Now those of you who are familiar with
the way we proceed in our Bible preaching,
know that we are following through books of
the Bible Sunday after Sunday.
Having those expositions interrupted from time to time
by visiting speakers or by absences, we are
now in the book of 1 Peter, and
we are still in the first chapter.
Very much in the first chapter, inasmuch as
we're only to verse 4.
In other words, Father and Son, William R.
and Philip, do what they call verse-by
-verse exposition.
I do not quite follow this method.
I try to follow idea-by-idea rather
than verse-by-verse, because there are times
when, in an epistle, one idea will be
embodied in a half a dozen verses, or
it will take a half a dozen verses
to embody one idea.
To me, therefore, it would be impossible to
stay by the verses.
I stay by the ideas.
So we come this morning to another great
idea, a great spiritual principle that lies embodied
here in the fourth verse of chapter 1
of 1 Peter, reading verses 3 and 4,
maybe 5 too.
Blessed be the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant
mercy hath begotten us again unto a living
hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from
the dead to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled,
and that fadeth not away, preserved in heaven
for you who are kept by the power
of God through faith, under salvation ready to
be revealed in the last time.
And the last time I spoke here, I
said, following Peter, that Christians are not born
upward into a vacuum, and that the new
birth is not an end in itself.
It is a means to yet a higher
end, and that Christians are born unto an
inheritance.
And I pointed out that that inheritance is
not a present gift, such as eternal life
is.
It's not a future reward, which comes by
faithfulness and toil, but it is a legacy
from the father to his children.
Neither direct present gift, nor reward earned by
works, but a legacy which comes to the
child by virtue of his or her relationship
to the father.
Now, in today's lesson, there are three qualities
that are attributed to this inheritance.
It is described by three words.
And these qualities, which are said to inherit
in our inheritance, are precisely the qualities that
distinguish our inheritance from any earthly thing.
The things of God and heaven itself, they
are not simply an upward projection of our
imagination, of the very best that we have
or know or can imagine in this world,
upward and in touch with perpetuity, so that
they are eternal.
They're mostly contrary to the things of earth.
And you'll find this inheritance, which we mentioned
this morning, to be of a kind which
distinguishes it sharply from any earthly inheritance that
there may be.
There are three words.
Incorruptible, undefiled, and unfading.
King James says, fadeth not away, which of
course is unfading.
So now let us look at these three
words, and remember that they are inherent in
the legacy which is left us.
They cling to it, they are part of
it.
They describe it, they do not define it.
But they are the qualities that belong to
our heavenly inheritance, which we have in Christ
Jesus, our Lord.
The first is the word incorruptible, and that
according to the Greek means undecaying in essence
and endless in years.
That which cannot be corrupted then is undecaying
in essence, and I suppose only secondarily, endless
in years.
Now I want to ask you what a
man can possess in this world that has
about it the quality of incorruptibility.
I want to ask you what there is
on the face of this earth that you
could have even if you had the power
to call to yourself whatever you would want,
some Aladdin's lamp to rub and bring to
you whatever gift you desired.
I ask you what there could be on
earth that can be properly or inaccurately described
as being incorruptible that does not decay in
its essence and is endless in its years.
Now our Lord said, Lay not up for
yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust
corrupt, and thieves break through and steal.
Now these were not the words of a
sinner, neither were they the words of a
defeatist.
We are often, we Christians, charged with being
defeatists.
They say it's defeatism.
They say that the colored man of the
south sings so beautifully about heaven and the
golden street because he had to live in
a little wooden shack somewhere and live on
corn foam.
That he is trying to create for himself
what his master in the old slave days
already possessed and then pushing it upward into
perpetuity, and that was the colored man's heaven.
And so we are charged with this.
They say that this is because you are
defeated.
You're nihilistic in your outlook.
And because you're defeated, you're dreaming of a
place where there's no defeat.
Because you're unhappy, you're dreaming of a happy,
happy land where no one wipes away, or
needs to wipe away a tear.
Now all that would explain everything except for
the small matter that is not true.
Our Lord Jesus Christ was not a defeatist.
Our Lord Jesus Christ never suffered, as they
said Abraham Lincoln did, from glandular deficiency, and
that's what made him the way he was.
He put in people and they said that's
a glandular deficiency.
But our Lord Jesus Christ had so no
such deficiencies.
Our Lord Jesus Christ was not a defeatist.
He was not a serious optimist, certainly.
Neither had he any of the heavy-handed,
heavy-hearted pessimism that is characterized by the
great many thinkers in the world.
Our Lord Jesus Christ saw everything clearly.
If there ever existed in the wide world
a man who earned the right to be
called a realist, Jesus Christ was that man.
For he saw everything exactly as it was.
It was all real to him.
He did not shave one edge of something
to bring something else into relief.
He did not either in ideas nor in
the words that expressed those ideas put his
best foot forward.
He saw everything exactly as it was and
described it and spoke of it exactly as
it was.
He was the world's most perfect realist because
he was himself truth.
And so our Lord was neither dreaming of
some heaven that he had never seen, neither
was he projecting his imagination upward away from
the grief and miseries of this world to
some lovely heaven, some mansion which was being
prepared.
He spoke of things as they were and
as they will be found to be.
And he said, lay not up for yourselves
treasures on earth, for moth and rust doth
corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.
And there we have that ugly word corrupt
again, and Jesus applied it to all traders.
And he said that the moth took some
of it and rust took other of it.
He certainly didn't give us a complete picture,
but he did say that there was corruption
in the earth.
And even if you did not wait for
it to corrupt, a thief might easily break
through and steal it.
So you see the vanity, the futility of
it all.
What a cheat the devil is and what
a deceiver, what a confidence man he is.
He sells poor people the Brooklyn Bridge and
then grins as he takes their last dollar
and goes and leaves them to find out
too late that the Brooklyn Bridge wasn't his
to sell.
He's a liar, I say, and a deceiver.
And he's leading people to spend the best
years of their life laying up for themselves
treasures, which, even before they die, will begin
to rust and rot and decay.
Incorruptible is a word that cannot be applied
to any earthly thing.
Nothing is there that is undecaying in its
essence and endless in its years.
But there is an inheritance, which Jesus Christ,
the Realist, Jesus Christ, the Heavenly One, came
to give to his followers, to his believers.
Now, that inheritance is incorruptible.
And the word incorruptible here is exactly the
same word as he used of the dead
who shall rise again at the coming of
Christ.
We sing, people who sing, sing, The dead
shall be raised incorruptible.
Remember that.
The dead shall be raised incorruptible, and that's
exactly the same word to describe the glorified
human body as is used here to describe
the inheritance of the saints.
It cannot decay, it cannot corrupt.
Job, poor, weary, sick, tired Job, said that
the skin worms would devour his body.
And there are those who have tough enough
stomachs that they can remind us with a
straight face that the very element, the very
powers that shall devour our bodies in the
grave already are active in our bodies.
I personally don't like to think of that.
I'd rather think of something a bit more
pleasant.
But if it is true, as it probably
is true, there will be a day when
those skin worms will be no more.
God will shake them loose and say, let
him alone.
Let him alone forever!
And it's also true of the inheritance of
the saints.
God's people have an inheritance that the skin
worms cannot bother.
It can never decay and will be endless
in years.
Now that's the first thing that describes it.
And I say that this quality that describes
our heavenly inheritance is precisely the quality that
distinguishes it from all earthly treasures.
The second word is the word defiled, undefiled.
Now I ask you, what earthly treasure is
safe from defilement?
The Bible has very little kind to say
about money, very little.
Very little it is kind to say about
the heaping up of trade.
The Bible uses the word lucre for meaning
profit and then adds the disgusting adjective filthy
before it and calls it filthy lucre.
And the man Paul, who was not defeatist
and was not compelled to rationalize his poverty,
but who had given up a high position
to become a Christian, he said that the
love of money is a root from which
all evil springs.
Note he did not say that money is
a root from which all evil springs.
He said the love of money is a
root, not the root, for there are other
roots.
But the love of money is a root
from which all evil springs.
Now everything that we have in this world
is defiled and has been defiled.
Even though a saint may have it, it
does not come to him undefiled.
The very ten-dollar bill you have folded
in your wallet, that you expect to give
to missions today, I don't know, but it
could be that that same ten-dollar bill
was part of a wad that somebody paid
somebody else to kill somebody that was in
his way.
It could easily be that that bill was
part of a wad handed out in some
gambling den or some house of ill-fame.
There is scarcely a dollar smell that dollar
bill or that ten-dollar bill.
The very smell of it indicates where it's
been.
It smells like itself.
There is something that isn't altogether morally right
about it.
I don't mean there's morally wrong for us
to own it and to use it and
to give it and to use it for
our families, because we keep pure by virtue
of the washing of the blood of Jesus.
But I mean that nothing that this earth
has is quite pure.
There is an element of defilement upon it
all.
The very lot whereon your house stands, that
very lot once belonged to the tribes of
red Indians that roamed the deep woods in
the section we call Illinois.
And it's yours now.
You got it honestly, so I don't want
to lay anything on your conscience.
I only want to say that that once
belonged to another race.
And we white men came without any payment
in kind and kicked them out to the
western seas and put them on little rice
-infested reservations and toss them ashock from year
to year to try to solve our own
conscience for the guilt of having upset and
invaded and cast out a race that once
owned this.
But on the other hand, that race was
just as guilty as we, because the red
Indians, the Chippewas and the Seminoles and the
rest of them that roamed the North American
continent, history tells us, once invaded and drove
out a race that preceded them.
So if we are thieves for taking it
from the Indians, we only took it from
thieves who had taken it from others who
were probably thieves in turn.
And when you go to the map of
Europe and look at it, you will see
how men are arguing and fighting for their
borders, those flexible and changing borders.
And yet I long ago threw up my
hands and said, My God, I'll never be
able to decide what nation owns what land
over there.
Because if you go back far enough in
history, you will find that they got it
by invasion, by massacre, by murder.
And then they had squatters right on it,
forgetting that they got it and the only
payment they made was the blood of the
people that owned it.
So, there isn't anything in the world that
isn't defiled.
Injustice and oppression runs through everything.
And it is this that gives the vile
devil-possessed communist the one lone weapon that
he has.
No man can think less of the communist
than I.
No man can be revolted as though it
were some bottomless pit that had been loosed
and locusts had come out and called themselves
communists.
That's what I think of the whole thing.
But I also know that all they say
about us is not lies.
I also know that that charming and beautiful
hotel on the North Shore that raises its
gracefully rocked story one above another into these
elegant corridors where come and go the rich
and the great and the learned and the
celebrity.
I know it's kept that way, but poor
tired old women with mop buckets who go
up and down the halls, weary, defeated ladies
who for a pittance make the beds and
mop up the halls.
So I say that while the devil invented
communism, we sinners tossed them weapons to cut
our own heads off with.
There isn't any treasure probably that isn't defiled.
I suppose you drive up the coast, Florida
or New England, and you see a yacht
flying at anchor there or floating gracefully over
the broad bosom of the deep.
And you say, how beautiful, and wish secretly
that you had one, or in a bracket
where you could have one.
If you knew how much of iniquity there
was rocking to that graceful thing, you'd never
want it.
I can only repeat again the say of
Emerson.
A young man said, Emerson, you want to
be president?
You want to go to the White House?
Ah, if you only knew how much of
his manhood he had to sell out to
get there, you wouldn't want it.
If you only knew how he must obey
those who stand erect behind the throne and
tell him what to do.
This is no political comment, whether a Democrat
or a Republican or a straddler is an
artist.
Everything is defiled because everything flows out of
the human breast, and the human breast is
defiled.
You cannot get pure water out of any
pile or fountain.
You cannot pluck sweet figs off of a
thorn tree.
You cannot get sweet grapes off a wild
grapevine.
And you cannot get edible chicken eggs from
a buzzard.
You cannot get pure treasures from impure hearts.
I repeat, this is not a blanket indictment.
I believe we have men in there listening
now, men listening to me, who would scornfully
turn their back on anything that wasn't honest
and fair.
I do not go along with those that
hold that every businessman is a crook.
I don't believe it.
I believe it entirely possible to live a
clean, upright life.
A man may not have as big an
income, but I believe it's entirely possible to
live where I can be in the business
world.
The very money that flows into your hand
and out again, however honest it may be
as far as you're concerned, I repeat, may
have bought the hired killer or the hired
whore.
So everything in this world is undefiled.
But our inheritance is pure and unsought.
And that which the redeeming God has given
to his redeemed children has no trace anywhere
of defilement upon it.
You can trace it back to the roots
of its beginnings.
Because it flowed out of the pure undefiled
heart of Jesus Christ, it is undefiled as
he.
And incidentally, that word undefiled is used to
describe the Savior too.
It says he is holy and harmless and
undefiled, separate from sinners and higher than the
highest heaven.
And the treasure he gives to his children
is a treasure as undefiled as the heart
of the one who prepared it.
Then there is the word faded not away,
unfading.
Now I ask you if unfading describes anything
in this world.
I do not know of anything in this
world that the word unfading could describe really,
particularly any treasure that you may have.
You buy a piece of property, and then
you die, and your children after you have
a hard time getting rid of it.
To you it was a wonderful thing.
Go down Michigan Avenue, if you please, and
see the great old brownstone mansions.
One time housed the elite.
More blue blood flowed in and out of
the old brownstone.
And yet today they're inhabited by anywhere up
to a dozen to fifteen families of colored
people.
They're running down.
And all the royalty that one time went
in and out of there, I mean social
royalty, whose names were in the who's who,
that didn't happen to know what's what.
I borrowed that from Kylite.
Well, they're gone, they're gone, and their property
has degenerated, deteriorated, prices going down.
And so it is with everything.
Marries her today in her blushing womanhood.
Beautifully seen, but in ten years she begins
that process they call fading.
Then she scrambles off to Woolworths and to
Walgreens and to Steinways.
It wasn't for men like me who were
supposed to have altars, and women like you
who were fading.
Steinways had run out of business.
I had to get pills from my altars
and you to get something to prop up
your fading beauty.
But everything fades, everything fades in this wide
world.
Old letters fade, old books, old paintings.
There's great difficulty, they're restored.
But another generation or two will have to
be restored again, and each restoration means a
fading.
So everything, no matter what it is, fades
in this world.
You cannot use the word unfading to describe
anything earthly.
The Bible tells us that we are like
the flower of the field that faded.
Today it is, and tomorrow it is cut
down and withered and is gone.
And the bouquet that cost the young swain
lovesick and sighing like furnace, $15 on Saturday
night, Wednesday noon, will be thrown out to
be carried away Thursday morning by the man
with the big yellow wag.
Everything fades, and we're like it.
Fading beauty, fading presence, fading values.
Did we all do fade as a leaf?
Doesn't sound like, Arthur, God forbid, does it?
Doesn't sound like the paid comedians the courts
ruled you they're painting in bells who make
millions to keep us from thinking about the
fact that we all do fade as a
leaf.
How very wise the devil is.
How very wise he is.
And if he was right, I'd want him
on my side.
For he's wiser than any Christian I've ever
met.
He knows how to keep people from thinking
about the fact that they're fading, and their
treasures are fading.
He gives them some silly little thing to
do, offers them twenty questions or something in
order to keep them from thinking about themselves.
God's children have an inheritance that shall not
fade nor pass away.
Now I believe that, brethren.
I do not believe that's poetry.
I do not believe that is highly inflated
metaphor.
I believe that God's people have an inheritance
which is incorruptible and undefiled, and that faded
not away.
Which can be said about that inheritance, but
can be said about no other inheritance in
the world.
Now, it says that this inheritance, this unincorruptible,
undefiled, and unfading inheritance is reserved in heaven
for you.
Well I've been thinking this week that heaven
is a place.
One is almost startled when he comes to
think about heaven and how little anybody believes
in heaven anymore.
Either a hillbilly with a guitar sings about
heaven in a way that would make any
intelligent man wish he'd never seen such a
heaven, or else we don't think about heaven
at all.
The corrosive action of unbelief has worn down
our belief.
And heaven, and the belief of the things
in heaven, the inheritance that is ours laid
up in heaven for us, it's almost gone.
You see, two men have partly, men I
think responsible for that.
One was Copernicus.
There was a day when men were geocentric
in their thinking.
They said, the earth, the earth, that's everything,
the earth is the center of everything, God
made the earth and put it here, and
everything else revolves around it, flies over it,
goes around it, goes above it, and goes
over it.
And it's solid, it's fixed.
God nailed it down and established the foundations
thereof.
And then along came Copernicus, and the risk
of his life went on to prove that
it wasn't so tall.
The earth isn't nailed down anyplace.
The earth isn't frozen fast, and you're stuck
fast.
The earth moves, and the sun stands still,
yes and all.
The sun only seems to stand still in
relation to the earth's motion.
The sun, in fact, moves in a wider
orbit, faster through the vast, vast spaces.
So that filtered down from the scientists into
the colleges, and the colleges, and everybody knows
it now.
And so everybody is saying, now what about
this heaven idea?
What about heaven?
There was a day when heaven was right
up there, and the stars were the peepholes
of heaven, and you could look up and
see the bit of the light of the
glory.
And so we laughed it off, but it
got hold of us, and it acted like
a downer belief in heaven.
And the second man that came along was
the man Einstein with his relativity.
Now relativity is true, it must be true.
There isn't anything in the Bible that says
that it isn't.
But he not only took the earth out,
he took everything out.
And so there isn't anything that's fixed anyplace.
Nothing's standing still, everything is in motion.
It wasn't exactly a new idea, all the
creatures had done the same thing before Christ's
time.
But he said everything is in motion, and
everything is only in relation to something else.
So there isn't anything against which you can
measure something and say, that's it.
He says, no, that isn't it, that's only
it in comparison with something else.
Find that other it, and say that is
it in comparison with it.
Then when you get to it number two,
you don't say, ah, now we've got something
nailed down, something fast against which we can
figure everything, because it's number two already, and
in comparison with it number three.
So we go on in that infinitum, world
without end, and there isn't any place fixed.
Oh, I don't know, after I read that
kind of stuff, I like to say, oh,
rest my long-divided heart.
Fixed on this blissful center, rest.
There is a place where neither Einstein nor
Copernicus trouble us in the wicked art, rest.
And it is the heart of God who
made all these flying balls and these worlds
within worlds.
There is one we call God.
And yet I say that the idea of
relativity and of the motion to the heavenly
bodies has helped to destroy faith in heaven
as a place.
I don't see why it should.
If God could create an earth and put
a race on it, why couldn't he create
something else and put a redeemed race on
it?
You know, I don't have to trouble some
people.
Thank God, and I'm not troubled intellectually.
What worries others doesn't worry me.
I believe that if God could make the
earth and put a race like us on
it, he could make another place and call
it heaven and make a race on it
that has been redeemed.
We are redeemed.
That's very simple for me.
So Copernicus and Einstein can lie down with
their fathers.
And they won't bother me at all.
But it is, it has taken away the
idea of heaven.
We try to make heaven as another plane.
We say it's another dimension.
We say heaven's another dimension.
Others say that heaven is a state of
mind.
And we get rid of heaven, the whole
thing is simply the artful dodging of unbelief.
I believe that there is an inheritance laid
up, incorruptible and undefiled, that fadeth not away,
reserved in heaven for God's children.
And when God said to Abraham, Abraham, I
will look around you now.
Get up on this high mountain.
We can take a look around.
All this is to be yours and your
children after you.
Abraham could have taken out a notebook and
written in Arabic or whatever.
This is mine and my children's for inheritance.
And along comes the relativists and the rest
of them and say, now just a minute,
Abraham, don't you realize that Palestine isn't anything
fixed?
It's just what it is in relation to
something else.
And that something else is what it is
in relation to something else.
Don't imagine that Palestine is a place.
Just don't think crudely like that and basically
think spiritually.
Palestine is just a state of mind.
Abraham said, you can't talk to me, friend.
You may have better education than I, but
I have heard God say, Abraham, this inheritance
is thine.
Put a stake down from Lebanon to the
great sea and from the Mediterranean to the
river Euphrates.
It's all yours.
You can locate that on the map.
And Abraham, see, true to the word of
God, went in there and took over and
lived for hundreds of years with a mailing
address.
You can locate him.
It was a place.
God had given them an inheritance.
And so all these gas-brained dreamers that
tell us that heaven is not a place,
it's a state of mind.
And let them go clamorful.
I still believe that the God who made
the earth and put a people upon it
can make heaven and put a redeemed people
in it.
Do you?
All right, let's sing more about heaven, brother.
Not necessarily this morning.
But, you know, more as we go along.
I used to sing a song when I
was a boy about a scarlet sky.
And I thought it said scarlet sky.
And I wondered what on earth they were
singing about.
And all we hear about heaven now that
I know.
But they sing about some gold.
God help me to be somewhere without some
golden daybreak.
And just beyond the sunset and all that
kind of thing.
If I die around Chicago, die of dust
and noise, if I die, in God's name,
don't worry my resting body beyond the sunset
and some golden daybreak.
Don't do it.
Give us a rest from golden daybreaks and
all that dreamy land of somewhere.
I'm not interested in a beautiful isle of
somewhere.
I'm interested in an inheritance reserved in heaven
for you who are kept by the power
of God through faith under that inheritance.
And that's just as real as your right
hand.
And just as trustworthy as the lock number
on the lock for your house.
And you go down to the court records
and find it and send a man out
and survey it.
And so this inheritance of ours is just
as real as that.
In spite of all that we now know
of astronomy.
The God who can fling somewhere.
If you were to go out to Mars
or somewhere, I suppose, and there were anybody
there, they'd be arguing there couldn't be such
a thing as a race of men loving
and weeping and dying and grieving and writing
great music and painting great paintings and building
bridges and highways.
There couldn't be such a thing.
But there is.
Here we are.
Still hanging on by the grace of God
to the power of gravitation.
And we're out of Europe riding around the
sun.
So let all the marshals argue we're here.
And there's a people somewhere, a great cloud
of witnesses our brother preached about last Sunday.
They're there, kept by the power of God.
Now, just listen to them down there.
Kept by the power of God through faith.
Why does it say we have an inheritance?
And not the inheritance, but we are kept
by the power of God through faith.
Why, it would be unthinkable if our inheritance
was incorruptible and we corrupted, wouldn't it?
It would be unthinkable if our treasure was
unfaithy and we failed it.
It would be unthinkable if our treasure outlasted
us.
And God found himself in the embarrassing position
of preparing an unfaithful treasure for a people
that he couldn't keep to enjoy.
All the papers of the man who looks
with unutterable love upon his boy in the
cradle and takes a quiet vow.
God helping me, I'll have an inheritance for
that boy.
God helping me, I'll invest wisely.
God helping me, this boy's not going to
go through what I did.
I'll have an inheritance for the boy.
As the boy gets older and learns to
walk and talk, the father gets happier and
prouder and more sure of himself.
He's invested in gilded securities.
He puts the government behind his securities.
As long as the flag flies and America
stands, it's good.
And he says, if I died or more,
I'm a boy's God.
He'll not have to work as I worked
twelve hours nights, as I used to think
I did as a kid.
In fact, he won't have to do it.
And one day out of the blue somewhere,
the dark shadow falls upon that boy.
They cry, oh, Rapolio, twelve hours he's gone.
The inheritance is there.
Put the boy down.
It's capous there, I said.
Poignant, piercing, too deep for human tears.
What is there quite so touching to the
human soul as the little treasure of the
one we love but couldn't keep to enjoy?
Is God going to be caught in such
an emotional tangle?
Is God going to allow himself to preserve
an inheritance for a people that he can't
preserve?
Never, never while the world stands.
You are kept by the power of God
through faith unto an inheritance reserved in heaven
for you.
So I'm leaning back very strongly on the
keeping power of God.
What are the earmarks of the kept?
Just above us it tells us, elect, begotten,
obedient, and believing, that's all.
Elect, obedient, begotten.
Elect, that's God's business before we know anything
about it.
Begotten, that's God's business as we believe in
his Son.
Obedient and believing who are kept by the
power of God through faith unto an inheritance.
So there we are, friends.
Once more I repeat, we Christians are not
only rich.
We Christians are nobly rich.
Soundly rich.
Rich with riches that we need not apologize
for.
Rich with riches that we need never fear
came to us through defiled hands.
Never any corruption, never any worm to make
the tree of life safe.
We're rich people.
I wonder when we'll begin to act like
it.
Instead of acting like the poverty-stricken creatures
that crawl around the earth amassed, whether we
can please crawl under a leaf and be
not seen.
Let's let the world know how rich we
are, let's tell it.
Unto an inheritance.
What are you doing there, Junior?
I'm a converted Christian, just gave my heart
to God.
What are you going to do?
Well, immediately you think, oh, I'll go to
Niagara movies there.
But if you go to Niagara movies, it
doesn't mean this or that.
The big thing is, you are now begotten
unto an inheritance, incorruptible and undefiled, reserved in
heaven for you, and you are being kept
for the power of God's enjoyment of that
inheritance.
So that's what you're saved for, brother.
And whether you go to Moody, Nyack, Wheaton,
or where, it makes little difference.
God will guide you in that.
I believe that.
But that isn't the big thing.
Say, you want to go into the work.
You're in the work as soon as you're
born, brother.
You're going to go into the full-time
work?
You're in full-time work as soon as
you're born into the kingdom of God.
Cultivating the riches of your inheritance and of
God's inheritance in the sense, telling the story,
letting the world know how rich you are,
and telling them where you got it and
how you got it.
That's the business of a Christian.
May God help us to go to work
at that just as soon as we get
up from the altar and have given our
heart to the Savior.
Amen.
Good night.
Lord, we pray for the afternoon that it
may not be wasted, but that it might
be used in some good, positive way to
know thee better, to cultivate spiritual things, to
do good unto all men, to witness of
saving grace to a world that's dying.
Now may grace and mercy and peace from
God the Father and Son and Holy Ghost
be with us.