: “Do you believe that Christ had all our sins upon Him when He was on the tree?”

“Yes, I believe He had.”

“Do you believe that He put them all away with His precious blood before He left the tree?”

“Yes, I believe He did.”

“Do you believe that He was buried, and rose again without them, according to the Scriptures?”

“Scripture says so, and I believe it is true.”

“Do you believe that He is in heaven, and has been for more than eighteen hundred years without them there?”

She answered, with all her heart, “Yes.”

“Well now, does not that make you happy?” I asked.

“No,” she answered.

I saw she was an honest soul, and for a moment could not understand her difficulty. At last I asked her the question at the head of this paper, “Have you ever thanked Him?”

She cordially owned she had not, and at once saw the secret of her unhappiness.

I advised her to do so without delay, assuring her that the Lord would make her happy..

The next evening she was at the meeting again.

At the close she came to me, and with a bright and happy face said: “I have thanked Him for what He did for me on the cross, and He has made me so happy.” Months have rolled away since this dear young woman believed in the Lord and His work—since she confessed it to Him, and thanked Him for it; still she is rejoicing in the knowledge that her body is a temple of the Holy Ghost (1 Cor. 6:19); that she is a member of Christ’s body, of His flesh, and of His bones (Eph. 5:30); and that she has been converted to wait for God’s Son from heaven. (1 Thess. 1:10.)

How is it with the reader of these pages? Are your sins all gone? If not, you cannot go to heaven with them; for heaven is the home of holiness, whilst hell is the abode of sin. “The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son cleanseth us from all sin.”

Trust it, dear soul, and I shall meet you in heaven.

"He Paid."

FOUR Christian friends were riding in an omnibus in the city of Bristol; as they neared the place where the omnibus stopped, a youth stepped inside and asked for the fares. One of the four friends paid for all, which led one of the party to say to the youth, “You won’t ask me for my fare, will you?”

“No, sir,” was the reply.

“Then you are satisfied?”

“Quite.”

“But I did not pay you?”

“He paid,” said he, pointing to the one who had done so.

This circumstance, simple in itself, brought to my mind the great transaction which took place eighteen hundred years ago, when God delivered Christ for our offenses, and raised Him again for our justification. (Rom. 4:25.)

“Behold the Lamb! ‘Tis He who bore

My burden on the tree;

And paid is blood the dreadful score,

The ransom due for me.”

Reader, do you believe, that Jesus Christ was delivered for our offenses—the offensive thought, look, word, and deed? that He was bound about with our sins on the cross, and suffered for them there? “He gave Himself for our sins.” This was the only way sins could be disposed of. God “made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.”

Three blessed results flow from Christ giving. Himself for our sins, and being made sin for us, to all who believe; sins are gone, sin, is judged, and righteousness is conferred.

“He paid.” Who? The one who was personally and perfectly free from the debt. Jesus, the Son of God, “He PAID.” How? With His precious blood.

“Jesus paid it all,

All to Him I owe;

Sin had left a crimson stain,

He washed it white as snow.”

And just as the youth in the omnibus did not require payment twice, neither will God.

“Payment God will not twice demand;

Once at my bleeding Surety’s hand,

And then again at mine.”

Dear reader, are you satisfied with what Christ did once for all on the cross? God grant that you by faith may be able to look up to where Jesus is in heaven, and say, with an adoring heart, “HE PAID.”

"The Precious Blood of Christ."

THERE is but one common road to salvation, peace, and glory, and that is through “the precious blood of Christ.” When Adam fell he lost innocence and departed from God; and neither he nor any of his posterity have ever been able to regain it or find their way back to God. But God has devised a way whereby sins shall be put away, sin judged, and the sinner be brought back to Himself. “Christ hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.” (1 Peter 3:18.)

I remember being once asked to go and see a dying man on the Surrey side of London. Arrived at his house, his kind, hardworking wife opened the door to me, and invited me to walk in and take a seat whilst she made known my arrival to her husband, who was resting in an inner room. Ere ever he came into my presence, the hollow cough which indicates consumption made me acquainted with the nature of his disease. Feebly he crept into the room where I was sitting; and as soon as he had recovered himself a little he began to tell me how long he had been ill, how much he had suffered, and that the doctor said that there was no chance of his recovery. I asked him how he stood in relation to ETERNITY; and he told me he was quite ready to die. I then asked if he would kindly tell me what had made him ready. He replied, “I weep over my sins, I say my prayers, and do the best I can.”

His reply made me sigh from the deepest depths of my heart, and after a moment’s silence I said: “Forgive me for being faithful with you, but you are laboring under a terrible delusion, and in trusting to your own doings, you are trusting to a rope of sand. God says, The BLOOD shall be to you for a token... where ye are, and when I see the BLOOD, I will pass over you.” (Ex. 12:13.) Now mark, God does not say one word about your tears, prayers, or your doing your best. God’s word is all about the BLOOD. Again God says, “It is the BLOOD that maketh an atonement for the soul” (Lev. 17:11.) Now, there is no BLOOD in your tears, prayers, or your best doings, consequently they are not God’s ‘token,’ and they can never make an atonement for your soul.” The poor dying man sat silent and pale, evidently eagerly drinking in the words of God. I continued: “God says, “Without shedding of BLOOD is no remission” (Heb. 9:22); and, “The BLOOD of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.” (1 John 1:7.) Notice, not the tears, prayers, or even the blessed life-works of Jesus could or did put away our sins; no, nothing less than His BLOOD would do for God or the sinner; and if the holy tears, prayers, and life-works of Jesus never put away our sins, is it at all possible that our unholy tears, prayers, or works could ever put them away?

“My hope on nothing less is built,

Than Jesus and the BLOOD He spilled;

I dare not trust the sweetest frame,

But wholly lean on His dear name.

On Christ the solid rock I stand,

All other ground is sinking sand.”

Having repeated the above, I commended the man to God in prayer, and left him. I soon repeated my visit; the anxious wife let me in, and in a few moments her husband and I were in earnest conversation about his eternal salvation. I was not long in discovering that a great change had taken place in him and his thoughts about preparing for eternity. His words were few, but sufficed to show the mighty change God had wrought in him. He told me that after I had left him, the words of God about the Lord Jesus and His moon kept ringing in his ears, and that God had shown him where he was wrong, had delivered him from the sad delusion he had so long been under, and that now he was trusting simply, wholly, and alone to the precious BLOOD of Christ (1 Peter 1:19), and that now he could truthfully and thankfully say

“On Christ the solid rock I stand,

All other ground is sinking sand.”

We praised God and the Lamb, in the language of Scripture, for having saved his soul and made him fit for glory. “Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light; who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son; in whom we have redemption through His BLOOD, even the forgiveness of sins.” (Col. 1:12-14.) “Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own BLOOD, and hath, made us kings and priests unto God and His Father; to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” (Rev. 1:5, 6.)

I took my leave of him now as a brother in Christ with deep emotion, for I felt sure his days in this sin-stricken, sorrowful world were few. I was unable to call and see him again, being called away to labor in the gospel in Scotland; but I heard, from a Christian who visited him to the last, that he died happy in Christ, with unshaken and unswerving faith in the precious BLOOD of God’s dear Son. And now I would most affectionately ask the reader of this narrative if he or she is on the only road that the Redeemer has made by His BLOOD to God and glory? If not, I would urge you at once to have “faith in His BLOOD,” which alone can free you from sins and make you “whiter than snow.”

“TODAY.”

MAN thinks and says, Tomorrow will do just as well as today to be saved. GOD SAYS Today; but where does He say Tomorrow?

Today the arrow of death is abroad, and every hour we live it is calculated that one thousand immortal beings pass into eternity.

If death came to you where you are, as you are, and just now, and laying his icy finger upon your pulse, stopped its beating, and laying his hand upon your heart, stopped its throbbing, and breathing upon your now warm blood, froze it in your veins, ARE YOU READY?

“Today” the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ may take place; and if it should, He would raise the bodies of all “the dead in Christ,” and change the living bodies of all who have eternal life in Him, accomplishing all “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.”

Should the second coming of the Lord take place whilst you are reading this little paper, ARE YOU READY?

None of those—No, NOT ONE—that have heard the gospel of salvation “TODAY,” and have been guilty of rejecting it, will have the ghost of a chance of being saved after Christ has been and taken His own blood-redeemed ones to glory. (See 2 Thess. 2:10-12.)

The Holy Ghost says, in Ps. 95:7, 8, “TODAY, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your heart;” and Jesus says, in Luke 19:5, “MAKE HASTE and come down, for TODAY I must abide at thy house.”

“TODAY” life, light, and glory forever are offered thee in the gospel, for only believing in the person and work of Christ as a lost and helpless sinner.

Tomorrow may be death, darkness, and damnation forever should you refuse. Which is it to be? God grant it may be the first, and not the last! May it be said of you, dear reader, as it was said by the Lord Jesus to Zacchaeus, “This day is salvation come to this house;” for, “behold, Now is the accepted time; NOW is the day of salvation.”

Willing or Unwilling - Which?

“AND they called Rebekah, and said unto her, Wilt thou go with THIS MAN? and she said, I WILL GO.” (Gen. 24:58.) What a blessed question, and what a fine answer!

Do you know that there is “one mediator between God and men, THE MAN Christ Jesus”? (1 Tim. 2:5.) “Be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through THIS MAN is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins, and by Him all that believe are justified from all things, f corn which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses.” (Acts 13:38, 39.) “THIS MAN receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.” (Luke 15:2.) “Wilt thou go with THIS MAN?” God give you decision for Christ, and cause you to see your responsibility to say, “I WILL GO.”

“And Moses said unto Hobab, the son of Raguel the Midianite, Moses’ father-in-law, We are journeying unto the place of which the Lord said, I will give it you; come thou with us, and we will do thee good, for the Lord hath spoken good concerning Israel. And he said, I will not go; but I will depart to mine own land and to my kindred.” (Num. 10:29, 30.)

What a contrast between the way that Rebekah and Hobab treated the invitation that was given them. One said, “I will go;” the other, “I will not go.” How is it with you? are you willing or unwilling to go to Christ? If you go to Him you will get forgiveness, redemption, salvation, adoption, the Holy Ghost, oneness with Himself, and you will share the glory with Him. But if you are unwilling to go, it will be to your own everlasting loss.

The writer was preaching some years ago in Derbyshire; the large preaching-room was densely packed; the Holy Ghost wrought mightily with the Word, and caused many to say that memorable night, “I will go to Jesus.” There was a young man in that packed audience who said, if not in words, by his acts, “I will not go,” and his delight was to make sport of those who had decided for Christ. George H— left the preaching that night refusing the love of God, rejecting the Christ of God, resisting the Spirit of God, and ruining his own soul. Early the following morning I was called in to see a young collier who had met with an accident in the coal-pit that morning; nearly every limb in his body was broken, and his head was an awful sight and size. I inquired his name, and was very much startled when I was told that it was poor George H—! I put my lips to his ear, and asked if he were ready to go into ETERNITY. He shook his head and died! Sad end to an unwilling soul! GO TO JESUS AT ONCE. Fear not what your friends or companions will say. Remember, if they laugh you into hell, they will not be able to laugh you out again.

Rebekah believed what was told her about the absent Isaac, and gave up friends, home, and all, to take the long, tedious journey across the trackless desert to meet Isaac. And do you think that, after she had met Isaac, was united to him, and sharing his name, home, honors, and fortune, that she ever regretted for a moment what she gave up, or the journey she took?

Do you ask, “Who is Isaac?” He is a type of Christ. Do you ask, “Who is Christ?” He is “the Son of God,” “the Savior of the world.” To those who believe in Him and are saved “He is precious.” He is nearer than the nearest, dearer than the dearest, fairer than the fairest, lovelier than the loveliest, sweeter than the sweetest, better than the best. He is the chiefest among ten thousand; yea, “He is altogether lovely.” What think ye of Christ? Will you not, by the grace and strength of God, give up everybody and everything to go to Him?

What a striking difference there is between Rebekah and Hobab! the former gave up everybody and everything for Isaac, the latter stoutly refused to give up anybody or anything; the first gained everything, the last lost everything. Which are you—a Rebekah or a Hobab? Have you found, as a poor sinner, such attraction and preciousness in Christ, as to be willing to give up all for Him, or do you see no beauty in Him that you should desire Him. In short, are you willing or unwilling to go to Christ?

“Oh! could I hear some sinner say, ‘I will go;’ And all his old companions tell, ‘I will not go with you to hell, I mean with Jesus Christ to dwell—I WILL GO.’”

"Mighty to Save."

YES, a Savior-God is “mighty to save” weak and helpless sinners who have no might and no strength to save themselves. Will you submit yourselves to be saved by Him? (Isa. 63:1.) He is “mighty to save” us from our sins. “Thou shalt call His name JESUS, for He shall save His people from their sins.” (Matt. 1:21.) He is also “mighty to save” us from that most terrible and to be dreaded of all foes—ourselves. (Gal. 2:20.) And He is also “mighty to save” us from that subtle and dangerous enemy, the world. (Gal. 6:14.)

Yea! He is “mighty to save” right through into glory, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for us. (Heb. 7:25.) Do credit it with all your heart, and “Sing of His mighty love, MIGHTY TO SAVE.”

Which? and Where?

AN unsaved person is one who is in his sins, in Adam, in the world, out of Christ, on the road to the lake of fire, ready for it, and deserving it.

A saved person is one who is out of his sins, out of Adam, not of the world, in Christ, on the road to glory, and ready for it, though utterly undeserving of it.

Reader, which are you?

The saved are destined to spend an eternity with Jesus, the saints, and the angels, in the peerless heights of everlasting glory the fathomless depths of the lake of fire—there to be everlasting food for the undying worm, and inextinguishable fuel for the quenchless flames of that awful abode.

Reader, where will you spend ETERNITY?

Pardon, Peace, and a Pattern

JOHN 19:30, 20:19, 21:22.

How carefully we treasure up the last words of our beloved ones! We write them in our Bibles or diaries, we show them to our relatives and friends, and have them sacredly handed down from one generation to another.

“It is finished” (John 19:30) were the last words uttered by the blessed Lord on Calvary’s cross amidst the scoffs and jeers of the religious and the godless ones, when He was suffering untold agonies, and when a holy God made His soul an offering for sin. Oh, how God prizes these three last words of His beloved Son, uttered as they were just as He was accomplishing the wondrous work which was to bring everlasting glory to God and everlasting blessing to poor sinners!

“It is finished.” Who was He who uttered them JESUS, the Holy One of God, when all the waves and billows of God’s wrath had rolled over His blessed head, and after having cried that terrible cry, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” (Ps. 22:1.) Yes, it was Jesus, the only and well-beloved Son of God, who said, “IT IS FINISHED.” To God He said it, and for you and for me, dear reader, He said it. Let us look at these three words separately for a moment.

“IT is finished,” the work God gave Him to do for His own glory and our salvation. In what did this work consist? The wrath of God must be endured against sin, death tasted, judgment exhausted, sins forever put away, and Satan’s power broken; and, blessed be God, “it” is all done; so that Jesus could say, “I HAVE glorified Thee on the earth: I HAVE finished the work which Thou gavest me to do.” (John 17:4.)

“It is finished.” Mark you well; not it is being done; not it has to be done; but “it is” done: done as God required it should be done, as Christ alone could do it, and done as you and I needed it should be.

“IT IS FINISHED;” nothing left for God, Christ, the Holy Ghost, or the sinner to add; finished outside of us, but for us. More than eighteen hundred years ago Jesus “finished” the work on the cross, on the ground of which God now gives FREELY to every believing, repentant sinner a present, perfect, and permanent pardon.

Think again who it was who said “It is finished,” of the circumstances under which the words were uttered, of the blessed GOD into whose ears they were uttered, and of the poor hell-deserving, death-deserving, and judgment-deserving sinners for whom they were uttered, and say, Will you not trust your immortal soul’s everlasting salvation to Jesus and His “it is finished” work? Perhaps you think, as thousands do, that you have to do something for pardon, and often your agonizing question is, “What must I do to be saved?” We answer (as by faith we hear Jesus say “it is finished”)—

“Nothing either great or small,

Nothing, sinner, no;

Jesus did it, did it all,

Long, long ago.”

Works flow from salvation like a stream from a fountain, but you must have the fountain first, and

“Until to Jesus’ work you cling

By a simple faith,

Doing is a deadly thing,

Doing ends in death.”

The Spirit of God may pass your soul through deep exercises, like those the prodigal passed through on his way to the father’s house, but you have no more to do for salvation than the prodigal had to do for the best robe, ring, shoes, and fatted calf; he confessed he had sinned, and was unworthy (and you can say nothing less); a father’s loving heart provided all the rest, and the prodigal son became the happy recipient of that father’s bounty; the father gave, the son received, and the house was filled with heavenly mirth.

God has received Christ up into glory as a proof that He is perfectly satisfied with the work that He did once for all on the cross, and now it remains for you to receive Him by a simple faith, as a proof that you are satisfied that “IT IS FINISHED.”

Peace.

That which is commonly taught and believed is that we are to make our peace with God; but how could an unholy, unrighteous, and unjust sinner make peace with a holy, righteous, and just God? As well expect an infant to leave its mother’s bosom, and stop the express train as it rushes down the main line. Be assured of this, poor sinner, that nothing you have done, are doing, or ever will be able to do, could make your peace with God.

Man’s heart by nature is at enmity with God; and Christ died not to reconcile God to man, as is so commonly taught, but to reconcile us to God (see 2 Cor. 5:18-20; Col. 1:20, 22), and until you know and believe this, you will never be at peace with God. But I think I hear you say, “If I am unable to make my peace with God, and yet must be at peace with Him, to be perfectly happy here and hereafter, how is it to be accomplished?” Christ has made peace through the blood of His cross. (Col. 1:20.) Yes, Christ has made it by His blood, has made it with God, and has made it for you; and having done so said, “It is finished.”

And now having slain all our enemies on the cross, God raised Him from the dead, and sent Him to proclaim peace to us; and the first three words He uttered after His resurrection to His assembled disciples were, “PEACE UNTO YOU.” (John 20:19, 21, 26.) Now the reason so many dear souls have not settled peace with God is because they stop at the cross, and do not go on to the resurrection.

But Christ is no longer a dead Christ hanging on. the tree; the angelic instruction and invitation is, “Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: He is risen; He is not here: behold the place where they laid Him.” (Mark 16:6.)

“Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant.” (Heb. 13:20.)

Do not confound the work of Christ for you with the work of the Holy Ghost in you: God does not preach peace by the Holy Ghost, but by Christ: “Preaching peace by Jesus Christ.” (Acts 10:36; Eph. 2:17.) But further, not only did He make peace on the cross, and announced it in resurrection, but “HE IS OUR PEACE.” (Eph. 2:14.)

Not feelings, experiences, realizations, progress, or service, but Himself in heaven, who is “the same yesterday, today, and forever,” is our peace.

We have now seen that Christ crucified made peace with God for us; that Christ risen preaches peace to us; and that Christ glorified is our peace, and the moment we believe in God who gave, raised, and glorified Christ, we have present, perfect, and permanent peace with God.

Pardon

Being pardoned, and having peace with God, I now need a pattern to walk by as I go through this world on my way to glory; and the same blessed person through whom I have pardon and peace becomes my pattern. “Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that we should follow His steps.” (1 Peter 2:21.) “He that saith he abideth in Him ought himself also so to walk, even as He walked.” (1 John 2:6.) We become exactly like what we are occupied with; if we are occupied with the world, we become worldly; if with ourselves, selfish; but if with Christ, Christ-like.

When I went to school I had a copy set me to write. Being desirous of pleasing, I endeavored to copy the headline exactly. On looking at it, my schoolmaster praised me for the first line, but found fault with the lines which followed, as being each one more unlike the headline. I assured him that I had done my best, when he kindly pointed out the secret of my failure; my first line was well written, because I had kept my eye steadfastly on the headline, which I failed to do in writing the second and following lines, and thus my copy grew worse and worse. Since I have been converted I have profited by my school lesson, and have endeavored to keep my eye on the headline—Christ.

“Oh, fix our earnest gaze,

So wholly, Lord, on Thee,

That with Thy beauty occupied

We elsewhere none may see.”

Prospect.

The beloved children of God have no future but the glory. What a blessed prospect!

“And he called his ten servants, and delivered them ten pounds, and said unto them OCCUPY TILL I COME.” (Luke 19:13.)

Beloved fellow-laborers, the time for both proclaiming and writing the salvation of God is nearly at an end, so be not weary in well-doing, but the rather be “steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”

Beloved fellow-child of God, are you praying for the salvation of sinners, and are you seeking to bring such to the Savior of sinners? It is the blessed privilege of each child of God to seek to bring one fellow-voyager to eternity to the feet of Jesus; and if we each desired and sought to be used by God to the salvation of one precious soul, what a work would be done for God and His Christ by us in this world.

As I think upon the thousands upon thousands of children that this sad and wicked world contains, how intensely I long for their salvation now in their early days, as I believe that the coming of the Lord is so near that I feel there is not time left for them to grow up to manhood and womanhood before the Lord’s second coming will take place. Who of us will go and tell them that Jesus died and shed His precious blood, to wash them from all their sins, to make them whiter than snow, to make them lambs of His flock, and to fit them to be forever with Himself in glory? Oh, the time is short for working for the best of Masters! If we would do anything for Him in this world, it must be now or never; for His word is, “SURELY I COME quickly;” and He is saying to us individually, “Occupy” not till death, or till the world is converted, but—“till I come.”

“A little while for winning souls to Jesus,

Ere we behold His beauty face to face;

A little while for healing soul-diseases

By telling others of a Saviour’s grace.”

“Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry TILL I COME, what is that to thee? follow thou Me.” (John 21:22, 23.)

Now this second scripture is the picture of the child of God in this dispensation, waiting not for death, nor for the world’s improvement, but for the Lord’s return.

The dear young converts at Thessalonica were converted “to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.” (1 Thess. 1:9, 10.) And the Lord Himself told His disciples that they were to be “like unto men that wait for their lord.” (Luke 12:36.)

There is the greatest difference possible between waiting for an event to take place and waiting for Person to come and take us away to His Father’s house. The first has little or no effect upon us; the last touches every point of the compass.

Which are you looking for, my beloved saved reader? Do you get up in the morning and expect Him to come ere night wraps this world again in darkness? Do you retire at night and expect Him, “the bright and morning star,” to come ere the light of another day shall flood your chamber with its rays? As you rise in the morning, or retire at night, listen to your Savior and Lord saying, as it were, “Wait for Me till I come.”

In the third scripture (1 Cor. 11:23-26) He asks all His own blood-bought and blood-washed ones to remember Himself “till He come.”

Do we not seize every opportunity of showing our dearly-loved ones that, though we may be absent thousands of miles from them, still they are remembered by us? Oh, think of His love to us? Was there ever love like His? His enemies said, “Never man spike like this Man.” But we who are by grace His friends can say, “Never man loved like this Man.”

He has left His name as a rallying center for all His loyal hearted ones to surround (Matt. 18:20); and by His Spirit, who is down here, He would fain gather all the members of His body to His earth rejected name, to respond to His loving request, “Remember Me till I come.”

But as the word of God and every divine principle are being called in question today, once more the words sound loud and clear upon the ear that desires to hear, “But that which ye have already HOLD FAST TILL I COME.” (Rev. 2:25.) Refuse persistently all the modern notions of the day that are called “developments,” and stick to the “good word of God,” remembering that it is in its sacred pages, “He that is of God heareth God’s words.” (John 8:47.)

“Eternal glories gleam afar

To nerve my faint endeavor;

So now to work, to watch, to wait,

And then to REST Forever.”

if the sure and certain prospect of the child is glory with Christ forever, what is your prospect, poor unsaved reader of these pages? If saved, it is because you have not known and trusted the person and work of the Lord Jesus and consequently you cannot, in your unsaved state, work and wait for Him. You cannot Him; for you neither know nor love Him. Neither can you hold fast His word; for a place in your heart.

Let go your sins, yourself, the world, and all that is keeping you from the Savior, and just to His arms, and then your prospect, instead the lake of fire forever, will be glory with ever.

Now, which is it to be? It must be one or the There is no time to lose. Make haste, and come to Jesus; make haste, and have faith in His blood; make haste, and believe in Him who shed He Himself will be everything to your time and eternity.

If you do not wish to be left when Jesus comes His own; if you do not wish to spend an eternity in the lake of fire, and to be forgotten for delay not another moment, but come to Jesus. He will gladly welcome you into His outstretched arms of love and mercy, and then you the holy and blessed privilege of working for, waiting for, and remembering Him, and holding fast for Him till He come, God grant that all who read these pages may have glory with Christ, and not the lake of fire forever, for their eternal prospect.

And now I affectionately urge you, if you have accepted Christ as your pardon, peace, and pattern, to accept Him also as your near, sure, and constant prospect.

Death!

PRINCE LEOPOLD is dead! He was alive and apparently well and cheerful on Sunday; on the Friday following he was suddenly ushered into the presence of God. What an unexpected and overwhelming blow to his young, loving wife, and his fond, royal mother May “the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort,” comfort their bereaved, crushed, and sorrowing hearts.

What a universal leveler—arbitrary, ruthless, cruel—death is! He is no respecter of persons. The prince, the peer, the peasant, and the pauper must all yield to his summons when it comes.

“Be ye also READY,” for you may be the next laid low by death. There are two things that will enable you to welcome death, and make you fit for the presence of a holy God. One is the PRECIOUS BLOOD of Christ, which removes all unfitness, and the other is the RIGHTEOUSNESS of God, which makes the possessor of it fit at any moment for the presence of God.

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thon shalt be saved, and know that His blood has cleansed thee from all thy sins; and that now, clothed in the righteousness of God, thou art ready for death, or for the second coming of Christ, whichever may occur first.

H. M. H.

"Oh, My Sins! Oh, My Saviour!"

SHE was an elderly woman, of at least sixty years of age, I should think. Her hair was white with care, and her face wore a look of deep distress, upon it. I observed her sitting regularly in the same place in the meeting, and I longed to speak to her; but she gave me no chance, as she went away directly the meeting was over. Her sad and anxious face haunted me. I could not rest until I found out where she lived, and had visited her.

Her cottage was in a back lane, and beautifully clean. She was busy working when I entered, but willingly stopped to be spoken with about soul matters. Her one cry was, “Oh, my sins!” I asked her if she had long felt the burden of her sins, when she told me that she had wept and prayed for the forgiveness of sins for about thirty long, weary years, and had gone to the meeting room, where I first saw her, all that time, in hopes that she should get it there; but it had never come to her longing soul yet.

I asked her if she believed that Jesus had died for our sins according to the Scriptures; had been buried and raised again the third day, according to the Scriptures? (1 Cor. 15:3, 4.) She assented to all this, but it brought her no comfort. She still indulged in the old mournful cry, “Oh, my sins!”

I asked her if she believed that Christ bare our sins in His own body on the tree (1 Peter 2:24), and that He had put them all away with His precious blood before He left the tree, and that He was back again in heaven without them?

Seeing that she was a divinely-quickened soul, without the knowledge of the forgiveness of her sins, I endeavored to show her, simply from the Scriptures, that Christ had all her sins, by imputation, upon Him on the cross; that He put them all away before He left the cross, and that He was upon His Father’s throne in glory without one of them being upon Him now; for how could God have sins in His holy presence?

I asked her to tell me, if Christ had her sins upon Him on the cross, and was now in the glory without them, where were they? She looked up, and replied: “Why, they are all gone, and I never saw that before;” and immediately she said, with an adoring, thankful heart, “Oh, my Savior!”

She now knew what it was to have not only the forgiveness of sins, but a Savior in heaven; and could look up into His face there by faith and say

“I know my sins are all forgiven,

Glory to the Savior-God.”

I find no end of people troubled about their health and their circumstances, but, oh! how few one finds troubled about their sins!

Are you who are reading these lines troubled about your sins, and anxious to know the forgiveness of sins? Then believe Christ died in the stead of the sinner.

“He knew how wicked man had been, He knew that God must punish sin; So out of pity Jesus said, ‘I’ll bear the punishment instead.’”

Worshippers or Wailers

“Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and His Father; to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. Behold, He cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see Him, and they also which pierced Him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of Him. Even so, Amen.”—Rev. 1:5-7.

THE first song that we read of in the Scriptures is in Exodus 15. It was sung by the children of Israel to Jehovah when they were out of Egypt and across the Red Sea; that is, when they were redeemed and knew it.

And that song was not about what they had done, it was all about what Jehovah had done. Listen to it: “The Lord hath triumphed gloriously, the horse and his rider hath He cast into the sea.” The Lord had done it all, and they celebrate His work in joyful strains of praise.

Now, “divine worship” can never be rendered to God by any but saved people.

Look at the three things that characterize the worshippers in the first half of our Scripture at the head of this paper. First, they are loved; secondly, they are washed; and thirdly, they are made kings and priests to God, and they knew it, were enjoying it, and could worship God for it.

This is not a song which we must wait until we get to heaven to sing. It is the song of the redeemed, composed by the Spirit of God to be sung to God the moment we know that we are redeemed, and all along the road to heaven. It is song, too, that would test all professing Christians, for none are saved, whatever their profession, but the of whom it is true. Suppose it were possible to read these words (“Unto Him that loveth us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood”) in the hearing of every congregation assembled for religious purposes next Lord’s day, and to challenge all of whom they were true to stand up, how many would answer to the challenge? Alas! I fear very few; and yet unless what is expressed in the song of the worshippers in Revelation 1 is true of them, they are not saved.

“Oh!” says somebody, “I am sure I do not love Him enough, and have not done enough, for Him to entitle me to sing such a blessed song as that.”

But, dear friend, if you will examine the song, you will not find one word in it about the worshipper’s love or works; it is all about the Lord’s love, the Lord’s work, and what He has made them to His God and Father.

Formal worshippers, whose worship is characterized by form without power, by routine without reality, may sing about their love and their works. But divine worshippers love to forget their little bit of love and work, and delight in remembering and celebrating, in their hymns of praise, their living, loving Lord’s love to them and work for them.

Our love to Him, when compared with His love to us, is like a taper before the sun. Yea; our taper has been lighted, if lighted at all, from the cloudless sun, rolling in the meridian splendor of His love to us. And whilst the sun eclipses the taper light, it never puts it out.

Our love to the Lord is like a drop of water in comparison with the ocean. His love is the ocean, shoreless and bottomless; and if we love Him at all, our drop of love has come from the fathomless ocean of His love to us

“O Love Divine, thou vast abyss,

My sins are swallowed up in Thee!

Covered is my unrighteousness;

From condemnation I am free:

While Jesus’ blood, through earth and skies,

Mercy! free, boundless mercy! cries.”

Come on, dear soul, thou who art satisfied with Christ’s love to thee, but rightly dissatisfied with thy love to Him, and give His heart joy by singing in satisfied strains of His everlasting love to thee. Remember He loves first, loves most, and loves forever, if He loves you at all. He loves you with all His heart, and can never love you more than He does, and will never love you less. “Having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.”(John 13:1.) “The Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.” (Gal. 2:20.) “Unto Him that loveth us... be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” A word upon the second part of our son: “And washed us from our sins in His own blood.” What part had we in the Cross except the sins that brought Jesus there? Who ever heard of a sheep washing itself? The Saviour-shepherd is the one who washes us; it is from our sins He washes us, and it is in His own blood that He does it. But He does it all. The doctrine that the forgiveness of sins cannot be known on earth is nowhere taught in the Holy Scriptures! The saints at Ephesus knew it, and could sing, “In whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of His grace.” (Eph. 1:7.) And in our song that we are looking at, the “us” means all the forgiven people in this world, and the Lord expects such to praise Him, this side the glory, for having washed them from their sins in His own blood, As to the third part of our song, it distinctly states that we are made kings and priests unto God; that is, we are actually brought to God now through Christ, in Christ, and as Christ is in His presence, and are made meet to offer worship to God and our Father.

Peter, speaking by the Holy Ghost, says: “ye also, as lively (or living) stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 2:5.) (And this is true of all believers, all saved persons.) Paul, speaking by the same Holy Ghost in his exhortation to this holy priesthood, says: “By Him (that is, Christ) let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to His name.” (Heb. 13:15.)

God is the object of worship; Christ is the food and material for worship; the Holy Ghost in the believer is the power of worship; the holiest of all, by virtue of the blood of Jesus, is the place of worship, and all saved persons are the holy, worshipping priesthood, and one of the songs that they sing is the song we have been meditating upon. Are you one of the worshippers? He who came once to die is coming back again soon for His loved, bloodwashed, worshipping people. Would you be translated to glory if He were to come while you are reading this? If you are not washed from your sins in His own most precious blood, you would be left, and would find your place among the circle of wailers mentioned in the 7th verse of our chapter, whose wail set up on earth will merge into the everlasting wail of the lake of fire. Oh, where will you spend your ETERNITY? Among the WORSHIPPERS OR WAILERS?

Lift Neither Hand nor Foot!

“And if thou wilt make Me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone; for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou halt polluted it. Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon.”—Exodus 20:25-26.

WORKS must flow from salvation. There must be first the fountain, and then the stream; first the tree, and then the fruit; first the fire in the grate, then the smoke from the chimney; first the seed in the ground, and then the crop above ground.

There must be inshining on God’s part before there can be the outshining on our part. There must be inpouring on His part before there can possibly be outpouring on our part.

And yet such is the ignorance and perversity of poor, fallen man, that he tries to lift, hand or foot in the matter of his soul’s salvation, because he does not see, or will not see, that God has been before him at the cross of His own Son, and that everything that God required for His glory, and man needed for his salvation, has been done once for all there.

Take two illustrations, one from the Old Testament, and the other from the New. Look at Jonah in the great fish’s belly three days and three nights, the waters compassing him about, the depths closing him. round, the weeds wrapping themselves round his head, the bottoms of the mountains, the earth and her bars about hire for over! What could he do there? He could lift neither hand nor foot, but in conscious guilt and helplessness he cried, “SALVATION IS OF THE LORD,” and immediately the fish vomited out Jonah upon the dry land of God’s everlasting salvation, where not a drop of God’s judgment would ever be able to reach him.

Jonah lifted neither hand nor foot in the matter of his salvation. God did it all, and wrote as it were upon the very forehead of Jonah’s salvation, “ALL THINGS ARE OF GOD.” (2 Cor. 5:17, 18.)

Look at the penitent thief on the cross, and listen to his confession: “We receive the due reward of our deeds;” his vindication of Christ; “This man hath done nothing amiss;” his request “Remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom;” and Christ’s answer, “Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with Me in paradise.” What a blessed case of conversion in the teeth of death, and on the verge of eternity! But what did that poor thief do towards it? Nothing! His hands and feet were nailed to the cross, and he was therefore totally unable to lift either hand or foot. JESUS DID IT ALL, and the thief got the benefit of it, all through casting himself just as he was upon Jesus and His finished work; and what a crown to it all, the Savior and the sinner that very same day together in the paradise of God!

“To him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.” (Rom. 4:4, 5.)

“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. NOT OF WORKS, lest any man should boast.” (Eph. 2:8, 9.)

“I would not work my soul to save,

For that my Lord hath done;

But I would work like any slave,

From love to God’s dear Son.”

Does this little paper meet the eyes of one whose cry is, “What must I do to be saved?” then listen to God’s answer, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house;” for be assured that in the momentous matter of your precious soul’s everlasting salvation God will suffer you to LIFT NEITHER HAND NOR FOOT.

"He Has Received Me!"

“SALVATION is of the Lord,” and a soul saved is God’s work, and therefore a work for eternity. It is a work that Satan can neither do nor undo; but a work that God delighteth to do, and that He will never undo. Do you believe this, poor sinner? Now listen to me for a few moments while I tell you of the free and sovereign grace of God, in the salvation of a lost sinner.

I was on my way from the railway station to life little meeting place where I was to preach, in a small fishing town in Scotland, when I was asked by a Christian man if I would go and see a poor young fellow who was dying. I at once consented to do so, having nearly an hour to spare he ore the time announced for the meeting. The friend who asked me to visit: the young man led the way, and soon we were in his room; and there, upon his bed, lay what had once been a fine young man, twenty-nine years of age. That deadly disease consumption had brought him thus low; and its awful sweat lay heavy upon him. I saw he was fast sinking, and that if he were to be saved all, it must be now.

This history as a sinner is soon told, He had lived hard and fast, and had been a prodigal to all intents and purposes. He had wasted his health and substance in riotous living; but be had spent all that he had without obtaining happiness or satisfaction, and now, in all the weakness and helplessness of disease, he desired to return to the parental roof that he had so long deserted, and die under the care and nursing of those simple, Christian, praying parents. He was brought home on a Monday, on the evening of which day the friend who took me to his house first saw him. The sick man asked to have read the Gospel narrative of the conversion of the dying thief. My friend read it, as it is given in Luke 23, which drew from the dying man the remark, “That’s grand.”

On Tuesday, the day following his being brought home, I saw him, and have already told you how I found him as to his body. Now I will tell you how I found him as to his soul.

I found God had been working in him by His Spirit, and had shown him that he was a lost sinner, and that it was an awful thing to go into eternity unsaved.

His agony about his soul seemed almost to make him forget his body, and he never expressed a desire to recover. Salvation was what he longed for, but he questioned if there was salvation for such a wretch as he had been and was. I opened my Bible, and read to him from 1 Tim. 1:15 “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”

I then asked, “Are you a sinner?” “Indeed I am;” he replied. “Then Christ came into the world to save you,” I rejoined. I then turned to Rom 5. “But God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

I again asked, “Are you a sinner?” He replied, “Yes, that I am.” “Then Christ died for you,” I said.

I then turned to a third Scripture, in Luke 15:2: “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.”

Once more I asked, “Are you a sinner?” “Yes,” was his earnest, emphatic reply; and turning on his elbow, he looked across the room to the friend who had brought me, and said, “I ken I see it plainer, Donald.” “But, man, you must believe it,” replied the friend.

I then went over the three Scriptures above mentioned again, and asked him, “Who did Christ come into the wor1d to save?” “Sinners,” be replied. “And what are you?” “A sinner.” “Then Christ came into the world to save you; believe it.” “For whom did Christ die?” I asked. “For sinners,” he said. “And what are you?” “A sinner.” “Then Christ died for you; believe it.” Whom does Christ receive?” “Sinners.” “And what are you?” “A sinner.” “Then Christ receives you; believe it, and you are saved.”

He drew a long breath, and exclaimed, “I wish I could say I was saved!” “If you believe that you are a sinner, and that Christ came into the world to save you, and that He has received you, than you are saved,” I rejoined.

The blessed Spirit of God applied the word, broke in upon him, and he was saved. I now read a fourth Scripture, Gal. 2:20: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” “Who does ‘who’ mean?” I asked. “Jesus.” “And who is ‘me’?” “Thomas M—”. “And what is between you both?” “Love.”

He turned on his back and said, “I wish I could make a little prayer to Him.” “Thomas,” I said, “He wants you to thank Him;” when he immediately said, “Lord Jesus, I thank you for having loved me and received me.”

My friend and I fell on our knees, and praised God for having shown this poor prodigal that Jesus had loved him, had died for him, received him, and saved him.

When we rose up he said, “Fetch in my mother.” We gladly did so, and in an instant mother and son were weeping for joy, as each embraced the other; the mother praising God as she heard from her osvn snit’::; lips the cheering news—“Mother, He has received me!”

Prayer was answered, the prodigal was saved, and the joy of that humble room and its happy occupants was but a faint picture of the peculiar joy that God the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and all heaven itself, were now indulging in over this returned, saved, and happy prodigal prodigal.

Thomas M— was brought home to his parents on Monday, was saved on Tuesday, and on the following Thursday evening he fell asleep, without a doubt or a murmur. Glory be to God for this trophy of His grace; surely where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.

Should this account meet the eyes of any of Thomas M—‘s companions, I would beseech them at once to be reconciled to God.

There are two events which may occur at any moment—the second coming of Jesus, or death—and while you are unsaved you are prepared for neither.

Oh, then, at once “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house,” and thus be prepared for either event.

There is nothing left for you to do in the matter of your soul’s salvation, for Jesus did it all more than eighteen hundred years ago; and having done it, He said, “It is finished.” It is salvation first, and then works follow, to please Him who has saved us. We are not saved by our holiness, our good works, or our service; but we are saved to be holy, to do good works, and to serve.

Look now by simple faith to the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved; for His word is, “Look unto Me, and be ye saved;” and then, until He come, live and work to please Him who has saved you.

"Prove That There Is a Devil."

To take a short journey I stepped into a railway carriage. There were Six of us in the compartment. I felt in my pocket for some tracts, and found that I had but four, which I distributed to my fellow-passengers, and then began reading a tittle book.

The gentleman sitting in the extreme corner of the seat I occupied received one of the tracts, and taking out his gold pencil case, read down a few lines, and coming to the word “Satan,” dashed under it and wrote in the margin, “I don’t believe in a devil,” then handed the tract back to me. I said nothing; but with a piece of india rubber erased his writing, put the tract into my pocket, and continued my reading. This was too much for the gentleman; be leaped, up, and exclaiming with a loud voice, “I don’t believe there is any devil,” poured out torrents of abuse against such as believed in an evil spirit. “Sir,” he cried, “I challenge you before these people”—who looked upon him with astonishment— “I challenge you to prove that there is a devil. Where would you begin?”

“Nothing is easier, sir,” I said, looking up from my book— “nothing easier, sir. I should begin with yourself, and from your passionate language, ungentlemanly and unchristian conduct, prove that you are energized by a living, personal devil.”

“Well, well, I was rather hot,” said the gentleman, sitting down, but continuing to abuse the idea of an evil spirit.

“If there is not a devil, what is it that stirs you up to be so angry?” I said.

“That is the evil principle which is in me. You cannot prove that there is any other devil.” Drawing out my Bible from my pocket, I said, “Now, sir, if you please, take that book into your hand.” He was constrained unwillingly to do so. “With that Bible in your hand I demand of you, Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?”

“I do; most certainly I do.”

“Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of the eternal God?”

“No, I don’t,” he replied, with great rage. “Show me where it says so.”

A lady sitting by my side said, “There are many passages which prove it, if not in the identical words.”

I then repeated some passages of the word of God to the man— “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” (John 1:1, 3, 14.) “Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8:58.) “I have glorified Thee on earth: I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.” (John 17:4, 5.) “Then saith Jesus to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold My hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into My side: and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. These are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through His name.” (John 20:27, 28, 31.) “GOD WAS IN CHRIST, reconciling the world unto Himself.” (2 Cor. 5:19.) “And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.” (1 Tim. 3:16.) “And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.” (1 John 5:20.) And then added, “I see what you are, sir—you are a Unitarian, and so you cut yourself off from the only hope of being saved—Jesus and His blood. Tell me what sort of a person is your Jesus?”

“The most lovely of men,” he replied.

“Not so, sir; yours, according to your own belief, is either a sinner or false; my Jesus, the eternal Son of the eternal God, is the ‘chiefest among ten thousand, the altogether lovely.’” Turning to the fourth chapter of Matthew, I read, “Then was Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.” “Was that an evil principle within him, or the veritable person of the evil one?” For a moment the unhappy opposer’s mouth was shut. I continued, “You have no blood in your religion; you hate the blood, sir—you hate the atoning blood.”

“I thank God that I have not a drop of blood in my religion. I do hate it,” he answered.

“Yes, I knew that you denied the blessed Person and the work of the Son of God. But you shall hear what God says about the blood before we separate— ‘The BLOOD shall be to you for a token... and when I see the BLOOD, I will pass over you.’ (Exod. 12:13.) ‘For it is the BLOOD that maketh an atonement for the soul.’ (Lev. 17:11.) ‘Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in HIS BLOOD’ (Rom. 3:25.) ‘He that despised Moses’ law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the BLOOD of the covenant, wherewith He was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace.’” (Heb. 10:28, 29.) At this point the train stopped, and we parted, to meet no more, in all probability, until we meet in His holy presence whose person and work alone avail for the present and everlasting salvation of any and every poor believing sinner.

“He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.” (John 3:36.)

Two Letters From God

¤ John 1:12; 5:13.

I SUPPOSE all my readers have received at least one letter in their lifetime; and if the letter was from someone that you had confidence in, and could trust, you would believe the contents of the letter, and the effect upon you would be according to the contents. If the letter contained sad news, you would feel sad; if it contained good news, you would feel glad.

But did any of you ever get a letter from her gracious Majesty Queen Victoria? Why, if she were to confer such an honor upon any of my readers, what a stir would be made about it! There would be an account of it in the daily papers; and one paper would copy it from another, until it would be spread all over the world. The receiver of the royal letter would have it put into a costly frame, and it would be carefully handed, down from generation to generation.

I have another question to ask you. Have you ever received a letter from God? I have received, two from Him, and would like to say a little to you about them I will give you the first in full. “I write unto you, children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake,”

I have left out the word “little,” which occurs in our most excellent translation of the Scriptures, because it is not in the original. The address is to children of God, and is a term which includes fathers in Christ, young men in Christ, and babes in Christ.

Just as in a large family all are children from the firstborn to the youngest, but all are not little children.

This first letter, then, from God is addressed to His children. Are you one of His children? It is possible that you may ask, “How do we become His children?” and lest my poor words should mislead you, I will ask you to look at two scriptures which answer your question most simply: “As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons (or children) of God, even to them that believe on His name, which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” (John 1:12, 13.) “For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:26.)

I beg you to notice very closely, because of the ritualistic and infidel notions of the day, that the scriptures we have just looked at do not say we are the children of God by creation or by baptism, but “BY FAITH IN CHRIST JESUS.” Now, have you received Christ by believing on Him? If you have, then you are one of the favored class called “children of God” to whom my first letter is addressed. What has God written this letter to His children for? That they may know their sins are forgiven them for His (Christ’s) name’s sake.

There are thousands of people in Christendom who regularly say every Sunday, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins,” who, if you were to ask them if their sins were forgiven, would at once say, “No; and I don’t believe that anybody can know their sins are all forgiven in this world.” What a solemn mockery it is for such persons to be saying, as they do, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins!” Now, don’t you think the woman in Luke 7 knew her sins were forgiven? Of course she did. But how did she know it? Because Jesus told her so. And how is any child of God to know that their sins are forgiven them? Because He has written them a letter that they might know it, and now they are to know it, not from their feelings or hopes, but from the infallible letter of their Father and God in Christ.

“Yes,” says someone, “I know all my past sins are forgiven me, but what about my present and future sins?” How many of your sins were past, how many present, and how many future, when Christ died? Surely they were all future; and if He had not all my sins upon Him when He died, He never will have them upon Him, for He will never die again, and therefore I must go to the lake of fire for them. If you are a child of God through faith in Christ, thank God your Father for His letter to you, and thank the Lord Jesus for having loved you and washed you from all your sins in His own most precious blood. (¤ John 1:12; Rev. 1:5, 6.)

God’s object in writing the first letter is, that all His children may know that all their sins ARE FORGIVEN. But His object in writing the second letter is, that all who believe on the name of the Son of God may KNOW that they have eternal life.

I will give the second letter in full: “These things have I written unto you who believe on the name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eternal life.” (1 John 5:13.) Have you ever thought of the difference between forgiveness and eternal life?

Suppose a man in the debtor’s prison for debt. He cannot pay a farthing there. A kind and rich friend procures all his bills, and satisfies the claims of all his creditors. The man is let out of prison, thankful that all his debts are paid, but he is not happy; for, though he knows that all his debts are paid, not having any money, he also knows he must go into debt again. But lie is informed that the friend who e paid all his debts has placed a running account to his name in the Bank of England. Now he is filled with thankfulness, happiness, and satisfaction. First, because all his debts are paid, but most because he is not likely to get into debt again, and has a good capital to commence again upon.

And so our first letter lets us into the secret that all our debts are paid—our sins are forgiven; and our second letter that our fortune is made—we have eternal life.

“But,” says someone, “I don’t feel I have eternal life.” God does not ask you to feel. Which is best—to be trusting to a fickle, short-lived, and uncertain feeling, or to the unalterable and everlasting word of God?

When we receive a letter from some trusty friend, do we write back again to ask them to send us some feeling to believe that what they wrote us is true? Who would think of treating any valued friend after such a fashion? Then why should we treat God as we would not think of treating any human friend?

God writes a letter to all who believe on the name of the Son of God that they may KNOW (not feel, hope, or doubt, but KNOW) that they have eternal life.

Suppose I get a letter from New Zealand, telling me that a friend has died and left me some property. I lied fear things in the letter—first, that a property has been left me; second, where the property is; thirdly, what the property is; and lastly, that it is mine.

I find the same four things in 1 John 5. In the eleventh verse God tells me He has given me eternal life, and where the life is; in the twelfth verse He tells me who or what the life is; and lastly, He writes me a letter (if I am a believer on the Son of God) THAT I MAY KNOW THAT I HAVE ETERNAL LIFE.

Could anything be more simple? Are you a child of God through faith in Christ? and are you a believer on the Son of God? If you are able to say, “By the grace of God, I am,” then the two letters are addressed to you, that you may know that you have the forgiveness of all your sins, and that you may know that you have eternal life in the Son of God.

All that is left for you to do is to accept the two letters from God, believe their contents, and praise Him for them, and now look to Him for grace to glorify Him in your words, ways, and walk, until His Son comes to take you, with all His blood-washed ones, to glory.

Have you ever received TWO LETTERS FROM GOD?

Threefold Deliverance

“Who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father: to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”

GAL. 1:4, 5.

THE first thing that troubles a divinely-quickened soul—a soul with whom the Holy Ghost is dealing—is its sins, and that trouble is met by the first six words of the Scripture at the beginning of this paper.

Have you ever thought about your sins? Have you ever been troubled about them? You are guilty of sins: what about them? and how are you to get out of them? You cannot deliver yourself from them! But a Deliverer has come, and has given Himself for them. Do you know this Divine Deliverer, and the deliverance that He has wrought by the work He did on the cross?

“Who gave Himself for our sins.”

Here we have the Savior, the sinner, and the sins, and these sins, like a mountain pile, standing between the Savior and the sinner. What is to be done with them? How are they to be put away? The Savior cannot righteously get through them to me, and I could not possibly get through them to Him. What, then, is to be done with them? How can they be removed from being between us, and from being before God? Christ answers the question by going under the terrible load of our sins, and by bearing them in His own body on the tree, and by suffering all that a holy God could possibly express against them. (1 Peter 2:24; 3:18.)

“Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and He was buried, and He rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3, 4); and this is the triumphant answer to “What has become of them?”

God laid them on Him; He bore them on the tree; He has suffered for them; He has put them away forever for every one who believes in Him; He is risen without them, and He is in heaven without them. The Deliverer is up in glory without our sins, and we who know Him there are in the fruits of His deliverance, and are entitled to know that we are as free from our sins in this world as Christ is in heaven. “As He is so are we in this world.” (1 John 4:17.) Believest thou this?

“I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” (Gal. 2:20.) This brings before us a second deliverance. We not only need deliverance from the crab-apples (sins), but from the crab-tree (self).

The second thing that really troubles a soul after it has got the knowledge of the everlasting forgiveness of all its sins is, that the old sinful nature, derived from Adam fallen, is unchanged.

What is to be done with that? What has God done with it? He has crucified it with Christ, and it has come to its end judicially in the cross of Christ. What a deliverance for the soul that believes it!

Nothing but death would do for the nature. In Romans 6, sin and death are mentioned seventeen times each; they ring changes all the way through the chapter. There is nothing in the chapter about salvation from sins or from hell; it is occupied with the subject of sin, and it clearly shows that nothing but death could possibly meet it. You must not confound between sin and sins—the former is the root, the latter is the fruit which sin (the root) produces. Sin is never said to be forgiven, but judged. (Rom. 8:3). How could God forgive a nature? Sin is judged, sins are forgiven; we are delivered from the power of the former and from the guilt of the latter by the work of Christ on the cross, where He bore the judgment due to sin, and put away sins.

“Our old man is crucified with Christ, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.” Here the broad fact is stated, and further on in the chapter we are exhorted to apply it to ourselves, “Reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God in Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom. 6). The wild briar has been brought into the garden of the Lord, and a beautiful standard rose grafted into it; and we are responsible not to contribute to the briar, not to allow it to bring forth wild roses, to keep back all its buddings and shoots, that nothing but the standard rose should bear roses for its new owner. “Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” (Col. 3:3.) We are entirely delivered from our old state in Adam; Christ, living in us, gives us our new state, and the Holy Ghost in us is our power to preserve us from bearing wild roses, so that the “rose of Sharon,” that “plant of renown,” should alone bloom for God.

“But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” (Gal. 6:14.)

This verse brings before us the third deliverance, which is from the world.

What is the world? It is a great system got up by Satan to keep people as happy as possible without a thought of God!

Many accept the work of Christ on the cross to deliver them from their sins and from the power of the old Adam nature in them, who refuse to accept it as separating them from the world. By separation from the world, I do not mean going into a convent, lest you should be tempted to look upon vanity; but Christ in glory so satisfying the heart that the things of this poor, fading world have no attraction for you.

If the world has met its judgment at the cross of Christ, and we have met our judgment there too, what have two judged things to say to each other? We are untrue to the cross if we allow the world in any shape or form—whether it be in the way the chapter. There is nothing in the chapter about salvation from sins or from hell; it is occupied with the subject of sin, and it clearly shows that nothing but death could possibly meet it. You must not confound between sin and sins—the former is the root, the latter is the fruit which sin (the root) produces. Sin is never said to be forgiven, but judged. (Rom. 8:3.) How could God forgive a nature? Sin is judged, sins are forgiven; we are delivered from the power of the former and from the guilt of the latter by the work of Christ on the cross, where He bore the judgment due to sin, and put away sins.

“But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” (Gal. 6:14.) This verse brings before us the third deliverance, which is from the world.

What is the world? It is a great system got up by Satan to keep people as happy as possible without a thought of God.

Have you accepted the cross for separation from your sins and from your sinful self? Then why not accept it for separation from the world? You will not want a bit of the world in heaven, and if you know that you are blessed with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ now, and are in the enjoyment of your heavenly blessings, you will not want a bit of the world now. Surely Christ is enough to satisfy the heart, and to make it independent of this hollow, untrue world for any pleasure. Scores of times we get this word “world” mentioned in the New Testament, which shows what a dangerous thing it is; and Christ says of His own, “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” (John 17:16.) “Now is the judgment of this world.” (John 12:31.) If the world has met its judgment at the cross of Christ, and we have met our judgment there too, what have two judged things to say to each other? We are untrue to the cross if we allow the world in any shape or form—whether it be in the way we dress our bodies, furnish our houses, or conduct our business. There is nothing like the cross for judging everything by, and we must not revive or allow the thing for which He bore the judgment them.

Do you know Him as the One who

“Came from off the throne eternal,

Down to Calvary’s depths of woe,”

to clear away everything that stood between God and us? He has cleared away sins, self, Satan, the world, death, judgment, and the cherubims, with their flaming swords, which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life; yea, He has cleared away every barrier, so that there is nothing between us and God save and except the blood; and there is nobody between God and us save and except Him who shed it. Do you know this blessed DELIVERER from sins, self, and the world? and are you at this moment in the enjoyment of this THREEFOLD DELIVERANCE?

"I Do Believe Now."

SOME time since, after a severe illness, I went to visit some relatives in Nottinghamshire, and though too weak to preach, I was able to visit a few people, I had not been long with my friends when I heard of a woman, some two miles off, who was dying of dropsy, unsaved, but most anxious about her soul’s salvation. I found her out without much difficulty, and after hearing from her all about her ailments, I spoke of eternal matters the holiness of God, the horribleness of sin, the preciousness of the blood of Jesus Christ which cleanseth from every sin, the value of the immortal soul, and the immense importance that, as she was so near eternity, she should seek its immediate salvation.

The dying woman assured me that she was most anxious to be saved; that she had wept, prayed, and done all that she could, but that she was nothing bettered, but had rather grown worse. I showed her from the Scriptures that Jesus had undertaken the whole responsibility of her salvation from first to last, that before He left the cross He said, “It is finished;” “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.” (John 19:30; 1 Cor. 15:3, 4.)

She replied that it was all very beautiful, but that she could not “see it.”

I urged that the word of God said, “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life.” (John 3:36.)

“But I do not feel it,” she replied; “and how can I know I am saved until I do?”

I replied, “‘Jesus said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.’” (John 5:24.)

“Well, I hope I am saved,” she answered. I saw God had wrought repentance towards Himself in her soul, but that the devil was trying to hinder “faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Acts 20:21.)

I turned my back upon her as she was lying in bed, and whilst in that position I took my watch out of my pocket, and concealing it in my right hand, turned my face towards her again, and said, “Since I turned my back upon you I have taken my watch out of my pocket and put it into my hand. Do you believe it?”

“Yes, sir, I do,” she replied.

“But you did not see me take it out of my pocket and place it in my hand, neither can you see it in my hand. How is it, then, that you believe me without seeing?”

“Because, sir, you told me so.”

“Then why do you not believe God without seeing when He says, ‘He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life’?”

“But I must feel it, sir, first, before I believe I have it.”

“Did you feel me take my watch out of my pocket and put it into my hand? and do you feel it is in my hand?”

“No, sir; I do not feel it is there.”

“Then why do you believe it is there?”

“Because you told me so.”

“But does not God say that ‘your sins arc forgiven you for His (Christ’s) name’s sake’?” (1 John 2:12.)

“Why do you not believe God?”

“I hope I am forgiven now,” she replied.

“But do you hope I took my watch out of my pocket, put it into my hand, and that it is in my hand?”

“No, sir; I do believe that you have done with your watch as you have told me.”

“How is it that you find it so easy to believe me, a poor failing man, without seeing, feeling, or hoping, and yet cannot believe the unfailing and loving God?”

The Spirit of God made her ashamed of her wretched unbelief, and blessed the simple illustration to “giving her full assurance of faith.” She lifted up her voice and cried, “Blessed God, I will not treat your servant better than you. I do believe you now without seeing, feeling, or hoping; and because you say I have the forgiveness of all my sins and everlasting life, I know it is true.”

I fell on my knees to praise God for His mercy to this poor doubting but honest heart; but she was so full of gratitude to God herself that I was obliged gladly to listen to her audible praise; and thus she passed away into His presence who loved her, and gave Himself for her. (Gal. 2:20.)

Should this meet the eye of an anxious soul, I would say that the road to peace is simply to believe what God says about Christ and His work, the sinner and his need. That faith is taking God at His word, and believing what He says, just because He says so; therefore, just where you are, as you are, and just now, receive the full, free, everlasting salvation of God as a gift to simple faith, without seeing, feeling, or hoping.

Take the blessing from above,

And bless God for His boundless love.

"I Credit It All."

IN these easygoing days of indifferentism—days marked by form without power, and routine without reality—it is blessed to see a soul downright in earnest to be saved; and such an one it was my privilege to see and talk with a few days since, he told me he was roost anxious to be saved; that he had been harassed by Satan and by doubts for some weeks that he was trying hard, but at present he could not say his feet were firmly planted on the rock Christ Jesus.

He confessed what a sinner lie had been, and that his sins troubled him. Seeing he was a truly repentant soul, I took out my pocket Bible and read from Exodus 12:13, “The BLOOD shall be to you for a TOKEN... WHERE YE ARE; and when I see the BLOOD, I will pass over you.” I pressed upon him that the blood of the Lamb and the word of God, and nothing else, was what God put before him for salvation; and that his faith must be in the word of God, about the blood of the Lamb, which cleanseth from all sin. (1 John 1:7.) I then read from John 3:33, “He that hath received His testimony hath set to his seal that God is true.”

I explained to him that Christ on the cross had paid our debts, who believe in Him, to God with His own most precious blood; that God, being perfectly satisfied, yea, glorified, with what Christ had done, had raised Him from the dead, and in that act had, as it were, receipted the bill; and that now Christ was in the glory of God as the paid and receipted bill in a safe place.

The dear man pushed down the bedclothes, stretched his arm out of bed, and, holding out his right forefinger as if pressing it upon a seal, exclaimed most earnestly, with tears flowing down his face, “I credit it all! I CREDIT IT ALL! Bless God I am free; I am delivered. My soul is saved. I am ready to go. Jesus has done it all, and He is in heaven waiting to welcome me. I credit it all!”

At this point his wife came into the room, when, taking her hand, he exclaimed, “I am free from my burden, and I wish you were as free as I am. Oh, don’t rest until you have the love of God shed abroad in your heart as I have I until you are ready to go as I am. I am quite ready to go now; Jesus has made me ready. He has done it all, You have not to look this way or that way, but only to Jesus. I credit it all.”

I have seen this dear man several times since, and found him each time calmly looking to Jesus only, with simple faith in God’s word about the person and work of Christ, and full of “all joy and peace in believing.” (Rom. 15:13.)

And now can you who are reading these few lines say, “I credit it all”? Do you credit or believe what God says about you as a death-deserving, hell-deserving, lake-of-fire-deserving, eternal-judgment deserving sinner? Do you credit all God says by His Spirit in His word about the peerless person and precious blood of His own dear Son? Do you, in short, accept God’s “token where ye are”? And can you from your heart say, with him about whom I have been writing, “I CREDIT IT ALL”?

"God so Loved the World."

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”—John 3:16.

WHAT a blessed verse of Holy Scripture this is! It contains the glad tidings of God as announced by Jesus Himself. I used to think, what so many still think, that I had to love God, give to God, and do for God, before I could be saved; but this precious verse showed me I was all wrong, and that God had loved, God had given, and God had done all the work in Jesus on the cross that was needed for His own glory and my salvation, and that what I had to do to get everlasting life was not to love, give, or do, but simply to believe in Him whom God in love had given to do the work that His glory and my state required. Do you see it, dear anxious soul? Do you believe that you are an object of God’s love? This simple verse has been used of God to the salvation of thousands of souls. Many are now with the Lord; many others are on earth ready and waiting for the Lord; and not a few are preaching the gospel in many parts of this world, who owe their own salvation to the truth contained in this verse.

Some people say, “Oh, if I only knew that I was one of the elect, then I would believe!” but our verse says nothing about God loving the elect; it says, “God so loved the world.” Now if you cannot bring yourself to believe you are one of the elect, you surely will have no difficulty in believing that you are one of the world; therefore you are an object of God’s love. “But must I not love God first?” No; you must rest in His love to you, and then you will love Him because He first loved you.

“We love Him because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:19.) “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:10.)

When I last crossed the Atlantic ocean, the fog was so thick that the captain of the steamer I was in signaled to the engineer to stop the engines, and had the lead thrown overboard to see if we were near any rocks. A piece of butter was put at the bottom of the sounding-lead, so that when it touched rock it would bring up an impression of it, or if it touched sand or pebbles it would have some sticking to it when it was drawn up. It was an awful moment of suspense as the vessel rolled from side to side in the trough of the sea, for none on board knew whether we were in danger or not. Presently the captain gave orders to the officer who was throwing the lead to stop and pull it in, and when it was hauled up it showed no impression, and brought nothing up from the bottom, for the simple reason that, though many fathoms of rope had been thrown overboard, it had not touched the bottom. We were safe; we might breathe freely. The engines began to work again, and the vessel plowed her way through the mighty waters. I thought of the ocean of God’s love, which has never yet been fathomed, for it is bottomless. “The circumference of our earth, the altitude of the sun, the distance of the planets, these have been determined; but the height, depth, and breadth of the love of God passeth knowledge.”

I know a dear child of God who was once most anxious about her soul’s salvation. She asked kind friends what she was to do, and they set her a whole round of things to do, assuring her that if she persevered she would obtain what she longed for. She did persevere, but was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse, when one night, as she was lying awake in her bed, unable to sleep from anxiety about. her soul’s salvation, God brought the verse I am writing about to her mind; and as she slowly repeated, “God so loved the world,” she said, “Why, I have been trying to love God into loving me, and all the time God has been trying to love me into loving Him. ‘God so loved the world.’ I am a part of the world, therefore GOD LOVES ME.” It was enough; her soul was saved and satisfied, and she drank in the love of God, and began to love Him whom she now saw had first loved her.

And God not only loved, but He gave—not the archangel, or one of the angels, or a poor sinner like ourselves, but—His only-begotten Son; and that holy Son went to the cross, and bore all that God could possibly express against sin; and having satisfied the holy and righteous claims of God, He cried, “IT IS FINISHED.” And now He is in the glory of God as a proof that it is finished, and that God is satisfied; and now we come in, not to love, give, or do, but simply to believe in Him whom God in love has given to do the work. And God says we shall not perish (just what we deserved), but have everlasting life (just what we never deserved at all); and the moment we are satisfied that God should be first in loving, giving, and doing, He will put us in possession of everlasting life, and allow us to love Him because He first loved us, to give to Him because He has first given us everything in Christ, and to do for Him because He has first done everything for us in Christ. Is it simple to you, dear soul? Do you understand it? Do you believe it? You reply, “If I only saw my name down in the Lamb’s book of life, then I would believe it.” But, my friend, if you do not see your name first in John 3:16 you are never likely to see it in the Lamb’s book of life. “What?” you say, “my name in God’s word?” Yes; only God does not spell it as you do. If He did, there are so many people by your name in the world that nobody would know which of them it meant; but God’s way of spelling your name is, “WHOSOEVER,” and if there are a thousand people by your name in the world “whosoever” takes them all in. It includes all, and excludes none but those who exclude themselves by their own guilty unbelief. A simple countryman once asked a boy what “whosoever” meant. The boy replied, “Why you, me, and anybody.” This definition made it quite clear to the countryman, who was anxious to be saved.

Have you got “everlasting life”? It is not something for a mere period; it lasts forever and forever: “He that believeth on the Son hath, everlasting life.” Mark, it is not he that believeth in himself, but “HE THAT BELIEVETH ON THE SON.” (John 3:36.)

I have done. Remember, God is first in loving, giving, and doing, and that we come in as believers in this wondrous love that gave its only-begotten to do all the work, when we immediately get everlasting life, and may love, give, and do for God in the power of the Holy Ghost, and may spread the blessed tidings far and wide that “God so loved the world.”

"Behold, the Bridegroom."

MATTHEW 25:1-13.

THERE is an immense difference between profession and possession, just as much as there is between current and counterfeit coin. A mere professor is like a bad filbert nut, all shell and no kernel; whilst the possessor is like the good filbert nut, kernel as well as shell are there, the shell of profession surrounds and has within it the kernel of possession. Which are you, my reader? A mere professor of Christianity, or a possessor of Christ?

Religion is earthborn, and occupies its deluded votaries with themselves and the earth; Christianity is heaven-born, and occupies the truly saved with Christ and heaven.

In the chapter given at the head of this paper Christ is looked at in four different characters;. first, as Bridegroom, hope and object of His people’s hearts; second, as Lord of His servants, who will reckon with them when He cometh; thirdly, as the Son of man, who will as surely “come in His glory” as once He came in humiliation; and lastly, as King who has gone to receive the kingdom from His Father, and who will then return and reign over this demoralized world during the millennium or thousand years. (Luke 19:12; Rev. 20:4.)

But it is the first thirteen verses of Matt. 25 that I want to say a little to you about.

“Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the Bridegroom.”

The only place where the words “the kingdom of heaven” occur is in Matthew’s gospel, and there they occur about thirty-two times. It is called the kingdom of heaven, because the King is in heaven, having been crucified and rejected from the earth.

The ten virgins are a picture of professing Christians, the lamps mean profession, and they all went forth from Judaism or heathendom, professedly to meet the Bridegroom. Mark you well, it was not death and judgment, the common lot of man, that they were expecting, but the Bridegroom who, as their Substitute, had borne death and judgment for them, so that there might be no hindrance to their constantly and joyfully looking for His return. “Five of them were wise, and five were foolish. They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them.”

These verses prove that half the profession of the day is false and half real; five of the ten were wise, and five were foolish. Now the folly of the foolish consisted in this, that they took their lamps, and took no oil with them; that is, they rested in a mere profession; they had no heart for Christ, and they had not the Holy Spirit, of which oil is the standing type in Scripture.

“But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.”

The wisdom of the wise is seen in their not resting in a mere Christ-less profession; they were not content with having put on Christ in baptism; they sought and found Him as their portion. There is nothing said about the foolish having “vessels;” but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. The wise had hearts for Christ; their bodies were the temples of the Holy Ghost, and thus their profession was a reality. Having believed with the heart unto righteousness, they were enabled to make confession with the mouth unto salvation. (1 Cor. 6:19; Rom. 10:10.) Which are you, a wise or a foolish virgin?

“While the Bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.”

This verse is a vivid and painful description of the condition of spiritual stupor and supineness that the professing church fell into during what is called “the dark ages,” when the hope of the Bridegroom’s return was entirely lost sight of.

“And at midnight there was a cry made, BEHOLD, THE BRIDEGROOM; go ye out to meet Him. Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps.”

These verses show very solemnly the worldly and selfish ways into which the professing church fell; it gave up seeking Christ’s things, and sought its own things only; but the cry, “Behold, the Bridegroom,” startled them from their slumbers, and produced a genuine revival.

Revival refers to sleepy Christians, and to such the word is, “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” (Eph. 5:14.) Dead sinners don’t want reviving; such need to hear the life-giving voice of the Son of God. (John 5:25.) When the fire has been lighted, and allowed through carelessness to get low, it needs reviving; but when it has never been lighted, it is not reviving that is required then, but to be lighted; and this was the effect of the midnight cry, it manifested where there was life, and where there was none.

“And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out” (or are going out).

The foolish awake to the discovery that they had “NO OIL.” They may trim their beautiful lamps by going to morning and evening prayers, by constant sacramental commemorations, by giving to religious causes, by visiting and helping the sick; but, having no oil, when they thus light their lamps it is only to see them flare up and blaze away for a few moments, and then go out in smoke and leave their unhappy owners in greater darkness than ever—the sure end of mere profession.

The foolish say to the wise, “Give us of your oil. But the wise answered, saying, Not so: lest there be not enough for us and you: but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves.”

The terms on which God sells and man buys the Holy Ghost are, “without money and without price.” (Isa. 55:1.) God is too rich to sell and man too poor to buy on any other terms. Paul said to the Galatians, “Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?” (Gal. 3:2.) The wise virgins got the Holy Ghost by the bearing of faith; the foolish tried to get it at the religious law workshops, but were unsuccessful, as all must be who go there for it.

“And while they went to buy the Bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with Him to the marriage: and THE DOOR WAS SHUT.” The coming of the Bridegroom will prove who are His and who are not; and that time is very near. Christians have nothing to do with fixing dates, but ought to be always expecting the return of their beloved Bridegroom.

“They that were READY went in with Him.” Who made them ready? “Giving thanks unto the Father, which HATH made us meet” (or fit or ready) “to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.” (Col. 1:12.) It is the Father’s work to make His children ready for His own holy presence; and He has done it, and they are entitled to know it, and to praise Him for it.

“The door was shut” and separated the wise and the foolish forever; the wise are inside with the Bridegroom, and the foolish forever shut outside from the Bridegroom and the marriage feast. And now, what an awful scene takes place on the outside of that shut door! “Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us. But He answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I KNOW YOU NOT. Watch therefore; for ye know neither the day nor the hour.”

Then eyes that never wept will weep, and lips that never prayed will pray, and hearts that never felt will feel, and knees that never knelt will kneel; but it will be all outside the closed. door! And these were not backsliders. Two things prove it; first, they had “no oil;” and, secondly, Christ says, “I know you not,” and “I never knew you.” Now, what characterizes Christians is that they have the Holy Ghost, and that the Lord knows them. (1 Cor. 6:19; 2 Tim. 2:19.)

What will the end be of those who are left outside the shut door? They have thrown away their last chance; they have forfeited their last opportunity. Not one who has arrived at the years of responsibility, who has heard the gospel preached, and been guilty of rejecting it, will ever have another opportunity of being saved after Christ has been and taken His people home to glory. (v. 12; Luke 13:24-27; 2 Thess. 2:10-12.)

The Christless religionist may plead, “I have been baptized, confirmed, and regularly taken the sacrament.” “I never knew you,” is His answer. “But I have wept, prayed, and done my best.” Again He repeats, “I NEVER knew you.” “But I have been regularly to church, chapel, or meeting.” “I NEVER knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity,” is the final word. (Matt. 7:22, 23.)

Oh ye who are clutching tenaciously as with deathless grip the oil-less lamp of a Christ-less profession, know ye if ye continue as ye are that your lamp will soon go out in the blackness of darkness forever! but now, ere it is TOO LATE, come to Jesus for life, for the Holy Ghost, and for fitness for His return, and join the wise virgins in the midnight cry, “BEHOLD, THE BRIDEGROOM.” “ONE LEAK WILL SINK A SHIP.”

“ONE leak will sink a ship, and one sin will destroy a sinner.” So said Bunyan; and he said right, for he drew his conclusions from the word of God.

There is an idea, I find, held by a large number of persons, that unless a man has committed some great crime, such as murder or theft, he is not a sinner. But that is what man thinks; and God has said, “My thoughts are not your thoughts.” (Isa. 55:8.)

Man judges of sin by the way it touches or affects his fellow-man. God judges of it by His holiness, and by the way it dishonors Him; hence He has said, “The thought of foolishness is sin.” (Prov. 24:9.)

Suppose a man takes away the life of his fellowman: if he is caught, and found guilty, he is hanged. But suppose another man is found guilty of having taken away the lives of several of his fellow-creatures, the law of the land can do no more and no less than hang him, the same as it did the one who only took one human life. And ONE SIN will EXPOSE a man to the ETERNAL JUDGMENT of God as much as one million of sins!

How many sins did Adam and Eve commit before God drove them out of the garden of Eden? One, and only one; and for that one act of disobedience they were, by the holiness of God, righteously excluded forever from the earthly paradise.

“The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” (Ezek. 18:4, 20.) Mark, God does not say, the soul that sinneth a hundred or a million sins shall die; but, “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.”

Again, “The wages of sin is death.” (Rom. 6:23.) Observe, again, God does not say the wages of a hundred or a million of sins is death, but, “The wages of SIN is death.” “And be sure your SIN will find you out.” (Num. 32:23.)

The holiness of God has weighed the world in the equal balances of the cross of Christ, and the verdict is, “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.” (Dan. 5:27.)

The holiness of God has measured man.by the just measure of the cross of Christ, and the sentence is, “THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE: for ALL have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” (Rom. 3:22, 23.)

Why has God thus weighed and measured man? In order “that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become GUILTY before God.” (Rom. 3:10.)

SIN, DEATH, and JUDGMENT are the lot of men because, as we have seen, “all have sinned,” and “all the world” is guilty. But is there no open door of escape? Blessed be God, there is; for Christ has died, and shed His precious blood. He has borne sin, death, and judgment on the cross; and now all who trust Him get forgiveness, eternal life, divine righteousness, the Holy Ghost, and everlasting glory.

Sin must be measured by the holiness of God, and by the cross of Christ. At the cross of Christ I learn that the holiness of God required the death and blood-shedding of Christ for one sin, just as much as for one million of sins. Nothing less than the death and blood-shedding of Christ would do to put away one sin, and nothing more was necessary to put away one million of sins. “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7); and whether you have sinned few or many sins, forgiveness and justification are to be had alone “through faith in His blood.” (Rom. 3:24, 25.)

“Believe in Him who died for thee,

And, sure as He has died,

Thy debt is paid, thy soul is saved, thou art justified.”

“OH, JOY, JOY!”

“Oh, joy, joy! The glorious work is done. I am passed from death unto life, from the power of Satan unto God. ‘Tis like a miracle—so sudden; I know it now. I am saved, and safe forever. I have peace, perfect peace; ‘I have a peace, and ‘tis calm as a river.” ‘Twas like a door in my soul suddenly opened; I instantly saw, I knew, I believed. I was blind, now I see. I praise God for His great mercy in letting me see; me as I am, and He as He is, and Christ, the Savior of sinners, such as I; and for bringing me out of darkness into light, out of such agony of soul, which felt as if it would really kill me. I did not know that I should ever be out of it, and I am brought out suddenly of this into such glorious light and peace. A peace that passeth all understanding, so safe in Christ. A peace and rest forever. What you have said to me, what you have written to me, has done it all. If I had been told the way and suddenness of it, as of any other person, I don’t know how I could have believed it. I must tell you how it was.

“In the morning, after reading your last letter again, I had walked out into the flower garden; but I saw nothing there. I looked up to the sky, and that awful solemnity came over me, stronger, than ever. I stood still—why I know not—my mind was turned inward to thoughts of God. I must have looked down again, from what followed. The next instant will ever be stamped upon my heart. All I know is, I looked up—that is, I lifted up my eyelids—so I must have been looking down. The instant I lifted up my eyelids, just as quick, like a door in my soul was suddenly opened, an instantaneous light came over me, I saw, I knew I was saved! I was at peace! Oh, such a peace! such a peace I never knew before! And, most strange, at the next instant words seemed put in my mouth. I know not where they are from. I said, ‘How safe, how calm, how satisfied the soul that clings to thee!’ Those words expressed it. I immediately walked into the house, wondering what had been done to me. I kept repeating those words, ‘So safe, so calm, so satisfied, the soul that clings to thee.’ And now I can say

“‘Accepted I am,

In the once offered Lamb;

It is God who Himself had devised the plan.’

“Am I saved? I could not have thought anyone could now be saved so suddenly. Are you not surprised at what I say, after all the agonies of my soul I have been troubling you with? Was there ever such a sudden change from darkness to light, taking Jesus instantly to my soul, knowing that He died on the cross for my sins? Your words and your letters have been blessed to me. I read them again now. You have done it; God has done it.

“I have now, as you told me, ‘let go every twig.’ Your ‘Prayer’ has been answered. I have read it so often—many, many times a day. It was a feeling also when I lifted up my eyes; I felt I was saved, as well as knew it. Your last papers with your note—so beautifully clear it is to me, so suited to my need—this note, both your notes have done it.

“What you wrote about faith has done me good. Was that wrong when I felt I was saved, as well as knew it? But I trust to no feeling now; I know it; I have the ‘receipt.’ That tract, Faith, or Feeling—which? Can’t it be both? I care for nothing now but the knowledge of Christ. I never can thank you sufficiently, or give you but a faint idea of my gratitude for all your teaching and advice. It is all your doing, through God, from first to last. You have been the means of saving my soul and bringing me to perfect peace, ‘so safe, so calm, so satisfied.’ I am—I am a changed being indeed. What you have said to me in your addresses, and what you have written to me, have done it all; and the books have been a great help also. I do nothing all day but read them; many thanks for them. Am I saved? is one. You said prayer would be answered, it is answered for me?

“Your eternally obliged and grateful friend,

“M. F. H.”

The writer of the above letter is absent from the body, and at home with the Lord. I therefore feel perfectly free in publishing it, and my object in doing so is, first, to encourage those who, like the writer of the remarkable letter that they have read, may have known what it is to be long troubled about their condition as lost sinners in the presence of a holy God. “Sorrow may endure for a night; but joy cometh in the morning.” You may and must have your night of sorrow—that is, repentance towards God—but joy shall be yours on the morning of your faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ. “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power: of the Holy Ghost.” (Rom. 15:13.)

My second object in giving publicity to this letter is, that the reader may see that salvation is sudden. How long was the Lord in saving the penitent thief? the three thousand at Pentecost? or Saul of Tarsus? In the Acts of the Apostles thousands of conversions are recorded, and all instantaneous. Salvation is God’s work. It is immediate, and it is eternal: “I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be forever: nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before Him.” (Eccles. 3:14.)

My third and last reason for printing my late friend’s letter is, that the reader may see that God wishes His children to know that they are saved, to thank Him for it, and to tell others about it. God says, “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life” (1 John 5:13); and those who have received and believed this letter can humbly but confidently say, “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren.” (1 John 3:14.)

I pray God greatly to bless this letter to anxious souls, and give them by His grace to say with the writer of it, “Oh, joy! joy the glorious work is done! I am passed from death unto life, from the power of Satan unto God.”

ONE stone thrown through a pane of glass breaks it into pieces, and you may mend it with putty, or paste a piece of paper on either side to keep it together, and to keep the wind out; but it is broken for all that, and some day, when the rain and wind are beating against it, away will go your putty and your paper.

Now, what is to be done in such a case? It is clear that all the glass manufacturers and glaziers in the world put together could not make that pane of glass as it was before it was broken. What is the remedy then? Why, a new pane of glass, and nothing else.

God says, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Then that proves that every man’s Dane of glass is broken. Many there are who do not believe this, but such will find out it is true when it is too late, if they do not believe it soon. But there are others who do believe it, and what are they doing? Why, instead of owning that their pane of glass is hopelessly ruined, and getting it remedied with a new one, they are having recourse to the putty of reformation, and the paper plaster of mere religious performances; but ere long death and judgment will remove these things in which they are foolishly trusting, and they will stand naked and exposed to the holy eyes of a heart-searching God.

Christ said, in John 3, to a most moral and amiable teacher among the Jews, “Ye must be born again.” He also added, that unless he was born again he would not be allowed either to enter or see the kingdom of God.

Man is fallen, lost, and guilty, and what he needs is, not reformation nor teaching, but a new nature, and this God alone can communicate to him.

Born once dies twice, but born twice never dies. That is, if a man has only one birth—his natural birth—two deaths stare him in the face; first, physical death, which is the separation of the soul and body from each other; and secondly, “the second death,” which is the “lake of fire.” (Rev. 21:8.) Whereas if a man has two births—the natural and the spiritual—he has imparted to him in the second, or new birth, “the divine nature,” which is “eternal life,” and therefore death cannot touch it; so that Jesus could say to the unbelieving Jews of His day, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.” (John 8:51.)

Your pane of glass is broken, whoever you are, rich or poor, learned or unlearned, religious or irreligious, old or young, and you cannot mend it, and God will not mend it for you. What you need, and cannot do without, is the new birth. May you hear the words of Jesus ringing in your ears, “YE MUST BE BORN AGAIN.”

There is the same nature in the lion in the menagerie as in the lion in the jungle of South Africa, and this would soon be seen if you were to remove all restraints from it. And Scripture declares that “that which is born of the flesh is flesh” (John 3:6), and will never be anything else. You may surround it with the restraints of education and religion, but they no more change the nature that we are born in than keeping a lion in a cage changes its nature. No; the new birth is an indispensable necessity. God affirms, in Romans 8:8 that they that are in the flesh cannot please Him; that is, that man in his natural and unregenerate state is positively unable to do anything to please God.

Man by nature is like a defiled spring of water in a well. You may clean out the well as often and as much as you please, but the water remains bad because the spring of the well is defiled, and nothing will remedy the difficulty but sinking a new well and refusing the old one.

After the fall of man, in the garden of Eden, God left man to his conscience for nearly two thousand years, and the world got so bad that God was obliged to send a deluge of water upon it, and to destroy the guilty cities of the plain and their inhabitants by fire.

Then God tried man under the law, and he broke it by making a golden calf and worshipping it; He tried him under the kings, and they led the people astray; He tried him under the priesthood, and the priests offered strange fire and were killed of the Lord; He tried him under the prophets, but he refused to be called back to Jehovah; lastly, He sent His one only-beloved Son, and they said, “This is the heir, let us kill Him, and the inheritance shall be ours,” and the world headed up its guilt in the crucifixion of its Creator in the person of the man Christ Jesus. The world’s trial and probation ended at the cross of Christ; it is a judged world now, and men can only be saved out of this judged scene and from the awful judgment that is coming upon it by receiving God’s Son as their Savior; and be it known to all, that “neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12.)

Your pane of glass is broken, therefore you must be born again. God cannot accept you in your old fallen nature, and until you are born again, you have no nature that can either love, worship, enjoy, or serve God.

But not only is there a needs-be for you to be born again, but the Son of God as Son of man must be lifted up on the cross for God’s glory, and to bear the judgment or punishment due to us. And this has been done. Christ has been lifted up, and said, when He was lifted up, “It is finished.” Christ has died, has been buried, and has risen again, and now all who believe in Him can say, “I died in Him as my substitute when he died; I was buried in Him, and now I am risen in Him, and He is in me, my new and eternal life; and by His Spirit in me I know His Father is my Father, and His God is my God, and I have a life and power now to love, worship, enjoy, and serve God.”

But how is this new birth produced? Jesus answers that question in John 3:5: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Water in this verse has no reference whatever to baptism, but to the word of God. Baptism puts a man on Christian ground; puts him in the place of privilege and of responsibility; but he is not thereby born again. How, then, is it communicated? By an ordinance? No. By a religious walk? No. By prayer? No; but by the reception of God’s word revealing Christ.

Look at a few Scriptures, and you will by God’s Spirit instructing you, see it clearly. “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to thy WORD.” (Ps. 119:9); “Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you” (John 15:3); “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church, and gave Himself for it; that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word” (Eph. 5:25, 26); “Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth” (James 1:18); “Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God” (1 Peter 1:23); “It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing.” (John 6:63.) The new birth, therefore, is produced or communicated by the word of God revealing Christ lifted up on the cross for us, and applied to the believing soul by the Holy Ghost.

There must be reception of Christ by faith for the new birth to take place. “As many as received Him, to them gave He power (or the right) to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12, 13); “for ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:26.)

And not only does the Spirit use the word of God to produce the new birth, but it is by the Spirit that we know we are children of God when we have received Christ by faith, and are by Him enabled to call God “Father.”

“For as many as are led by the Spirit of God they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.” (Rom. 8:15, 16.) “And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” (Gal. 4:6.)

And just as we had to be born naturally to get the place of a child to our earthly father before we could do anything to please him, so we muss, be born again to have the sweet and holy relationship of a child to our Father in heaven, and to enable us to do aught that is acceptable to Him.

Come at once then to the same Jesus that Nicodemus came to, and learn from Him your guilty state, the necessity of the new birth, and how it is produced, that you may henceforth be a divinely happy person, though YOUR PANE OF GLASS IS BROKEN.

Repentance

THERE are two incontestable proofs that man is a responsible being. One is, that God calls upon him, yea, commands him, to repent; and the other, that God is going to judge him.

God never calls upon horses, cows, or dogs to repent; and when they die He will not raise them again, and judge them for the deeds done in the body; but “God... now commandeth all men everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30); “and... it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” (Heb. 9:27.) This is a most solemn consideration for those who deny and teach that man is not a responsible being.

Repentance must not be confounded with conversion, nor with remorse; it is on earth that people must repent and be converted; there is neither repentance nor conversion in hell, there is nothing but eternal remorse there.

Repentance is turning “from dead works.” (Heb. 6:1.) There is much more than turning from dead works involved in repentance, as I hope to show from the Scriptures before I have done. Conversion is the turning of the will and heart and life to God. (1 Thess. 1:9, 10.) Remorse, like a quenchless fire, and undying worm, will be the burning, gnawing portion throughout eternity of the finally impenitent and unconverted. Repentance, as the word signifies in the Greek, means a change of mind, an afterthought founded upon reflection. To quote a most reliable authority upon the subject, “It is literally an after or changed thought, a judgment formed by the mind on reflection, after it has had another or previous one; habitually, in its use in Scripture, the judgment I form in God’s sight of my own previous conduct and sentiments—consequent on the reception of God’s testimony, in contrast with my previous natural course of feeling.”

Repentance is always preceded by faith; it takes place in the presence of God, and is produced by the revelation of God through His word to my soul of what I am and what I have done. God shows me that I am lost and guilty. The moment my faith bows to this solemn revelation on the part of God of what I am and what I have done, repentance is produced in my soul.

To say that repentance must come before faith, as some do, is to say that it is produced apart from the word of God, and that it is therefore founded upon unbelief, which is a most unscriptural and mischievous kind of teaching. To quote again from the same sound and scriptural authority: “The setting a certain quantity of repentance first (as some men preach) as a preliminary process to believing, I hold to be utterly mischievous and unscriptural. According to such views, repentance must take place without the word of God; for if it be by the word of God, there must be faith in that word, or else repentance is founded on unbelief, which is absurd.”

Jehovah by His servants in the Old Testament called upon guilty sinners, whether they were Jews or Gentiles, to repent; and repentance was wrought by a testimony rendered, and by their belief of that testimony. See an instance of what I mean in Jonah 3:4, 5. “And Jonah... cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them... And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way.” Clearly repentance here was founded upon the word of God about coming judgments, and their faith in it; that is, faith preceded repentance, as it always does and always must.

Now if we turn to the New Testament we shall find that Jesus and His apostles preached repentance. See Matthew 3:2; 4:17, where you will find Jesus and His servant John using exactly the same words: “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Now all those who believed this twofold testimony saw and felt their unfitness to receive the kingdom of heaven, and repented or judged themselves on account of this moral unfitness.

Turn now to Acts 2, where we shall find a third and the most advanced testimony that we have yet considered. It is an open-air meeting; thousands are congregated together. Peter is the preacher. His subject is, Jesus and the resurrection. He charges home upon their consciences the murder of the Son of God in the most scathing language: “Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that He should be holden of it.” And when they saw and believed their guilt in rejecting Christ, and God’s righteous act in raising Him from among the dead, the Holy Ghost used the word to prick them in their hearts, and genuine repentance followed.

In Acts 8:22 God says, “Repent of this thy wickedness.” Surely this is enough to convince anybody that repentance is not believing, though it follows it; neither is it conversion, nor forgiveness, though they invariably follow it. Unless I believe God that I have been guilty of wickedness, I shall most certainly not repent of it. Let me be clearly understood. I do not mean that saving faith comes before repentance; I believe it never does; at any rate, it ought not. Convicting faith comes before repentance, and saving faith follows it.

Repentance is not only pungent sorrow for what I have done, but also what I am—my state. Take Job as an instance of the deep, real judgment of state. See forty-second chapter: “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now my eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” Where did Job’s repentance take place? and what produced it? It took place in the presence of God, and faith in what his ear heard of God produced it. God hath exalted Christ with His own right hand to be a Prince and a Savior, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins. (Acts 5:31.) “Then hath God also to the Gentiles granted repentance unto life.” (Acts 11:18.) But whether given to the Jews or granted towards the Gentiles, it is “towards God.” and is followed by “faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21), and it is “the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance.” (Rom. 2:4). When I believe the goodness of God to me, a ruined and guilty sinner, in delivering Christ for my offences, and raising Him again for my justification (Rom. 4:25), I sit in judgment upon myself in the presence of God, and abhor myself: I repent in dust and ashes on account of my God-hating, Christ-rejecting, Holy Ghost-resisting, sin-loving, unbelieving, guilty course. “Repentance is the judgment we form, under the effect of God’s testimony, of all in ourselves to which that testimony applies. Hence it is always founded on faith: I do not say the faith of the gospel.”

Repentance is not something that takes place in a lump, and then is all over forever. No; even after we are forgiven, and have got the Holy Ghost indwelling our body as His temple, the closer we walk with God conditionally, the more we shall judge everything in our state and actions that the word of God shows us is unsuitable to God.

To sum up this paper, we have seen that repentance is an afterthought produced upon reflection; that it is produced by the Holy Ghost’s application of the word of God to the conscience and heart; that it is founded upon faith in the word of God; that it takes place in the presence of a holy God; that it is the judgment of my state and actions; that it is a gift from the ascended and glorified Christ; that God grants it; that it is towards God; that the goodness of God leads to it; that it is from dead works, and an ever-deepening thing right into glory. This much may suffice to show the place and importance of repentance in the Scriptures. I pray God, in conclusion, that He would, by His Spirit and His word, work in all who may read this paper genuine REPENTANCE.

Feeling Versus Faith

A very large number of persons in this nineteenth century, not satisfied with our good old Bible, which is the word of God, are preaching a new Bible, which is not the word of God; and I grieve to say that thousands are always talking about it, and are trusting to it.

The name of this new Bible is feeling. Now the sad thing about these dear people who have such an attachment to this new Bible is, that they are very angry if you speak against it; and, worse still, they do not believe what God says in His word, because He says it, but because they feel it; consequently, if they do not feel it they do not believe it, and thus prove that they attach much more importance to their variable feelings, than they do to the unchangeable word of God.

I will suppose a case for the sake of illustration. I meet an infidel, and he asks me, “How do you know that what is written in the so-called word of God is true?” I reply, “Because I feel it is.” When he immediately answers, “Then I do not believe it is true, because I do not feel it is.” Do you not see that we have neither of us any scripture to stand upon, and that one is just as much right as the other?

So many have told me, when I have asked them if they were saved, and how they knew it, that they were saved because they felt it. Such people are invariably distressed with doubts when they do not feel they are saved. Others again have said that they did not know they were saved, because they did not feel it.

The constant use of the two words feel and feeling in connection with salvation has made me look them up in Cruden’s Concordance. He gives the word feel as occurring seven times, and the word feeling twice in the whole of the Scriptures. (Gen. 27:12, 21; Judges 16:26; Job 20:20; Psalm 58:9; Eccles. 8:5; Acts 17:27; Eph. 4:19; Heb. 4:15.) Of the nine times that these two words are used, it is not once about forgiveness, salvation, adoption, sealing by the Spirit, preservation of the believer, or the glory soon to be revealed.

This continual search for feeling that you are forgiven, saved, that you have the Holy Ghost, and are a child of God, is the greatest dishonor to God, as it is allowing a feeling to usurp the place of the word of God, and of faith in that Word.

Whilst the words feel and feeling only occur nine times in the Bible, the words faith, believe, believest, believed, believeth, and believing are mentioned between five and six hundred times. Then give to the winds thy frames, fears, and feelings, and know that God loves to be trusted, and delights to honor faith.

You ask perhaps, “What is faith?” It is taking God at His word, and believing what He says because He says it.

Again you ask, “How is this faith to be had?” It is not natural to the human heart, “it is the gift of God.” God says, “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” (Rom. 10:17.)

Everything you can see and feel has written upon it, “Fading away, change and decay;” that only is real and abiding that can neither be seen nor felt. “Look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” (2 Cor. 4:18.)

In the Scriptures we shall find faith connected with Christ, eternal blessings, and the walk of a believer through this world. Let us look at a few Scriptures where it is so used.

“YE BELIEVE IN GOD, BELIEVE also in Me.” (John 14:1.)

“Jesus Christ, whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now you see Him not, yet BELIEVING, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.” (1 Peter 1:8.)

“Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of FAITH?” (Gal. 3:2.)

“After that ye BELIEVED, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise.” (Eph. 1:13.)

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that BELIEVETH on Me hath everlasting life.” (John 6:47.)

“These things have I written unto you that BELIEVE on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life.” (1 John 5:13.)

“For by grace are ye saved through FAITH; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Eph. 2:8, 9.) “And He said to the woman, Thy FAITH hath saved thee; go in peace.” (Luke 7:50.)

“Be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins; and by Him all that BELIEVE are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses.” (Acts 13;38, 39.)

“Therefore being justified by FAITH, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Rom. 5:1.)

“To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by FAITH that is in me.” (Acts 26:18.)

“For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our FAITH. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that BELIEVETH that Jesus is the Son of God?” (1 John 5:4, 5.)

“Whosoever BELIEVETH that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” (1 John 5:1.) “As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that BELIEVE on His name.” (John 1:12.)

“For ye are all the children of God by FAITH in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:26.)

“Who are kept by the power of God through FAITH unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” (1 Peter 1:5.)

“For we walk by FAITH, not by sight.” (2 Cor. 5:7.)

“But without FAITH it is impossible to please Him: for he that cometh to God must BELIEVE that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.” (Heb. 11:6.)

I have now given you a fair sample of the way God presents the subject of faith in His word. It is connected with God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit; with everlasting life, salvation, and forgiveness; with justification, peace, and sanctification; with the new birth, victory over the world, preservation, and walk. The words feel and feeling are not thus mentioned once. May God deliver you from morbid feelings, and bring you back to simple faith in Himself and His word. Dr. Lyon Playfair (a celebrated scientist) said to the Prince of Wales, when showing him some scientific experiments, “Does your Highness believe in scientific truth?” “I do,” replied the Prince. “Will your Highness then thrust your hand into this crucible of molten lead?” “Does the doctor tell me to do this?” “I do,” replied the doctor; and the Prince did so, and drew his hand out unhurt, the reason being that the intense heat draws out the moisture from the hand, which for the moment protects the flesh from the molten lead; were the lead less hot it would burn, because it would fail to draw out the moisture.

This is surely what God wants, to be taken at His word despite appearances.

Forgiveness and Eternal Life

THESE two scriptures bring before us the two subjects—forgiveness of sins and eternal life—which I wish to take up. The first thing about which a soul is troubled, when God begins to deal with it, is its sins—sins which it is quite conscious it cannot put away, nor go into heaven with, and for which it knows it deserves to go to hell. And how are they to be put away?

Now I turn to 1 Corinthians 15:3, which makes it very simple: “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.” “Our sins;” i.e. the sins of those who have believed in Jesus. He put away the sins of those who believe on Him, therefore God can never put a believer into hell, because Christ put away his sins. God will not ask payment for sins at two persons’ hands; one payment is enough for Him. “Christ died for our sins;” that is how the question of sins is dealt with; there was no other way suitable to God but by Christ dying for them; and if you want to see what an awful thing sin is, look at what nailed Christ to the cross. It was our sins put Him there—the judgment of God against our sins. The moment you see that Christ died for your sins, you will never love them again. How could you love them when Christ had to die for them? Those very sins cost the Lord Jesus His life; so of all things I hate, it is those sins.

Now I turn to Galatians 1:4, which brings in a little more than that verse in Corinthians: “Who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father.” A man who says he believes in Jesus, but does not know that his sins are forgiven, is always worldly, because his sins are forever tying him down here. It is like a balloon ready to mount up into the air, but kept to the earth by the cords which tie it down. Until a man knows his sins are forgiven, his sins are like the cords tying him down to earth. Christ gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil world. Were any of your tears, prayers, experiences, sighs, or works there? Why Christ did it all eighteen hundred years before you ever could have had any of them.

Now look at 1 Peter 2:24 for another verse about sins: “Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree.” Now then, beloved, how many sins had He on Him then? People say, “Oh, all my past sins?” Is He then coming again to put away your present sins, and then the future ones? Do you want Christ to die three times? That is impossible. How could He? He has shed all the blood He had. “Behold, I am alive for evermore.” He cannot die any more. Don’t you see, all your sins were future when Christ died eighteen hundred years ago. He had all our sins upon Him; every sin that we have committed, or ever shall commit, were all laid upon Him, and if they were not put away then, they never can be put away; for Christ will never be on the cross again. You did not find out that your sins were put away till quite lately perhaps, but the work was done eighteen hundred years ago. Your sins were not put away the other day, but you then first found out that they were.

Just look at another verse, 1 Peter 3:18: “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit.” There are three things in that verse: first, what Christ was; secondly, what we were; and thirdly, what our condition has cost Him. Look at every separate word of it; who was it that suffered? He that was holy, harmless, and undefiled. For whose sins did He suffer? Not His own, but the sins of the unjust. What you and I deserved to suffer forever and ever the Lord Jesus went through on Calvary’s cross, that we might never go through it in hell, and that we might be with Himself in the peerless heights of glory for evermore. How shall I then trifle with the sins for which the just Jesus suffered on the cross? Do you believe that Christ died for your sins according to the Scriptures? Do you believe that He gave Himself for your sins that He might deliver you from this present evil world? Do you believe that He Himself bare our sins in His own body on the tree? and that He suffered for our sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God? They must all have been there, or else none of them. Where is the Lord Jesus who had them upon Him? Is He on the cross now? Indeed He is not; it was sins that kept Him there; but He is not there now. He went into the grave, but He did not leave the sins in the grave, as people say; for He could not have left that cross for the grave if He had not already put them away. The reason He could leave the cross was because the sins were all gone. He is not on the cross now or in the grave. Look up to the brightest spot in the glory of God, and the first thing that will meet your gaze will be Jesus. Could He be in glory if any sins were on Him? Certainly not; and yet Jesus is there, with the marks of the nails in His hands and feet, and the mark where the spear pierced Him in His side— “a Lamb as it had been slain.”

Where are the sins then? That brings me to the twelfth verse of 1 John 2: “I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake.” Does it mean that they are being forgiven? or that they shall be forgiven? No; it says they are forgiven—it is accomplished. Whether one of you has been converted fifty years, and another fifty minutes, it is just as true of one as the other. “I write unto you, little children.” There is a letter from your Father, and what is it about? To tell you that your sins are forgiven! How is it that God can tell me I am forgiven? Because He forgives me for “His name’s sake,” who has offered the payment in full to God, with His own precious blood. Christ paid, my debt on the cross, and God raised Him from the dead as the proof of it, and now He adorns the throne of God. Why doubt anymore? When the devil comes in you either resist him or you entertain him. Are you going to entertain him? or resist him by planting your feet firmly on the word of God? Suppose Satan comes in, and says, “Oh, your sins are not forgiven!” I say, “You are too late, Satan; for I have God’s word for it that they are, and you are a liar from the beginning.” I cannot doubt my Father’s letter to please Satan. Well, then, we have no more doubt about the sins being forgiven. Satan says, “Oh, but God will bring you into judgment for them one day!” But I turn to Hebrews 10:17, and, meet him with the word of God: “And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.”—I not only have a letter to tell me that I am forgiven, but that God will remember my sins no more.

Now supposing I sin, won’t it separate me from Christ? What is to be done? Have I ceased to be a child of God now? Did your being a sinner hinder His saving you? No. Then do you think He is going to cast you off now you are His child, and yet have sinned? Sins won’t hinder His keeping you; but they come in between you and Christ, and hinder your communion and enjoyment of Him. How do I know it? Because 1 John 2:1 tells me so: “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” Suppose that my besetting sin is temper, and I have got angry about something, what am I to do? Before you can do anything, before ever you can think, as quick as lightning flashes, or the pendulum swings, or heart throbs, or pulse beats, if you could see what happens, the Advocate is with the Father before ever you have time to confess. The instant any true child of God sins, the devil would like to come in and make that sin separate between the child and the Father. But the Advocate goes to the Father about it; and what happens? I am made conscious that I have sinned, and I go and confess it to God. The job of salvation is then restored to you. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just, to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” It shows how grace triumphs over sin. The Holy Ghost in me brings some word of God home to my conscience, and causes me to turn out my heart in God’s presence, and He is faithful and just to forgive me my sins. Sins touch my communion; but they can’t separate me from Christ. How could God put me into hell for the sins for which Christ suffered on Calvary’s cross?

Well then we have seen clearly from Scripture that the sins are forever put away, but we ought to praise God for these things; and a beautiful little song of praise comes out in Revelation 1:5, 6: “Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and His Father; to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” In these verses you get the washed, the Washer—what we are washed from, and what He washes us in. Now then we praise Him. Shall you and I drink in His love to us? shall we know that He has put away our sins, and have no note of praise for Him, no heart full of worship for Him? Oh, no! let our hearts go out in songs of praise and thanksgiving to Him.

Now I will close with a little word on eternal life. “And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.” What is the difference between forgiveness of sins and eternal life? Eternal life is something additional to forgiveness of sins. Picture a man thrown into a debtors’ prison because he owed money. There were two things he could not do in prison—he could not get into debt, and he could not pay his debts; for how could he work at anything to earn money in the debtor’s prison. Supposing I know the poor miserable being who is in this plight, and I go to him and ask him who his debtors are, and how many debts he owes, and he gives me their names. Well, I take the bills and pay them, and get the receipts for them all. Then I go back to the prison, and I show the governor there all the receipts as proofs that the debtor is no longer a debtor. He lets me go to the man, and he sees the debts are all gone. The governor says, “We can keep you no longer; you are a free man.” Away he can go, able to say there is not a man to whom he owes anything. No, he does not go. Why? “Ah” he says, “I know my debts are all paid, and that I am free; but I have not a halfpenny in my pocket, and the moment I get out of prison I shall have no power to keep out of getting into debt again.” “Well, first of all thank the one who paid the debt, and then I will tell you I have something more for you.” So the man thanks him gratefully; and now he says, “There is a checkbook for you, and you can write out a check to any amount, tens of thousands if you like. I have put a fortune into the bank to your account.” Now the man leaps for joy. “I am out of debt,” says he, “and no chance of ever getting into it again.” Well, that is forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Who can spend up eternal life? If you have eternal life, it is in God’s Own Son you have it. It is not a matter of feeling, it is a fact. There is the fortune for you; but where is it? It is in the bank; “this life is in His Son.” First He tells you He has given it to you, and then He tells you where He has put it for you. The Son of God Himself is my life.

And now, lastly, “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life.” Two letters for you from God—one about forgiveness of sins (1 John 2:12), and now the other about eternal life. (1 John 5:13.) Well, this enables me to go through the world as light of heart as the nightingale whose breast is full of song. What do I want with cares? Have I not got the forgiveness of my sins, and eternal life, and the Holy Ghost? am I not united to Christ in glory, and waiting for His second coming to put me in that glory with Himself? Tell everyone about it. Is it given to us that we may hide it in our hearts? No; it must find its way out somewhere if you have got it. How can my eternal life come to an end? It is Christ Himself. It is a wonderful thing to find out on the infallible authority of the word of God that I have eternal life. “I give unto them eternal life.” (John 10:28.) “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.” (Rom. 8:1.) There is none for Christ, so there is none for us who are in Christ.

"The Sin Against the Holy Ghost" - What Is It?

I HAVE met with quite a number of persons who think that they have sinned the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost. I have before me a letter from a man who has been in sore distress of soul for months, and in it he says, “I have thought so much about what a great sinner I have been; and when I was a lad I was tempted to curse God. I shall never get pardon; it is the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost. I shall never get to heaven; I cannot see the least hope for me.”

The Holy Ghost is a person, and He is God. This is very clear from what Peter says to Ananias in Acts 5:3, 4: “Why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost?... Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God,” therefore all sin is sin against the Holy Ghost.

The man from whose letter I have quoted, and all to whom I have ever spoken who have been troubled about this matter, confound between sin against the Holy Ghost, and blasphemy against the Holy Ghost.

If you will turn to Mark 3:22-30, the subject is simply and thoroughly entered into, and the difference between sin and blasphemy carefully distinguished. Enemies of Christ, the scribes from Jerusalem, saw a wonderful power in Christ, which with all their learning and influence they had not; and not knowing the source of this power—the Holy Spirit—in Christ, they in their jealousy and wickedness attributed it to the devil. They said of the blessed and holy Jesus, “He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth He out devils.” The Lord condescends to reason with them, and shows them the folly of such a wicked and blasphemous remark by asking them, “How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end.” And now having shown them the utter folly of their reasoning, He goes on to distinguish between sin against the Holy Ghost which is forgivable, and blasphemy against the Holy Ghost which is not forgivable.

“Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: but he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation: because they said, He hath an unclean spirit.”

Should any read these lines whom Satan has tempted to believe that they have been guilty of the unpardonable sin, I would ask them a question I have often asked those similarly troubled: “Do you believe Christ cast out devils by the power of the devil, or by the power of the Holy Ghost?” I am sure you will give the same answer that they have all given. “Not by the power of the devil, but by the power of the Holy Ghost.” Then, dear friend, thank God you are not guilty of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost; for blasphemy against the Holy Ghost is saying that Christ cast out devils by the power of the devil, whereas He cast them out by the power of the Holy Ghost, as He Himself says in Matt. 12:28 “If I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you.” God the Holy Ghost, a real divine person, is down here on the earth in God’s house called Christendom, and consequently all sin is sin against Him. But how blessed to hear Jesus saying, “All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men.” On what ground? Christ died, and God says His blood cleanseth us from all or every sin; and what you have to do, poor troubled soul, is to have “faith in His blood.”

"Come," or "Depart;" "Today," or "Tomorrow."

Today Jesus is saying, “Come;” tomorrow He will say, “Depart.” Today is the day of salvation; tomorrow will be the day of judgment. Today Jesus lets fall from His gracious, tender, loving lips, into the ear of faith, the invitation, “Come;” tomorrow He will thunder in the guilty ear of unbelief the terrible word “Depart.”

Today the three persons of the ever-blessed Godhead are inviting poor sinners to come and get cleansing, rest, and life. In Isaiah 50:18, GOD says, “Come NOW, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” In this verse God Himself is inviting sin-stained sinners to come to Him, where they are, as they are, and just now, with the blessed promise that they shall be cleansed from all their scarlet and crimson-dyed stains, and be made as white as the pure snowflakes on a winter’s day. But it is “Now” that God invites.

In Matt. 11:28, JESUS says, “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” In this lovely verse, which is clustered with blessing, Jesus is inviting restless wanderers after rest to come to Himself and get it. He does not invite you to come to so-called church, chapel, or meeting room, to get rest, or what would become of the thousands of bedridden ones? No; He invites you to come to Himself, a living, loving Person. And those whom He invites to come are those who are laboring to do the best that they can; such He would have know that He has labored in the fires of a holy God’s wrath against sin, and said, ere He left the awful scene, “It is finished;” then let the laboring ones trust His finished work and get rest. But He also invites to Himself the “heavy-laden,” with the guilty conscience of unforgiven sin; such He would have know that He bore our sins in His own body on the tree, and has put them away forever with His own precious blood, and He would fain give them rest from the intolerable load of a guilty, unpurged conscience.

What an unspeakable mercy, that in the midst of this scene of unrest, where there is naught on earth to rest upon, there is One who is inviting us in the most winning accents to come to Himself and have rest. Poor anxious one, He desires that you should say at His feet what many thousands there can truthfully say

“I heard the voice of Jesus say,

‘Come unto Me and rest;

Lay down, thou weary one, lay down

Thy head upon My breast.’

“I came to Jesus as I was,

Weary, and worn, and sad;

I found in Him a resting-place,

And He has made me glad.”

But it is “NOW” that Jesus invites.

In Revelation 22:17 it is the SPIRIT that invites: “And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” How exceedingly sweet and welcome it is to find that, just ere the canon of inspiration closes, the Holy Spirit joins in the cry of the Father and the Son, for sinners who are dead in trespasses and sins, to come and “take the water of life freely.” “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” (Isa. 55:1.) The Holy Spirit’s invitation is not only to the thirsty, but to “every one that thirsteth;” it is to whosoever, and whosoever means you, me, and anybody and everybody.

In Revelation 21:6, God says, “I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.” Here we have God as a Giver, giving to the thirsty, giving the water of life, and giving freely; but whilst the Holy Spirit invites and God gives, our responsibility is to “take;” and if we do not take we must perish everlastingly in the lake of fire.

We have now seen in the Scriptures that we have glanced at, that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, all join in inviting poor anxious souls to “COME,” “NOW,” “TODAY,” with the blessed assurance that whosoever comes will be sure to get present and everlasting cleansing, rest, and life.

Do you ask, “How am I to come?” I answer, “The moment you own that you are a hopeless, helpless, and hell-deserving sinner in the presence of God, at the feet of Jesus bowing to the testimony of the Holy Ghost in the Scriptures, that moment you have come, and it is yours to know that you are cleansed, and that you have rest and life.”

Now, the devil will allow you to believe all that we have said, only he will say that “tomorrow” is time enough to come. Tomorrow is death, the grave, the judgment, eternity, too late, when, instead of hearing God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost say “Come,” you must hear the awful word “Depart.”

Today Jesus is saying, “Come unto Me;” tomorrow He will say, “Depart from Me.” If He were to say, “Depart into the righteously-deserved lake of fire” it would be intolerable enough; but when He shall say, “Depart from Me,” how inconceivably awful it will be to have to depart from the One who once as a Saviour-God said, “Come unto Me,” but who will then as an inflexible Judge-God say, “Depart from Me!”

Today as a Saviour-God He is inviting you to Himself; tomorrow as a Judge-God He will be Commanding you from Himself!

But not only will He say tomorrow “Depart from Me,” but He will add the terrible words “ye cursed,” and you will go away out of His presence with the curse branded indelibly upon your forehead.

Today He desires your blessing; but if you refuse to be blest, tomorrow He must curse you.

But He has yet more words to add to the already dreadful sentence, “Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire,” and everlasting fire not prepared for us, but “prepared for the devil and his angels,” but to be shared with them by those who have deliberately preferred the lie of the devil to the truth of God.

Oh, come to Jesus now, today, and “eternal life” shall be your portion; but if you put it off until tomorrow “everlasting punishment” will be your portion.

Today you may have “rest” and “eternal life” in Christ; but if you refuse to accept His invitation, then the awful tomorrow will find you in “everlasting fire” and “everlasting punishment.”

Today Jesus is saying, “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

Tomorrow He will say, “Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

Which is it to be, “COME,” or “DEPART;” “Today,” or “TOMORROW”?

Glory, the Fountain, and the Lake of Fire

REV. 21:1-8.

WHO but God Himself could unfold to us the eternal state? And this He has done in the first eight verses of the twenty-first chapter of the Revelation. In them, with His own divine hand, He has drawn aside the curtain of the glory, and told us what there will not be there; He also draws aside the curtain of the lake of fire, and tells us who there will be there. But He omits not to point us with loving finger to the ever-playing Fountain, planted midway between glory and the lake of fire, to which He invites thirsty souls to come and drink, as the only possible way of escape from the dreary, fathomless depths of the lake of fire on the one hand, to the peerless heights of glory on the other hand.

In the twentieth chapter of the Revelation we have an account of the two resurrections: the first resurrection of the blessed and holy, which takes place at the beginning of the millennium or thousand years of Christ’s reign over the earth; and then the second and last resurrection of the dead—the unforgiven, unpardoned, unsaved, unrepentant, Godless, Christless, wicked dead, who died in their sins—which takes place at the end of the world, in front of the great white throne. Then after the seven thousand years of this world’s sad and tragical history have run their course, we are introduced, in Rev. 21:1-8, into God’s eternity.

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” (v. 4.)

Here we have glory as it were on the right hand, and the five things—tears, death, sorrow, crying, and pain, that this poor world is full of, have no place there.

“God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” What a blessed prospect for the weeping child of God; in a world where tears are always falling, and sighs are always rising, God is about to wipe away with His own hand of love all tears from the faces of His own everlastingly loved ones. There will be the eternal absence of tears in glory.

“And there shall be no more death.” Now ruthless, arbitrary death, enters unbidden and unwelcome our dwellings, and snatches away the darling objects of our love; and neither bolts, bars, locks, nor entreaties can keep him out. But there is a land where there are no graveyards, no cemeteries, where the undertaker and the gravedigger are seen no more in their harrowing occupations, and where the solemn death-knell is never heard. And that land is you lovely home in glory, where Jesus is, and which He has purchased for us with His own most precious blood. Death is not ceasing to be, it is not annihilation. Death is viewed in three ways in Scripture, but always as separation.

First, the instant Adam and Eve disobeyed God in partaking of the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, death was the penalty, as God had said, “In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” (Gen. 2:17.) Did they then cease to exist? Were they immediately annihilated? No. But they were at once separated in their whole moral being from communion and intercourse with their good Creator.

Secondly, there is physical death, or the death of the body, which is the separation of the spirit and the body. “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” (Eccles. 12:7.)

Thirdly, there will be the re-union of the spirit and the body of those who die unsaved, and in this state they will stand before the great white throne, and will be consigned from thence to the lake of fire which is the second death, which second death will be eternal separation from God, Christ, the Holy Ghost, the saved, the unfallen angels, and the eternal glory. (Rev. 20:13-15, 21:8.)

“Neither sorrow.” Now we are in the scene of a thousand sources of sorrow. But

“In glory above, where all is love,

There will be no more sorrow there.”

“Nor crying.” Now the jarring, discordant notes of murmuring, repining, complaining, wailing, and clamoring, fall upon the ear sadly enough, but none of these will ever have an existence in the glory.

“Neither shall there be any more pain.” No more pain of spirit or body; no more mental and no more physical pain. Sin has wrought such havoc with the human body that it is a very rare thing indeed to meet in one’s travels with a sound body. The first cry that issues from the newborn babe is a cry of pain, and the last cry of the dying one is a cry of pain.

But, blessed be God, there is a home, a place, a land, where there are none of the five sad things we have been looking at, and that is the eternal glory of God, where it is all joy and no tears, all life and no death, all happiness and no sorrow, all singing and no crying, all bliss and no pain forever and forever and forever. Will you be there?

“But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.” (Rev. 21:8.) In this truly awful verse we have eight classes of persons described, who, should they any of them die unforgiven, are doomed to spend eternity in the lake of fire.

The first on the list are “the fearful,” or cowardly. Oh, how many are wearing the white feather of cowardice! They would like to be saved, but they are afraid of being laughed at for belonging to Christ. Man, you would like to be saved, but you cannot endure the thought of being laughed at by your fellow-men. Young man, you too would like to be saved, but you dread being scoffed at by your fellow young men. Young woman, you have a desire to be saved, but you fear being talked about and made game of by your fellow young women. Poor cowards, and will you sell your souls to death, damnation, and the devil, for a curled lip, for a scoff, for a laugh? You may be amiable, kind, and generous, but if you are a coward, God has put your name first on the list of those who are bound for the lake of fire.

Then, second on the list are the “unbelieving.” Skeptic, rationalist, rejecter of Christ and divine revelation, this means you. “He that believeth not shall be damned,” are the words of Jesus Christ Himself. (Mark 16:16.) You may be moral, and yet a rejecter of Christ; you may be philanthropic, and yet a rejecter of Christ; you may be religious, and yet a rejecter of Christ. I do not ask you if you attend any “place of worship,” if you have been baptized, or if you are a member of a “religious society;” but, have you received Christ? You are either a receiver or a rejecter of Christ. And whatever people may think or say about you, or you think or say about yourself, if you have not yet received Christ as God’s gift of eternal life, you are one of the unbelieving, whose sad course ends in the lake of fire. You must spend an eternity with those who make themselves abominable, and with murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars.

But, says some one, “there are no idolaters in this land of Bibles, tracts, preaching, and Sunday schools.” Very likely, and I hope it is so, that there are none in Christendom who bow down to worship images of metal, stone, or wood. But do you not know that God says, “Covetousness, which is idolatry”? (Col. 3:5.)

What is the crying sin of the present moment? I am bold to say that it is covetousness. Oh, covetous man and covetous woman, thou art an idolater—a worshipper of gold, and God hath put the number seven on the list of those unhappy beings who, living and dying in their present state, will find themselves at last in the lake of fire. Last on the list are the “liars.” How common is the sin of lying, from the very uppermost to the very lowest strata of society.

Ladies and gentlemen tell lies, say they are not in when they don’t wish to be seen, or don’t wish to see those who call. Tradesmen tell lies, say their goods are what they well know they are not. Servants tell lies to hide their sins or to get their own way. Children tell lies to hide their guilty faults. Whatever may be your standing in society, and whatever your age, if you have come to the years of responsibility, and are in the habit of telling lies, you rank among the “all liars,” who “shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.” I would ask any moral, proper, noble-minded person, “How would you like to be shut up for twelve months with these eight classes of guilty sinners?” “Ah!” you say, “I would rather die ten thousand deaths than be subject to it.” But if you are unsaved, if you are, in short, a rejecter of Christ, you will have to spend an ETERNITY with them in the lake of fire!

And now having looked at the glory, and seen what there will not be there, and at the lake of fire, and seen who there will be there, let us turn to “the Fountain” which we find mentioned in the sixth verse of our scripture, and which God has placed between glory on our right hand, and the lake of fire on our left hand, and coming to which is the only possible way of securing the glory, and escaping the lake of fire.

“I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.” (Rev. 21:6.)

“O Christ, Thou art the fountain,

The deep, sweet well of love.”

Four things are stated in connection with this fountain. First, God is a giver. “I will give,” not I will sell for so much money, nor I will reward for so much done; no, “I will give.” God is the giving, not the exacting God. Poor sinner, He is not asking you to give Him something, but He desires to give you everything. Jesus said to the woman at the well, in John 4, “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldst have asked of Him, and He would have given, thee living water.” Do you know God as a giver?

Secondly, to whom He gives. It is to the thirsty. Thirsty, anxious soul, do you thirst for pardon? then God will give you pardon. Do you thirst for forgiveness? then God will give it to you. Do you thirst for eternal life? “The gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.” Do you thirst for the Holy Spirit? He will give you the Holy Spirit the moment you have believed in Christ to the salvation of your precious soul. Do you thirst for the glory? God will presently give you that with Christ eternally. The thirst that God creates God satisfies.

Thirdly, what God gives, it is of the fountain of the water of life. God gives the best He has to give. He gave Christ to die for us, and now, having raised Him from the dead, He gives Him to us as our life, our peace, our righteousness, our sanctification, our redemption, and our hope.

“Salvation in God’s Christ is found,

Cure for my grief and care;

A healing balm for every wound,

All, all I need is there.”

Lastly, how God gives. He gives FREELY. It is the style and fashion of God’s giving that adds significance to it, and makes it so welcome to us.

All this is the sovereign grace side of the giving; there is the other and b responsible side in Rev. 22:17: “And let him that is athirst COME. And whosoever will, let him TAKE the water of life FREELY.”

It is divinely true that God gives to the thirsty, but such are responsible to come and take; and it is also blessedly true that God gives freely; but He expects us to take as freely as He delights to give.

In these eight verses of our chapter, God having rolled up the past ages, brings us into His eternity. He shows us the eternal glory which is ours who believe in Christ, as the fruit of His redemption work. He has shown us the lake of fire which He has prepared for the devil and his angels, and which we have seen will be shared by eight classes of persons living and dying in their described state. He has also shown us the fountain, to which He invites us to come in this day of His long-suffering mercy. Oh, will you not come and drink?

In conclusion, I ask, Where will you spend ETERNITY? with whom, will you spend ETERNITY? and how will you spend ETERNITY?

"I Will Fear No Evil"

Two women sat talking together in a hamlet in the West of England, about the possibility of knowing the forgiveness of sins in this world. One of the two believed it to be possible; the other did not. The one who did believe it endeavored, upon the authority of God’s word, to show her friend that God had laid upon Christ, when He was upon the tree, the sins of all who believe in Him, and that He put them all away forever before He left the cross; that He is now in heaven without them, and therefore that they are all gone—gone forever from Christ, and forever from all who trust Him.

Did not JESUS say to the woman in Luke 7, “Thy sins are forgiven”? and does not the apostle John, in 1 John 2:12, say, “I write unto you, children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake”? and do not Eph. 1:7, “In whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace;” Col. 1:14, “In whom we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins;” and Rev. 1:5, “And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the Prince of the kings of the earth. Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood,” prove beyond doubt that all saved persons ought to know that their sins are forgiven them, and to praise God and the Lamb for it?

Annie W., a little girl of about twelve years of age, the daughter of the woman who believed, sat and listened to the conversation between her mother and her friend, and drank it all in. Anxious about her soul, she went upstairs, shut the door upon her, and kneeling down, asked God to forgive her all her sins, and to let her know it before she got off her knees. Sweetly came the words of Jesus to her soul, “Thy sins are forgiven,” which her young soul believed. She thanked Him for forgiveness. Annie’s mother was taken seriously ill, and for some months she remained in that state, and then it was that the young disciple waited lovingly and constantly upon her, and looked after the comfort of her father and the rest of the family. Love is unselfish, and is glad to seize opportunities of showing love to others, and especially at home in the family circle. But soon Annie herself was taken ill, with an illness from which she never recovered, and that made long awl sad work with the poor body. But as the lapidary’s wheel takes off the roughness of the apparently ugly stone, and discovers exquisite beauties in it, so did the trying sickness bring out what God had wrought in Annie’s soul, and show most clearly the beauties of the “divine nature” which had been implanted in her. Many Christians visited Annie, by whom they were always welcomed; for she loved to hear them speak of Him who had loved her, and given Himself for her, and who had told her that her sins were all forgiven.

Whilst Annie was lying ill a most gracious work of God’s Spirit broke out in her neighborhood, and many precious souls were truly brought to God; and it was a very real joy to Annie to know that some of the young people with whom she used to associate were among the number of the saved. But it was a still greater joy to her that she was nearing home. Jesus was becoming daily increasingly precious to her, and she had intense longings to see Him and be with Him.

The grace of God that had saved and kept her now shone brightly in her. She not only loved to hear about the blessed Lord, but she loved to speak about Him. When told she was dying, she smiled with joy at the thought of so soon being with the Lord, and repeated, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.”

Her mother said, “The valley is not dark, is it?”

“Oh, no it is bright—it is beautiful.”

“Yes; the Lord Jesus has been through the valley, and lit it up for you, my child.”

She said, “Yes; I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Come unto me and rest.’ I shall soon be at rest—at home. Jesus, blessed Jesus, thou art precious unto me.”

As her sight grew dim, so that she could not see her kind devoted mother, she said, with a sweet forgetfulness of self, “Don’t you be afraid, mother; I hope I shan’t frighten you;” and then, without a fear, murmur, or struggle, she sweetly fell asleep in Jesus. A few days after devout men carried her body to the grave, and around it we spoke of the positive, comparative, and superlative blessedness of being a Christian. The positive blessedness—living Christ (Phil. 1:21); the comparative—to depart and be with Christ (Phil. 1:23); the superlative—for Christ to come again, raise the bodies of all who sleep in Him, change the bodies of all who live in Him, and take all away in the chariot of the clouds to meet Him in the air, “and so shall we ever be with the Lord.” (1 Thess. 4:15-18.) And then, having sung a hymn of praise, we left the body of Annie in the village burial ground, in sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection.

“BE YE ALSO READY.” Are you ready, dear reader? Oh, where will you spend ETERNITY? Will it be spent with Jesus, His saints and angels, in the peerless heights of everlasting glory, or with the lost in the fathomless depths of the lake of fire? If you are not saved, I beseech you no longer to refuse the love of God. Reject not the Christ of God! Resist not the testimony of the Spirit of God, but at once, where you are, just as you are, and just now, believe in God, who delivered Christ “for our offenses,” and raised Him again “for our justification,” and you will be saved, and ready for death or Christ’s second coming.

"Ten Minutes to Three."

WHEN I was a boy I read and heard of little boys being converted, and then soon afterward dying. I did not like to hear or read of children being converted, lest I should find out that they had died; and I was quite afraid of being converted myself, lest I should die also. Now, I do not doubt many of my dear young readers have the same feelings that I once had about being saved while they are young; but God had His own way with me, and was pleased to save me when I was young, and that is many years ago, and since then I have been trying, in my poor way, to the best of my ability, by the grace of God, to live, serve, and please Him, who gave His dear Son to die for me on the cross.

So you see, my dear young friends, all who are converted young do not die immediately afterward. But I will now tell you of a dear youth who was converted at twelve years of age.

I was asked to address a Sunday school at C—, in Derbyshire, three Sunday afternoons following each other. There were about four hundred scholars in the school.

The first Sunday afternoon, whilst I was speaking about Jesus dying and shedding His PRECIOUS BLOOD to wash away the sins of little boys and girls, the blessed Spirit of God made many of my young hearers very anxious to be washed from all their sins in the blood of the Lamb. Many professed to be saved that afternoon, and also the two Sunday afternoons following. My young friend was there the first time I addressed the children. He had a dear praying father and mother; but he was not saved, and he did not want to be, because he thought that if he were, he would have to give up all his little pleasures, amusements, and companions, and that he would become very miserable, and so he went away, determined that he would not come to Jesus. Nevertheless, the Spirit of God was dealing with him, and made him very unhappy, and caused him to see and feel that there is no real happiness out of Christ.

The second Sunday afternoon, W— R— was there again when the address was given, and though many were in tears, he appeared to be quite unmoved; but he was not really so, only he was listening to the wicked, lying suggestions of Satan, and so he spent a second week rejecting Christ; and all who reject Him must be very unhappy, whilst all who accept Him are very happy-they only are ready for His second coming, or for death.

Well, the third afternoon arrived for me to give my last address to the dear young people, and W— R— was there again; and whilst I was speaking of the love of God, the preciousness of the blood of Jesus, the hatefulness of sin, the blessedness of being saved, and the awfulness of living and dying without Christ, W— R— as he told me afterward, felt the burden of his sin to be so heavy that it seemed as if it would press him right through the floor into hell. In his distress he cried to Jesus to remove the terrible burden of unforgiven sin, and he simply looked in faith to Jesus where he was kneeling, and in a moment, he said, the burden was removed, his soul found rest, and his heart was filled with joy; and looking up, his eyes met the clock, and it wanted exactly “ten minutes to three.” Yes, at “ten minutes to three,” on the second Sunday afternoon in March, 1863, God gave W— R— to know that his sins were all forgiven, his soul was saved, and he there and then found happiness in Christ.

It is now many years since God saved W— R—, and he is living still, a very consistent, godly young man, working for the blessed Lord, who loved him and gave Himself for Him, and he has been used to bring many precious souls to Jesus among the young and the old, and he has long known that

“Search the whole creation round,

Happiness out of Christ can ne’er be found.”

And now, my dear young friends, will you not come at once by faith to Jesus, and find rest in Him? Look at once to Him by faith, and be saved forever. Receive Him at once as God’s gift of eternal life. Give the blessed Lord the sunrise, meridian, and sunset of your days, and then, living or dying, you are the Lord’s, and ready for His second coming or death; and should He spare your life, and leave you in this poor world, you will be able by His grace to live for Him and work for Him.

What a Contrast!

WHAT an immense difference there is between the position, portion, and prospect of a saint and a sinner.

A saint is one who is separated to God by the Spirit of God and the precious blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.

A saint is a person who has got the present and eternal forgiveness of all sins; has everlasting life in the Son of God; is saved forever; is in-dwelt by the Holy Spirit; is “accepted in the Beloved;” is complete in Christ; is a member of Christ’s body, of His flesh, and of His bones; and is made meet to be a partaker of the inheritance of the saints in light.

In short, a saint is one who has judgment behind him; hell shut under his feet; heaven open over his head; everlasting glory full in front of him; there is only a spider’s web between him and the glory; by faith he can see Jesus in glory; and he only waits for Jesus to rise up, put His feet upon the spider’s web, and then he and Jesus will be wrapped in each other’s embrace forever.

“He and I in that bright glory One deep joy shall share;

Mine, that I am ever with Him, His, that I am there.”

But a sinner is one who loves his sins and his pleasures in preference to the Savior and pardon; he is unforgiven, unpardoned, and unsaved; he is a refuser of the love of God, a rejecter of the Christ of God, a resister of the Spirit of God, and a deliberate destroyer of his own precious and immortal soul.

In short, a sinner is one who has glory behind his back; “eternal judgment” staring him in the face; heaven is closed over his head, and hell is open in front of him; he is a child of wrath on his road to the lake of fire, and ready for it.

Which are you, a saint or a sinner?

State and Actions

MY DEAR READER, Will you allow me to say an earnest word to you about your state and your actions? The Psalmist, speaking by the Spirit, says, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps. 51:5); and Paul, speaking by the same Holy Spirit, says, “And were by nature children of wrath.” (Ephes. 2:3.) These verses prove beyond doubt that we are all born lost: from the Queen upon her throne to the meanest peasant in his hut; from the philosopher to the clown; from the millionaire to the penniless pauper; from the upper ten thousand of Belgravia to the dregs of society at Blackwall. Yes, whether it be the monarch in his palace, the monk in his cloister, or the mendicant in the streets, “there is no difference” (Rom. 3:22); all are lost. We have not to go to hell to be lost; WE ARE BORN LOST. God in His mercy give you each to see it, own it, and to accept His remedy! “For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was LOST.” (Luke 19:10.)

“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6.)

“For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was LOST, and is found. And they began to be merry.” (Luke 15:24.)

“But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are LOST: in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” (2 Cor. 4:3, 4.) These verses show our state.

And now a word about your sinful acts. Perhaps you think that only great sinners go to hell. Will you allow me to ask how many sins Adam committed before God drove him out of Paradise? One! only one! If God was so holy that He could not have Adam in the earthly Paradise with one sin, do you think He will let you into the heavenly Paradise if you have committed one sin? I do not charge you with being a great sinner, but I know you have been guilty of one sin at least; for God says, “All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” (Rom. 3:23.)

Now, as sure as God is holy, one sin, not washed away in the blood of Jesus, will keep you out of heaven just as much as one million of sins. It required the death and blood-shedding of the Lord Jesus to put away one sin, just as much as to put away one million of sins, and “the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanseth us from all sin.” (1 John 1:7.) Tears, prayers, and good works will not put away sins; there is no blood in these things.

Nothing you have done, or are doing, or ever will be able to do, will avail before God to put away your sins. “Faith in His blood” (Rom. 3:25) will alone put you in immediate and everlasting possession of the forgiveness of all your sins. Now what will you do? Will you trust Him who came “to seek and to save the lost,” and have “faith in His blood” for the full remission of your sins? or will you go on refusing the love of God, rejecting the Christ of God, resisting the Spirit of God, and spurning the precious blood of Jesus the Son of God? Remember, if you die in your sins you will be put into your coffin in them, you will be buried and raised in them, you will stand before the great white throne in them, you will then have them fastened upon you, and have them as your everlasting companions in the lake of fire.

“Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Cor. 6:2.) “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” (Acts 16:31.)

May the salvation of God be yours, dear reader, prays yours affectionately in the Lord.

"The Quaint Old Picture."

HE was a High Church clergyman, devoted to church architecture, music, and ritual; visited his parishioners weekly; did his utmost to get them to church, and to make good Churchmen of them.

He says, “I remember that my thoughts dwelt very much on forgiveness and salvation, but I preached that these were to be had in and by the Church, which was as the ark in which Noah was saved... and all who were not inside were lost.... I had no idea that I was lost now. Far from that; I thought I was as safe as the Church herself, and that the gates of hell could not prevail against me.”

But all the time he was a stranger to conversion, forgiveness, salvation, and the new birth. Often he said to himself, “What can this conversion be?” and God graciously showed him through his own servant. I give the account in his own words: “Soon after my gardener, a good Churchman, and duly despised by his neighbors for attaching himself to me and my teaching, fell seriously ill.

“I sent him at once to the doctor, who pronounced him to be in a miner’s consumption, and gave no hope of his recovery. No sooner did he realize his position, and see eternity before him, than all the Church teaching I had given him failed to console or satisfy, and his heart sank within him at the near prospect of death. In his distress of mind he did not send for me to come and pray with. him, but actually sent for a converted man, who lived in the next row of cottages. This man, instead of building him up as I had done, went to work in the opposite direction—to break him down. That was to show my servant he was a lost sinner, and needed to come to Jesus just as he was for pardon and salvation. He was brought under deep conviction of sin, and eventually found peace through the precious blood of Jesus.

“Immediately it spread all over the parish that ‘the parson’s servant was converted.’ The news soon reached me, but, instead of giving joy, brought the most bitter disappointment to my heart. Such was the profound ignorance I was in.

“Still I went on, hoping against hope, ‘building from the top’ without any foundation, teaching people to live before they were born.

“God was speaking to me all this time about the Good Shepherd who gave His life for me; but I did not hear Him, nor suspect that I was lost.

“In those days, when building my new church and talking about the tower and spire we were going to erect, an elderly Christian lady, who was sitting in her wheelchair, calmly listening to our conversation, said, ‘Will you begin to build your spire from the top?’ It was a strange question; but she evidently meant something, and looked for an answer. I gave it, saying, ‘No, madam, not from the top, but from the foundation.’ She replied, ‘That is right! that is right!’ and went on with her knitting.

“This question was not asked in jest or in ignorance; it was like a riddle. What did she mean? In a few years this lady passed away, but her enigmatic words remained. No doubt she thought to herself that I was beginning at the wrong end, while I went on talking of the choir, organ, happy worship, and all the things we were going to attempt in the new church; that I was aiming at sanctification without justification, intending to teach people to be holy before they were saved and pardoned. This is exactly what I was doing. I had planted the boards of my tabernacle of worship, not in silver sockets (the silver of which had been paid for redemption), but in the sand of the wilderness. In other words, I was teaching people to worship God, who is a Spirit, not for love of Him who gave His Son to die for them, but in the fervor and enthusiasm of human nature. My superstructure was built on sand, and hence the continual disappointment.... No wonder that my life was a failure, and my labors ineffectual, inasmuch as my efforts were not put forth in faith. My work was not done as a thank offering, but rather as a meritorious effort to obtain favor with God.”

And is not this where thousands are today in highly-privileged and responsible Christendom? They have a name to live, but they are dead, and all their works are “dead works,” from which they need cleansing by “the blood of Christ” to enable them “to serve the living God.” (Heb. 9:14.)

At this point the subject of my narrative went on a visit to a truly saved and godly clergyman, who told him plainly he was “not converted,” and showed him he was not from the Scriptures, and then prayed for him. “What he prayed for,” he says, “I do not know. I was completely overcome, and melted to tears. I sat down on the ground, sobbing, while he shouted aloud, praising God.”

A few days after this the subject of our paper was truly converted to God whilst preaching from the blessed words, “What think ye of Christ?” (Matt. 22:42.)

The news spread in all directions that “the parson was converted,” and that by his own sermon, in his own pulpit. The church would not hold the crowds who came in the evening. He says, “I cannot exactly remember what I preached about on that occasion, but one thing I said was, ‘That if I had died last week I should have been lost forever.’ I felt it was true. So clear and vivid was the conviction through which I had passed, and so distinct was the light into which the Lord had brought me, that I knew and was sure that He had ‘brought me up out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and put a new song into my mouth.’ (Ps. 40). He had ‘quickened’ rue who was before ‘dead in trespasses and sins.’” (Eph. 2:1.)

I now turn to the “quaint old picture” and the inferences that the subject of this paper drew from it, which I will give in his own words: “ ... As I was sitting by the fire one wet after. noon, my eyes fell on a little colored picture or the mantelpiece, which had been the companion of my journeys.... It was a quaint medieval illustration of Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness, copied from a valuable manuscript. . . in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford.

“As I looked at the engraving before me I began to suspect for the first time that there was a design in the arrangement of the figures, and that it was really intended to convey some particular teaching. I took it in my hand and studied it, when I observed that the cross or pole on which the serpent was elevated stood in the center, dividing two set, of characters; and that there were serpents on one side and none on the other.

“Behind the figure of Moses is a man standing, with his arms crossed on his breast, looking at the brazen serpent. He has evidently obtained life and healing by a look. On the other side, I observed that there were four kinds of persons represented, who were not doing as this healed one did to obtain deliverance.

“First, there is one who is kneeling in front of the cross, but he is looking towards Moses, not at the serpent, and apparently confessing to him as if he were a priest.

“Next behind him is one lying on his back, as if he was perfectly safe, though he is evidently in the midst of danger; for a serpent may be seen at his ear, possibly whispering, ‘Peace, peace, when there is no peace.’

“Still further back from the cross there is a man with a sad face doing a work of mercy, binding up the wounds of a fellow-sufferer, and little suspecting that he himself is involved in the same danger.

“Behind them all, on the background, is a valiant man, who is doing battle with the serpents, which may be seen rising against him in unabating persistency.

“I observed that none of these men were looking at the brazen serpent, as they were commanded to a. I cannot describe how excited and interested became; for I saw in this illustration a picture of my own life. Here was the way of salvation clearly set forth, and four ways which are not the way of salvation, all of which I had tried and found unavailing. This was the silent but speaking testimony of some unknown denizen of a cloister; who lived in the beginning of the fifteenth century, the days of ignorance and superstition. But notwithstanding this darkness, he was brought out into the marvelous light of the gospel, and has left this interesting record of his experience.

“Like him, I also had fought with serpents; for I began in my own strength to combat with sin, end strove by my own resolutions to overcome. From this I went on to do good works, and works of mercy, in the vain hope of thus obtaining the same for myself. Then I relied in the Church for salvation, as God’s appointed ark of safety; but not feeling secure, I took another step beyond, and sought forgiveness through the power of the priest. This I found was as ineffectual as all my previous efforts. At last I was brought (by the Spirit of God) as a wounded and dying sinner to look at the crucified One. Then... I found pardon and peace. Ever since it has been my joy and privilege (like Moses pointing to the serpent) to cry, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world’ (John 1:29); ‘I am determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified;’ that is, to tell only of the person and office of Jesus Christ our Lord.”

May God use this paper to show any who are trusting to the Church, its priests, or its sacraments, or their own doings for salvation, that it is not to be found in these things, but in Christ’s person alone; as God has said, “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12.) “SALVATION IS OF THE LORD.” (Jonah 2:9.)

"I Have Been Making a Savior of My Good Works."

IT was in a large iron room in the southwest of London that I first saw, in front of a crowded audience, an aged woman, between ninety and one hundred years of age. She lived at a considerable distance from the iron room, and was seen one day sitting outside her little house, enjoying the warm sun and refreshing air of an early spring afternoon.

The young person who saw her sitting outside her cottage invited her to come to some special gospel meetings, which were then being held in the iron room. My aged friend told her that she was too old and too feeble to walk so far, when my young friend, though possessed but of very limited means, immediately offered to pay the expenses of a cab fare there and back again, which she did the next and two following Lord’s-day evenings.

I did not speak to her myself until the third time of her coming to the meetings. I had been preaching that evening from the last words of Jesus on the cross before He died, which were, “IT IS FINISHED.” She remained behind with some others after the preaching was over, to have personal conversation with me about her soul. I found her in deep distress about her many years of sin, though she had led a very moral life. She told me that she had been a nurse; but that whenever she had an opportunity she went to “church;” that she was kind to her neighbors, paid her debts, did not owe anybody anything, read her Bible, and said her prayers. “But,” she added, “God has undeceived me, and shown me I have been all wrong all these years, and that instead of accepting JESUS for my Savior, I have been making a Savior of my good works. Oh, pray for me!”

Seeing that she was looking from herself and her doings to me and my prayers, I replied, “No; I shall not pray for you, nor ask you to pray for yourself. JESUS said, ‘It is finished,’ and His finished work is so perfect that it does not need the weight of either your prayers or mine. You must therefore trust His finished work for salvation, or neglect it, and be damned forever.”

God at once caused her to see the force and truth of what I had just spoken, and removed her last false prop from under her, when, with all the simplicity of a little, helpless child, she trusted the Person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ, and cried out with a loud voice, “Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy name.”

She lived some four or five years after this, and was frequently visited by aged and experienced, and by young, earnest Christians, and by myself, and we none of us ever doubted, but had many proofs of the genuineness and reality of the work of God in her soul. What hath God wrought! To Him be all the praise.

And now, should this little narrative meet the eyes of any who are making a Savior of their good works, be warned by it to look away at once to Him who did all the work of the sinner’s salvation on the cross. Are you, like some of old, saying, “What shall we do that we might work the works of God?” Then listen, and bow to the answer, “Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent.” (John 6:28, 29.) “Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.” (Rom. 4:4, 5.) If ever you are saved at all, it must be without your works, so that God may be able to say of you, “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Eph. 2:8, 9.) Works will flow fast enough after we are really saved by grace, and know it; but all the way home to glory we shall be led adoringly and gladly to say, “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; which He shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior; that being justified by His grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” (Titus 3:5-7.)

"You Have Two Strings to Your Bow Whilst I Have Only One to Mine."

THE subject of this paper lived in London, where I called upon him one Lord’s-day afternoon to speak to him about JESUS, the Savior of sinners, and his immortal soul’s eternal welfare.

He was ninety-seven years of age, wore no glasses, and had all his faculties in a remarkable degree, and looked the very picture of health!

After asking me to be seated, he inquired about the object of my visit, as I was a perfect stranger to him. I at once informed him that I had come to read the word of God to him, to speak to him about God, about Christ, and His precious BLOOD. about his soul and ETERNITY.

He looked steadfastly at me, and said in the most determined manner that I might save my breath and time, as he did not believe in anything of the sort, and was not in the slightest troubled about the future.

“I am ninety-seven years of age,” he said, “and no thanks to anybody but myself. I have lived a most careful and abstemious life, and I mean to live three more years, until I am a hundred years old, and then I think I shall have seen and had enough of life, and shall quietly lay myself down and die.”

“It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment,” I rejoined.

“All fudge and nonsense,” he said; “when a man is dead he is done with, there is no hereafter for him at all;” and then for the space of nearly an hour he quoted to me the most blasphemous passages from his favorite infidel authors.

It was difficult to keep one’s seat, and my blood seemed to curdle in my veins as I listened unwillingly to his awful conversation, and looked at him and thought of his nearness to eternity, and the dread future that awaited him if he died as he was; but I felt God had sent me to him with a message from Himself, and I must bide my opportunity to deliver it.

I told him that I had listened to him for nearly an hour, and now he must listen to me for ten minutes. I saw that to reason with the old man would be useless, and a waste of precious time, and I had and have no faith in it either, so I began quoting the Scriptures which I knew were the sword of the Spirit, such as “The FOOL hath said in his heart, There is no God.” (Ps. 53:1.)

“The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.” (Ps. 9:17.)

“He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” (Mark 16:16.)

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16.)

“He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.” (John 3:36.)

“And the BLOOD of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.” (1 John 1:7.)

I then fell on my knees, and asked God to bless His word just quoted to the old man, to open his eyes to his danger, to deliver his precious soul from the diabolical grip of the fiend of hell, and let me meet him as a brand plucked from the burning, and washed from all his sins in the blood of the Lamb in heaven.

As I rose from my knees our eyes met, full of tears, and as I took my leave of him he grasped my hand, and said, “If there is a heaven I hope I shall meet you there; if you are wrong and I am right, you are as right as I am; but, oh, if you are right and I am wrong, I am wrong indeed. You have two strings to your bow, whilst I have only one to mine.”

I was unable to call again until that day fortnight, when I found myself again knocking at his door. His wife, who was a Christian woman, answered my knock, and to my first question, “How is your husband?” bade me follow her, which I did, into the old man’s bedroom, and there the first object that met my gaze was the mortal remains of her husband!

She said he complained of a spot on one of his feet giving him pain, which rapidly grew worse, until inflammation set in, followed by mortification, which closed his long career on earth. Thus had God summarily cut the impious old boaster down, who had said he would live three years more in this world.

His wife informed me that the doctor who attended him in his last brief illness was also an infidel, that he urged the old man to stick to his infidel opinions, and to die like a brick; but that her husband found no comfort from his miserable, guilty adviser. And no wonder; what had he to stick to in infidelity? No God, no Christ, no Holy Spirit, no precious blood, no hereafter! What was there in the baseless myth of infidelity—the thin, cold shadow of a fool’s heart—to stick to?

I asked the poor weeping wife to tell me her husband’s last words. She said, “He took my hand in his, and looking earnestly at me, he said, as loud as his remaining bit of strength would allow him, ‘Wife, I believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, heaven and hell,’ and then breathed his last.”

Dark, cold infidelity hath nothing to cheer its deluded votaries in the hour of death. Christianity hath everything to cheer its happy followers in sickness and in health, in poverty and plenty, in life and in death, in time and in eternity. There is everything to cheer and nothing to chill in Christianity. “What think ye of Christ?”

"Ye May Know."

I WAS preaching some time since, in a watering-place in the West of England, from the words, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life” (John 5:24), when I sought to impress upon my hearers that all who had really heard the life-giving words of the Son of God, and had believed God, who sent His Son to put away our sins by the sacrifice of Himself, were in the present possession of everlasting life; that it was not left to them or to me to say that they had it, for Christ Himself. said that; but what they had to do was to believe that they had everlasting life, because Christ said so.

An earnest but questioning person, sitting at the extreme edge of the congregation, said, loud enough to be heard by those sitting alongside, “Yes, Christ did say ‘hath everlasting life;’ but He did not say that we were to know that we had it.” I did not know what thoughts were passing through the minds, or what words were dropping from the lips of any in my audience, but at the moment the words that I have just given fell from the lips of the one who uttered them, I was led of the Holy Ghost, who was personally present in the meeting, and who knew all that was going on in it, to turn to 1 John 5:13, where the following strikingly blessed words occur: “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that YE MAY KNOW that ye have eternal life.” And I was informed by the one who heard the words spoken that the questioner was confounded and silenced by the force and clearness of the word of God.

When I turn to the Scriptures, where the words “known,” “knowest,” “knoweth,” “knowing,” “knowledge,” and “known,” occur altogether above one thousand times, as any reader of the Holy Scriptures may see for himself who will take the trouble to look them out as they are given in Cruden’s Concordance, I am perfectly amazed at the daring boldness of the man who can write or say that it is impossible for any one to know that they have eternal life or the forgiveness of sins in this world.

What would be the state of society if God, who has instituted and given the relationships of husband and wife, parent and child, had at the same time prevented our knowledge and enjoyment of those relationships? Imagine wives not knowing their own husbands! husbands not knowing their own wives! parents not knowing their own children! and children not knowing their own parents! Could you conceive of anything more truly sad and sorrowful, and as far removed as possible from all intelligent enjoyment of the relationships of life, morally and socially? To say nothing of how unworthy such a state of society would be of Him who is the author of our natural relationships! And where would be the goodness and love of God in forgiving me, saving me, giving me eternal life, making me His child, putting His Holy Spirit in me, making me one with Christ, and fitting me for the glory, and then preventing my having, or not giving me, the knowledge and enjoyment of all these divine and eternal blessings? Such teaching is a slur upon a kind, good, and loving God, and is totally opposed to the word of God.

But I will turn to a few scriptures which are infinitely preferable to all our words and illustrations. “And He said unto them, Unto you it is given TO KNOW the mystery of the kingdom of God but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables.” (Mark 4:11.) Are you within the favored circle of His own blood-bought and blood-washed ones to whom “it is given to know”? or are you “without,” and therefore in darkness and uncertainty?

The blind man in John 9:25, whose eyes Christ opened, said, “One thing I KNOW, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.”

If you heard anyone saying that it was impossible to distinguish colors, you would be justified in immediately concluding that such an one was color-blind. So when I hear persona saying that nobody can know they are forgiven and saved in this world, I cannot avoid coming to the conclusion that such are not forgiven or saved themselves, Some have the hardihood to say that Paid the apostle did not know that he was saved. I find him speaking very differently himself in 2 Tim. 1:12, where he says, “For I KNOW whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day.” Again, in 2 Cor. 5:1, where he associates others with himself, he says, “For WE KNOW that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” And in 1 Cor. 2:12 he traces this wonderful knowledge up to its source: “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that WE MIGHT KNOW the things that are freely given to us of God.” There is no uncertainty in these scriptures, where we have heard Paul saying by the Holy Ghost What was true of himself, and equally true of all saved persons. And remember, the scriptures cannot be broken, and cannot contradict themselves.

If I turn to the apostle Peter’s writings, I find him speaking in the same strain. “Forasmuch as YE KNOW that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold.... but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a Lamb without blemish and without spot.” (1 Peter 1:18, 19.)

Now, let us listen to what the apostle John has to say upon this subject of assurance. “But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby KNOW WE that we are in Him.” (1 John 2:5.) And again, in 3:2: “Beloved, NOW are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but WE KNOW that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is.” “And YE KNOW that He was manifested to take away our sins.” (v. 5.) “WE KNOW that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren....” (v. 14.) “Hereby KNOW WE that we dwell in Him, and He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit.” “And we have KNOWN and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (4:13, 16.) “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that YE MAY KNOW that ye have eternal life.” And WE KNOW that we are of God.... And WE KNOW that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that WE MAY KNOW Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.” (v. 13, 19, 20.)

What can we say, in the face of such an overwhelming and unanswerable body of Scripture proof as to the doctrine of assurance, but what the blessed Lord Himself says in John 7:17: “If any man will do His will, HE SHALL KNOW of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself”?

And yet once again Christ says, speaking prophetically of the days in which we are living, “At that day” (the day of the Holy Ghost being given, which was ten days after Christ’s ascension) “YE SHALL KNOW that I am in my Father, and ye in Me, and I in you.” (John 14:20.) I ask in all solemnity, Who am I to believe? Christ, who says that the characteristic of Christianity is, that “ye shall know,” or those who teach it is impossible to know, and presumption to say that we do know? What is the object of “the tender mercy of our God whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,” if it be not “to give KNOWLEDGE of salvation unto His people by the remission of their sins”? (Luke 1:77, 78.)

Poor, anxious, troubled soul, drop all your reasonings and questionings; flee from the dreary regions of frames, fears, feelings, and experiences which you are now putting in the place of simple faith. Cease from those who teach you cannot know that you are saved, and take God at His word, for He says “YE MAY KNOW.”

"The Holy Scriptures."

2 Cor. 3:15-17.

I CANNOT know God as Father apart from Christ (John 1:18; Matt. 11:27); I can know nothing of Christ apart from “the Holy Scriptures” (Luke 24:27; John 5:39); and I cannot understand the deep spiritual meaning of “the Holy Scriptures” apart from the teaching of the Holy Spirit. (John 14:26, 16:13.) Blessed mystery of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit revealed to faith, for eternal life and comfort, in “the Holy Scriptures.”

Prayer should ever accompany the study of the word of God, that the Holy Spirit might produce a full and right understanding of its meaning, and an acceptable ministry of it to others. Peter says, “We will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word.” (Acts 6:4.) Paul says to Timothy, “Give attendance to reading.” (1 Tim. 4:13.) And when Paul is taking his leave of the saints at Ephesus, to whom does he commend them? To the elders? No! “I commend you to God, and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up.” (Acts 20:32.)

And surely, beloved, nothing but “God and the word of His grace” can keep us steady in these perilous times, and indeed at any time. In the study of Scripture we must be careful never to disconnect it from God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To do so is to find ourselves in the region of “the letter” which “killeth.”

At this point I would like to put a question to my young brethren and sisters in Christ. How do you read the Holy Scriptures—the word of God? The answer that I almost invariably get to such a question is, “Oh, I have no rule; sometimes I read in one part, and sometimes in another, and sometimes just where it opens in my hand!” If some dearly-loved one wrote you a long letter, how you read it? You know that you would begin at the beginning, and read carefully through to the end; otherwise you would fail to see the connection of its parts. How are you treating that blessed volume of inspired letters, that our God and Father has so graciously given us, known as “the Holy Scriptures,” the word of God? Is it not, to say the least, a dishonor to the Holy Author of those letters, and a shame to ourselves, that we should be in such lamentable ignorance of their contents and connection? It required divine illumination to write “the Holy Scriptures,” and it requires divine illumination to understand them, or to read them intelligently; thus it becomes us when we approach the word of God to look up in felt need and dependence, saying, “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy word,” and He will open our understanding to understand “the Scriptures.” (Luke 24:45).

I would be far from putting any saved soul under bondage, but I would affectionately suggest the orderly reading of the word of God. If three chapters of the Old Testament and one of the New Testament were read every day, the contents of the divinely inspired volume would be compassed in the course of a year. The Lord preserve us from the terrible looseness of the day in which we are living. “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby.” (1 Peter 2:2).

But to return to the Scripture at the head of this paper; in it we have presented to us “a child” and “the man of God,” and the Holy Scriptures are said to be sufficient to make “a child” wise unto salvation, and for the throughly furnishing “the man of God.” How important, then, to be diligent in a duty which has been too much neglected by us—the careful instructing of children in “the Holy Scriptures.”

Whether I am a man or a child, I can have no certain and true knowledge of the Savior or His salvation apart from the Scriptures. I am not saved by faith in the Scriptures. To say or think such a thing would be giving the Scriptures the place of the Savior. The Holy Spirit convinces a sinner of sin by the Scriptures, and then from the same blessed source He reveals the Savior, and gives that faith in Him who alone saves the soul forever. Thankful as we ought to be, and most surely are, for simple gospel tracts for children, we must be very careful never to allow them to supplant the Holy Scriptures, which the Holy Spirit most plainly teaches are able to make even “a child” wise unto salvation. But more: all Scripture being God-inspired, “is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.” If a man, professedly a teacher, bring a doctrine, a reproof, an instruction, and is unable to produce Scripture for them, we should be warranted in rejecting such teaching without hesitation. It will not do to infer, deduce, and conclude. We cannot build a doctrine upon inferences, deductions, or conclusions. No; nothing less will do, and nothing more is needed, than “the Holy Scriptures.” Oh, beloved, there is sad departure from the simple Scriptures! Beware how you receive anything that is not directly from the word of God. If you accept a doctrine founded only upon inferences, deductions, and conclusions, your premises are upon a wrong foundation, and God alone knows where they may land you.

There is much religious literature abroad in our day, and it is being largely read; but if these things take us from the word of God, the only source of light, truth, and blessing, in that same measure they do our souls a very serious wrong. If “pamphlets” and “notes” do not lead me to an increased appreciation of the word of God, then, instead of benefiting me, they are doing me mischief. Why is it that so many dear children of God are being tossed about by the many and false doctrines of the day? Simply because they do not know the Scriptures, are not established in them. Job could say, “I have esteemed the words of His mouth more than my necessary food.” (Job 23:12.) Is it so with us, beloved? I am sadly afraid that we care much more for our necessary food, than we do for the words of His mouth. Jeremiah could say, “Thy words were found, and I did eat them: and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart.” (Jer. 15:16.)

“Every word of God is pure.” (Prov. 30:5.) “For thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name.” (Ps. 138:2.) It is by “the word” that we are born again.” (John 3:5; James 1:18; 1 Peter 1:23.) It is by the Word that we are made clean and are kept clean. (John 15:3; Eph. 5:26.) The feeble Philadelphians were commended because they had kept His word. (Rev. 3:8.) The noble Bereans, because “they received the Word with all readiness of mind, and searched the Scriptures daily.” (Acts 17:11, 12.) And the blessed Lord Himself said that “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4); and He Himself, when tempted of the devil in the wilderness, used this “sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,” against the tempter, and with an “IT IS WRITTEN,” thrice repeated, He overcame and worsted the enemy of God and man. (Matt. 4:4, 7, 10.)

The blessed Lord never in a single instance of His blessed, holy, wondrous life down here, took His stand upon the baseless foundation of inferences, deductions, or conclusions, but ever upon the sure, infallible, unalterable, and eternal word of His God and Father, and He is our pattern; He has left us an example that we should follow in His steps, and he that says he abides in Him ought himself also so to walk, even as He walked. (1 Peter 2:21; 1 John 2:6.)

The good and gracious God bring us back to Himself and His word, give it its proper place in our hearts, lives, worship, and service, make us very jealous for it, and cause us to remember that it is God-inspired to make even “a child” wise unto salvation, as well as for the thoroughly furnishing “the man of God.”

MISSING PAGES 150-151

is blessed to know that they cannot touch or shake God’s foundation. And whilst thousands of poor deceived souls are resting upon the shifting sand of ordinances and religious performances, it becomes us to see to it that we are on the foundation that nothing can prevail against. Jehovah Jesus says, “Thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation.” (Isa. 28:16.) Are you on this only “sure foundation”? Do you answer, “I wish that I knew I was”? Then listen to the words of Jesus: “Whosoever cometh to Me, and heareth, My sayings, and doeth, them, I will show you to whom he is like: he is like a man which built an house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock.” (Luke 6:47-49.) Have you come to Jesus? Have you heard His words? and are you doing them? If you can answer these questions in the affirmative, then you can surely sing

“On Christ the solid Rock I stand,

All other ground is sinking sand.”

“We are sure that the judgment of God is according to truth.” (Rom. 2:2.) Are you quite sure of this? Can you look back to the cross and see Jesus suffering untold agonies, and hear Him cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1), as He groans and expires beneath the weight of a holy God’s judgment against sin, and say, “I am sure that the judgment of God is according to truth”? If you do not bow to the judgment of God against sin at the cross, you will have to bear it in your own person throughout eternity in the everlasting flames of the lake of fire, when you will be obliged to own “that the judgment of God is according to truth.” Do it now, before it is too late.

“Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast.” (Heb. 6:19.) How many thousands there are who say, in this day of earnest personal dealing with precious souls, when asked the important question, “Are you saved?” “I hope so.” Have you got Christ? for Paul says, “Lord Jesus Christ, our hope” (1 Tim. 1:1); and He being “our hope,” if you lack Him you most certainly have no hope.

When a captain of a ship gives orders to his men to drop anchor, what would he think of them if they dropped it in the hull of the vessel? And yet this is just what many simple souls are doing—dropping their anchor into their own hearts: no wonder they are all adrift. Where is Christ? He is at the right hand of God. Accept Christ for your hope, and then you will be in Christ, anchored to the very throne of God, and you will know that your anchor, being outside of yourself, is “both sure and steadfast,” and you will be able to say, “I have Christ; what want I more?”

“Thy testimonies are very sure.” (Ps. 93:5.) Yes, they are not only sure but “very sure,” whether He speaks about man’s condition by nature as being lost and guilty, as “all we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way.” (Isaiah 53:6), therefore the whole world is “become guilty before God” (Rom. 3:19); or whether He speaks about His own rich provision for the blessing of such, as “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16); or whether He speaks of the present portion of the believer and the unbeliever, as “He that believeth, on the Son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:36); or whether He speaks of the destiny of the believer, or the doom of the unbeliever, as, “And these” (the unbelievers) “shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.” (Matt. 25:46.) Yes, depend upon it, God’s “testimonies are very sure,” and “he that hath received His testimony hath set to his seal that God is true” (John 3:33); and “he that believeth not God hath made Him a liar.” (1 John 5:10.) Have you set to your seal that God is true, by receiving His “very sure” testimonies? or are you making Him a liar by calling them in question and doubting them?

“Give diligence to make your calling and election sure.” (2 Peter 1:10.) I am amazed at the audacity of people in saying, “You cannot be sure you are saved in this world,” when God says I am to be sure. “Yes,” you say; “but I do not know if I am one of God’s called ones.” Well, turn to 1 Cor. 1:26-29, and look at the persons whom He calls: “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are: that no flesh should glory in His presence.” Now, do you answer to this fivefold description of God’s called and chosen ones? Have you ever confessed to God that you are “foolish, weak, base, despised, and nothing”?

If so, you are most certainly one of God’s called ones. Has God’s gospel come to you, not in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance? if it has, and you have answered to the fivefold description of God’s called ones, then you have made “your calling and election sure.” (1 Thess. 1:4, 5.)

“Be sure your sin will find you out.” (Num. 32:23.) We have now come to the last Scripture I wish to call your attention to where the word “sure” occurs, and a most solemn one it is for a certain class of sinners. Oh, ye hypocrites, ye deceitful and secret sinners, ye may go on undiscovered for weeks, months, and even long years, but your sin will hound you and find you out in the long run! Oh that it might find you out now, and cause you to come to Jesus, the sin cleanser and the sinner’s Saviour! “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.” (1 John 1:7.)

I have done, and must now leave God’s word to do its own work, earnestly praying that all who may read this paper may be led of God truthfully to say, “We believe and are sure.”

Come to Jesus Just as You Are

JESUS did not come to call those who were doing the best they could to merit His favor. He said Himself, “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” The Pharisees and scribes advertised the blessed Lord in the following words: “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them;” and the Holy Spirit saith that “God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us;” and one who was “before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious,” found his greatest comfort in the fact that “this is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.”

Are you conscious that you are a sinner? and do you find that the poor publican’s prayer, “God be merciful to me a sinner,” suits you? Then that is your recommendation to come to Jesus; and be assured that He is waiting to welcome you. Only “come to Him just as you are.”

"Eternal Judgment."

HEB. 6:2

DID you ever sit down quietly, and, in the solemn stillness of your own soul, think over the two words at the head of this paper? All men have an everlasting existence, and are therefore very different from an animal, which dies, and there is an end of it. Man is a responsible being, and not “like the beasts that perish;” he dies, but does not cease to exist, he will be raised again for judgment.

“Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: BUT know thou, that for all these things GOD WILL BRING THEE INTO JUDGMENT.” (Eccles. 11:9.) “It is appointed unto men once to die, BUT AFTER THIS THE JUDGMENT.” (Heb. 9:27.) Death therefore is not ceasing to be, for if it were there would be nothing left to judge; whereas God says, “Die, but after this the judgment.” And this judgment will take place before “the great white throne,” when all whose names are not found written in the book of life will be cast into the lake of fire. (Rev. 20:15.) So we see clearly from the Scriptures that there are three things staring every unsaved man in the face, and those three things are, “DEATH,” “JUDGMENT,” and “THE LAKE OF FIRE!”

Unsaved reader, you are living, eating, drinking, and walking, as it were, upon a trapdoor; and at any moment death may draw the bolt, and you would be in a moment launched into ETERNITY, there to endure the “eternal judgment” of God. Take a slate and sit down and try to calculate ETERNITY; begin with multiplying a unit, and when you have filled one. side of the slate, turn it over and begin the other side, and when you have reached the bottom of it, your figures will show many millions. But what is that in comparison with ETERNITY? Suppose it were possible to count every blade of grass, millions of years must roll away before the task could be accomplished; and having counted all the blades of grass, begin to number the drops of the ocean; and the ocean counted, count the grains of sand that girt it; that done, count all the specks of air that by thousands of tons float in space; that done, begin upon the stars that stud the heavens. Oh, how many millions of years must pass away before the task could be performed and when all the blades of grass, drops of ocean, grains of sand, atoms of air, and stars of the heavens have been numbered, eternity will still be in its infancy; it will still be only just begun, and you will have been all that time enduring the “eternal judgment” of God, and you will be no nearer the end of it than eternity is near its end!

The conscious happiness of the saved and punishment of the damned run parallel with the existence of God Himself, and the same word is used to express the three things. (Matt. 25:46; John 3:16; Rom. 16:26.)

A friend of mine once told me a very remarkable dream that he had. He dreamed that he was transported to heaven, and there he saw a magnificent gold clock, constructed upon the principle of perpetual motion, but it had no dial plate to it.

He saw a group of bright, beautiful, and happy beings gazing upon it, of whom lie asked the question, “What is the time?” when immediately they joyfully answered him, “There is no time here; do you not hear what the pendulum of the clock says as it swings to and fro?—Salvation EVER, damnation NEVER!” He was then transported to hell, where he saw another large clock, constructed upon the same principle as the first one, upon which he saw unhappy beings looking, to whom he put the question, “What time is it?” Sadly they looked at him, and shrieked back the answer, “There is no time here; do you not hear what the pendulum of our clock says?—Damnation, EVER, salvation NEVER!”

God used this solemn and awful, but too true, dream to my friend’s conversion, and he has now for many years been working for the living and everlasting Lover of his immortal soul.

“The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is ETERNAL LIFE through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom. 6:23.) Which will you have—eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord, or reject Him and have in the lake of fire “ETERNAL JUDGMENT”?

"Move Your Finger."

IT was at the close of a meeting in a town hall in the Midland counties that I saw a respectable woman dressed in deep mourning; she was the wife of a farmer in the neighborhood of the town hall. I was standing at the door of the hall speaking to one and another as they passed out, when, as she was passing out, I spoke a few words to her about her soul’s eternal welfare. For some time she was too much overcome with emotion to reply, and when she did speak, it was to ask me if she could see me alone on the morrow. The morrow arrived, and we met, when I soon discovered that she was a soul with whom the spirit of God had long been dealing. I found that He whom God had exalted to be a Prince and a Savior for to give repentance and forgiveness of sins, had graciously given her repentance; but as yet she was a stranger to the gift of forgiveness. She assured me that she was a lost and guilty sinner, deserving nothing less than death, judgment, and the lake of fire; but I found that she was waiting to know she was forgiven, until she felt it.

Opening my Bible at the seventh chapter of Luke’s gospel, I read that lovely story of grace, beginning at the thirty-sixth verse, and finishing at the fiftieth verse. When it was read through, I drew the dear woman’s attention to the forty-seventh verse, “I SAY unto thee, Her sins, which are many, ARE FORGIVEN.” I asked her to place her finger upon the two words “are many,” and tell me if she could look up into the face of the blessed Jesus, who uttered those two words, and honestly say that they were true of her sins?

Placing her finger upon the two words “are many,” she said they were too true of her sins. I then asked her if she believed her sins were many because she felt they were many, or because Jesus said that they were many. She replied that she knew that they were many, that she felt that they were many; but that she believed that they were many because Jesus said so. I then asked her to move her finger to the next two words, “ARE FORGIVEN,” and to tell me that if she believed the first two words “are many,” spoken by Jesus, were true about her sins, why should she not believe that the second two words “are forgiven,” spoken by the same precious lips about her forgiveness, were equally true and worthy of being believed? She moved her finger on to the second two words, “are forgiven,” and looking up by faith into the face of Jesus, told Him she believed Him, and thanked Him for the good news.

It is some years since the blessed Savior-God gave this dear woman the knowledge of the forgiveness of all her sins, since which time she has gone on her way rejoicing, having taken her place at the Lord’s Table as a forgiven, saved, happy, and worshipping child of God, and member of Christ’s body. And if you met her today, and were to ask her how she knew that her sins were forgiven, she would reply, “I knew they were many, not because I felt it, but because Jesus told me they were; and I know that they are all forgiven, not because I feel it, BUT BECAUSE JESUS SAYS so.”

And now, dear, anxious, troubled soul, you have had your finger long enough on the two words “are many,” but look at the two following words “are forgiven,” and at once believingly and adoringly “move your finger.”

Earnest Words for Earnest Souls

Table of Contents

The Common Salvation

Present Salvation

The Eternal Salvation

So Great Salvation

"He Paid."

"The Precious Blood of Christ."

Willing or Unwilling - Which?

"Mighty to Save."

Which? and Where?

Pardon, Peace, and a Pattern

Death!

"Oh, My Sins! Oh, My Saviour!"

Worshippers or Wailers

Lift Neither Hand nor Foot!

"He Has Received Me!"

"Prove That There Is a Devil."

Two Letters From God

Threefold Deliverance

"I Do Believe Now."

"I Credit It All."

"God so Loved the World."

"Behold, the Bridegroom."

Repentance

Feeling Versus Faith

Forgiveness and Eternal Life

"The Sin Against the Holy Ghost" - What Is It?

"Come," or "Depart;" "Today," or "Tomorrow."

Glory, the Fountain, and the Lake of Fire

"I Will Fear No Evil"

"Ten Minutes to Three."

What a Contrast!

State and Actions

"The Quaint Old Picture."

"I Have Been Making a Savior of My Good Works."

"You Have Two Strings to Your Bow Whilst I Have Only One to Mine."

"Ye May Know."

"The Holy Scriptures."

Come to Jesus Just as You Are

"Eternal Judgment."

"Move Your Finger."