Is there yet need of warning to any careless sinner
who reads this? Is there come callous of indifferent of neglectful soul who
might yet trifle away the hours of mercy, might drive away forever the Holy
Spirit of God?
A man once opened an elevator door and stepped carelessly, attempted to enter the elevator. It was not there! He stepped out into space, falling eight floors to death. Will any reader so carelessly step beyond the mercy of God, step into the eternal doom of the unpardonable sin? May God in pity warn those who read!
1. Let Me First Warn, Do Not Trifle With The Patience of God!
It is true that:
There's a wideness in God's mercy,
Like the wideness if the sea.
But the greater the mercy scorned, the more terrible the punishment.
God so loved this poor, wicked, hateful, murderous, tainted world
this alien world, this malignant race who had broken His law and despised His
righteousness and took ungratefully His blessings--God so loved us that He
gave His Son, Heaven's fairest jewel. The dear Lord Jesus Christ, equal to the
Father--Jesus came to be born of a maiden, in a stable, to grow up in poverty,
to preach to the resisting rabble, to be tried in a crooked court, to be
scourged like a criminal, and to die in the public shame of execution on the
cross! God loves men! God loves sinners. God loves you!
But love so infinitely merciful, so long-seeking, so
long-suffering, so sacrificial, may be spurned too long! God's righteousness
demands that God turn His back upon the scorning, unrepentant and resisting
sinner.
In that moving book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence
of Arabia tells how he and the Arabs, striking for independence from the
unspeakable Turk during World War I, took the village of Tafas from the
retreating but bloodthirsty and murderous Turks. Among the corpses on the
ground, a little figure tottered off as if trying to escape, a girl three of
four years old, soiled dress, red with blood down one shoulder and side. She
had been wounded, a lance going deeply into the body at the neck. She begged,
"Don't hit me, Baba!" A choking friend who lived in the village fell from his
camel, knelt beside the child. Fearful, she tried to cream and died.
On the mud wall of a sheepfold, a pregnant woman, naked, had been
pinned with a saw bayonet. Some twenty other innocent ones butchered were "set
out in accord with an obscene taste," Lawrence tells us.
Lawrence told his men that he would regard best the soldiers who
would bring in most of the Turkish dead. Nearly insane with grief and
righteous rage, they pursued the Turks, killing, killing. Part of Lawrence's
Arabs had taken prisoner the last two hundred men, and had them huddled under
guard.
Lawrence would have saved them. But he was called to find one of
his own men with his thigh shattered and dying; yet heartless Turks had
hammered bayonets through his shoulder and the other leg, pinning him to the
ground. When they saw this last barbarism and asked who did it, Hassan, dying,
motioned toward the prisoners. Is it any wonder that they turned guns upon the
prisoners, and shot them down in a heap?
Under other circumstances that would seem horrible. But Lawrence
and his men had fought honorably for freedom by high standards of warfare,
only to have women and children, old men and prisoners, tormented, violated
and murdered. Say what you will, the conscience of decent men cries out that
such sin must be punished and that such murderers must pay.
That was not God. God's mercy is longer than the mercy of men. But
will God's love go on pleading forever with those who despise and insult His
Son, those who "do despite to the Spirit of grace," those who trample under
foot the blood of Jesus Christ?
"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?
For we know him that hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will
recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people.
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." --Hebrews
10:28-31
The scorned love of God, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the
cross, the long and tender wooing of the Holy Spirit, so often repulsed, so
often ignored and often insulted--will God's patience last forever? No! One
day God's Spirit will withdraw, and man will be left to his own choice and his
eternal ruin.
Love, long scorned, gives up mercy and turns to justice.
Don't you know that love must some day turn to scorn and holy
indignation for the sinner who trifles too long with God?
I solemnly warn all who read this message--do not trifle with the
patience of God! If you ever intend to be saved, turn to God now before God
gives you up, before God withdraws His Spirit, before God lets you go to Hell!
2. If There Is Any Call of the Spirit, Any Moving of Conscience, Be Saved Today!
Oh, how blessed is the poor lost sinner who conscience tells he
is a sinner! That means that God has not yet given you up. That means that the
Spirit of God still calls you! How fortunate is the sinner who knows he is a
sinner, who is troubled by it, who feels a burden to be saved! That proves that
God's Spirit is still calling you. He has not given you up. You have not crossed
the deadline.
In a city-wide campaign in the Binghamton theater, Binghamton New
York, in January and February, 1936, a man who worked in the Endicott-Johnson
Shoe Factory, as I recall, was deeply convicted during one service. After I had
preached and given a simple invitation for people to turn from their sins and
come to Christ and to walk down to the front and tell me so, he stood at his
seat and trembled. The sweat broke out from his forehead. His foreman in the
shoe factory came and stood by his side and urged him to be saved. A fellow
workman came to the other side and put his arm around him. But this poor sinner
held onto the seat in the front of him, trembled and said, "No, no!" He was not
ready. But the deep concern in his heart, the war in his soul, caused him to
fall fainting. His friends caught him up and carried him outside into the zero
cold. Soon he was revived. One man said to the other helper, "Here, you stay
with him. I'll get my car and take him home."
But the unconverted man said, "NO! I'm going back!"
They tried to get him to go home. They urged his weakness; they
said he could come back tomorrow night.
But he insisted, "No, I must do it tonight. God has told me in my
heart that it is not or never. I must be saved tonight."
So he came back into the auditorium and met me in the wings.
He told me his story. How wonderful that he came back, that he said
"yes" to God that night before it was too late!
If the Spirit of God calls you, you can be saved. Will you turn to
Christ today, trust Him and be saved?
Are you fearful that you have waited too long? Then I will tell you
how you can know. If you really want to be saved, you can. Jesus said,
"Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely" (Revelation 22:17). If
you want to, that proves you can. Remember that Jesus said, "Him that cometh to
me I will in no wise cast out" (John 6:37). Just come. Never mind whether you
feel a certain way; if you honestly want to come, if you choose to come, then
come in your heart, this moment, and trust Jesus Christ to save you. He never
turns down those who come to Him. "Whosoever shall call upon the name of the
Lord shall be saved" (Romans 10:13). If, here and now, you turn to Christ, admit
you sinfulness and turn from it in your heart; if you trust Jesus Christ to
forgive and save you here and now, then that moment you will be saved. Will you
do it?
There is a time, I know not when,
A place, I know not where,
Which marks the destiny of men
To Heaven or despair.There is a line by us not seen,
Which crosses every path;
The hidden boundary between
God's patience and His wrath.To cross that limit is to die,
To die, as if by stealth.
It may not pale the beaming eye,
Nor quench the glowing health.The conscience may be still at ease,
The Spirit light and gay.
That which is pleasing still may please
And care be thrust away.But on that forehead God hath set
Indelibly a mark,
By man unseen, for man as yet
Is blind and in the dark.And still the doomed man's path below
May bloom like Eden bloomed.
He did not, does not, will not know,
Now feel that he is doomed.He feels, he sees that all is well,
His every fear is calmed.
He lives, he dies, he wakes in Hell,
Not only doomed, but damned.Oh, where is that mysterious bourn,
By which each path is crossed,
Beyond which God Himself hath sworn
That he who goes is lost?
End of Book
