The seventeenth verse of John's third chapter.
For God sent not his Son into the
world to condemn the world, but that the
world through him might be saved.
This is really a part of John 3
.16, joined to it by a connective for,
For God sent not his Son into the
world to condemn the world, but that the
world through him might be saved.
Now, our Lord makes, or the verse here,
makes three related statements.
And these statements are so meaningful, so momentous,
so critically important to the human race, that
in the most conservative language, we may properly
say of this verse that it constitutes a
proclamation extraordinary.
Now, there are three statements here.
One of them is that God sent his
Son into the world.
The other one is that he did not
send him to condemn the world.
And the third is that he sent him
in order that the world might be saved.
To show you that I do not read
anything in it, that I merely show you
what is there, let me read Charles Kingley
Williams' translation.
He puts it in the positive instead of
the negative.
The meaning is precisely the same.
For God sent his Son into the world,
not to judge the world, but that through
him the world might be saved.
That's the same verse stated in the positive.
Now, I have been mulling this over this
last week, knowing that tonight I was going
to attempt a sermon on it.
I have been lying at night thinking about
this and walking around thinking about it.
For God sent his Son into the world,
not to condemn the world, but that through
him the world might be saved.
And I have a question that I want
to ask, not about that verse, but about
our reaction to it.
It might be called the unanswered question.
And that question is, since this is the
proclamation extraordinaire, since this is and constitutes a
proclamation so meaningful and so momentous, then why
the apathy concerning it on the part of
the people, even Christian people?
Now, in the full sound of this proclamation,
this proclamation that God sent his Son into
the world, that he did not send him
to condemn, that he did send him to
save, I say in the full sound of
this proclamation, more gravely significant this proclamation is
than any declaration of war or proclamation of
peace, any plague or any news from afar,
any discovery of any new continent or even
a new world would not be compared with
this.
And yet in the full light of it,
people are indifferent.
Upon our eyes there seems to have fallen
a strange dimness, and on our ears there
seems to have fallen a strange dullness, and
in our minds there is a stupor, and
in our hearts, I am afraid, a great
callousness.
The very fact that one feels bound up,
that in reading this over and thinking about
it, and seeing the brilliant shining quality of
it, and the significance of it to the
human race, that this has been heard, and
we're so little stirred up about it, that
is as wonderful as it the verse itself,
in a different way.
So wonderful, so terrible, that this verse should
be here.
Now if it wasn't here, I could understand
why we could go our way, and as
Tennyson says, nourish a dumb life within the
brain like sheep.
If that verse was not there, then I
could see why we could all come to
church and sit in stoical silence, why we
could kneel in prayer and mumble into a
deaf ear that doesn't hear us, why we
can rise in the morning and are more
concerned with whether the paper has arrived, than
with whether this verse is here or not.
If the verse hadn't been here, I could
understand our apathy, I could explain our indifference,
I could say it is the indifference of
despair, I could say it is the apathy
of despair.
Like the Israel in Egypt, for 400 years,
generation had followed generation in slavery, generation after
generation in bondage, and therefore, when a new
generation of Jews came up, they didn't expect
anything but bondage.
They were someone who, like had languished in
a prison camp for so many years, their
friends had died and forgotten them, and they
had no hope ever of having it otherwise.
So their jaws hung and their brows sloped
and their shoulders were bent, and they had
no expectation.
If this verse were not here, I'd know
why we're the way we are.
If this proclamation extraordinary had not been made,
I could understand how we can be so
unhappy, I can understand how the human race
should walk around looking down at the earth
like the beasts and rarely looking at the
sky.
I could understand it then.
But in the light of the fact that
it was made 2,000 years ago, then
I ask the question, what's the matter with
us?
What's the matter with Christians, and what's the
matter with the unsaved man who used the
message?
What's the matter with people every place?
And I say that this great stupor is
upon us, and I feel it even here
tonight.
I sense it even here tonight.
People think this is a spiritual church.
I wish they knew all I know about
it, and I wish they had to live
with it all the time.
I think a lot of people would change
their mind if they knew how little of
response there was, how little of that sensitivity
of the spirit, how little of that urgency
of their heart, and how much of the
world.
I believe that this apathy that is upon
us is a tactical victory for organized evil.
I don't know too much about the dark
spirits that move up and down in the
world.
I know as much as I want to
know.
I want to know even less as I
grow nearer to God in grace.
But I know that the Bible teaches that
there are sinister spirits that walk up and
down.
There are even organized spirits.
Perhaps it's what it means when it talks
about principalities and powers and mights and dominions.
It does not mean the it must mean
the opposite one.
They are undoubtedly abroad, invisible to the naked
eye, or perhaps even inaudible to the ear.
But they are abroad, and they are the
legions of hell.
They are the fifth column of iniquity present
in the world, and their business is to
subvert and produce and destroy and bind and
kill, like the thief that got into the
fold.
I believe that after years of beating the
propaganda of hell into human ears and beating
us over the head until we're groggy and
punch-drunk and without lift in aspiration or
hope and without immortal dreams, I believe it's
a tactical victory for the devil.
I believe more than that.
The very sober countenance you and I wear
tonight is an astonishment to the unfallen creatures
yonder.
For there are the unfallen legions, the Watchers,
the Holy Ones, the Seraphim, the Cherubim, the
Angels, the Archangels, the holy creatures that never
fell.
I don't know how much they know, but
they must know something.
For they have been sent to announce the
birth of Jesus in one instance, they were
sent to announce the resurrection of Jesus in
another instance, and in the book of Revelation
we see them fly in midheaven to move
about among men.
So they must be there, or rather they
must be here.
And that we can take all this with
such indifference must be an astonishment to holy
creatures.
We say it is yes that we are
not like holiness people, we don't hold in
the straw and climb tent poles, that we
are more sober, we're better educated, that we're
more cultured.
If I thought that were true, then I
would say, thank God.
But I don't think that's true at all,
because as soon as the benediction is pronounced
here, you couldn't hear out of the archangel's
gibber if he blew his head twenty feet
up.
He blew his horn, I mean, twenty feet
up, above the earth toward heaven.
Because of the talk and the noise and
the exuberance and the freshness and the interest
and the smiles and all the rest.
But when it comes to such a proclamation
as that God sent not his son into
the world to condemn the world, we take
it with an apathy and an indifference.
That is not a proof of our culture,
but a proof of our sin.
Not a proof that we are better educated,
but a proof that we are more hardened.
And I believe not only is this a
victory for organized evil and an astonishment to
unfallen creatures, I believe also that it's a
great grief to the God on high.
I believe God loves enthusiasm.
Not the enthusiasm of fanaticism, but I believe
that God loves enthusiasm.
The Lord Jesus Christ had a special fondness
for babies, and I think that he loved
babies because they were so vigorous and buoyant
and unsophisticated and fresh.
And their reactions were unmediated, and they were
not sickled o'er with the pale cast
of thought, to quote from Shakespeare.
They just do what they do.
Out of simplicity and immediate response of their
young hearts.
And the Lord must have loved them.
He laid his hands on their heads and
said, the kingdom of heaven is like these,
and made a great deal of the babies.
And the theologians, of course, ever since, have
been tossing and kicking these babies around, wanting
to know what it all means.
And simple-hearted people know that Jesus just
loved babies, that's all.
He loved the bald ones and the hairy
ones and the redheads and all the rest
of them, because there was something about them
that hadn't yet been spoiled.
You know Shakespeare, you know Woodrow's famous conceit,
it's only a conceit, and it's probably not
true, but there's something fresh about it.
He says that when we are born, we
come down from God trailing clouds of glory.
That coming from the fresh hand of God,
we come trailing clouds of glory.
And a little bit of heaven lies round
a growing boy.
Then as he travels further from his home,
sad and tragic as it may be, as
he travels further from his home, the glory
disappears and evaporates.
And that little bit of heaven that lies
round the newborn boy disappears like dew before
the sun, and finally it's no heaven anymore
and no glory anymore, but he forgets God
and his heart is hard and the earth
shuts round him and he's a carnal man
in a fallen world.
My God, that we might have something happen
to us that would toss us suddenly back
into our childhood again, that would grab us
up and throw us back into the cradle
of the human race and lay us and
stretch us on the cool ground and get
us once more in rapport with the powers
of God in the world and in grace.
But these hard crusts that are over our
hearts, this lack of sophistication, or this sophistication,
this lack of simplicity, this defensiveness, I'm hardly
talking to a man or woman or a
young person tonight above ten who doesn't have
his guard up against me.
They're not afraid of me, they've known me
around here since the beginning, but they're afraid.
Nevertheless, what I'm going to say, and there's
a guard up there, and there's a quick
parry.
Every preacher that preaches to congregations these days
is fencing with Master.
He lunges and plunges, and I don't know
the language of the fencers.
I never fence and don't tend to.
I've mended fences.
And he's always fencing with his audience.
And it's very rare that anyone comes anymore
to the house of God and with guard
down and head bowed says, wherefore you'll hear
what God will speak unto us.
We have become so learned and so worldly
and so sophisticated and so blase and so
burned out and so bored and so religiously
tired and beat up.
The freshness and delight, the trails, clouds of
glory seems to have gone thus.
And it's the great need of this hour,
my friends, that a verse like this, when
it is read, should have an instant response
in the human race, a response of fresh
and alive.
The very fact that we have to talk
like this is incriminating in itself.
And I want to know why this is.
That God should send this proclamation extraordinary.
God sent his son into the world.
He did not send his son to condemn
the world, but he sent him that the
world might be saved.
And we take it with such apathy.
Who has poisoned our cup?
What evil alliances have we made?
What has sin been doing to our hearts?
What devil has been working on the strings
of the heart of our soul?
Who has been giving us sedatives?
Who has been feeding us the medicine of
apathy?
What has happened to us that we can
talk about this, sing about this, preach about
this, and it leaves us untouched?
Oh, dear God, I sympathized with Old Wordsworth
when he said, I would rather be a
heathen, a heathen, and believe in an outworn,
heathen creed than stand on the shore of
the ocean and imagine that I could hear
old Neptune or old Triton blow his horn
and have something alive in me than to
be a civilized Christian to which everything has
died.
The world is too much with us.
Getting and spending late and soon, we've wasted
our powers.
Well, God sent his son into the world,
but he didn't send him into the world
as its judge.
He sent him into the world as its
Savior.
There are the three ideas in that verse.
I say that for all, for importance, there's
nothing like it, nothing like this and other
related scriptures that say about the same thing,
nothing like this in all the wide world.
For the human race in its present condition,
this is it.
There may be a time way out yonder
in the glorious tomorrow when all this is
over and sin has passed away and the
shadows have been driven from the sun and
the brows of men are no longer furrowed.
We are like him and know him and
see him as he is.
His name is in our forehead and we
gaze on his countenance.
The slippery path we once trod is now
only a memory past fading.
It may be that there will be other
and newer and grander proclamations that God may
make based upon this one, but for us
in our present condition, there's no proclamation as
great as this is it.
The proclamation extraordinary, that God sent his son
into the world and sent him into the
world as the world might be saved.
Now it says God sent his son into
the world, and I'd like to take one
word and change it here, not change it
at all, but just change it for you
tonight, and yet it's exactly what God said
and meant.
The world there doesn't mean geography.
It doesn't say he sent his son into
the Near East.
He sent his son into Palestine.
He sent his son to Bethlehem.
He sent his son to the corner of
2nd and 9th, if there were any streets
in that sweet tiny little town where he
was born.
No, it doesn't have a geographical or an
astronomical meaning.
There's nothing to do with kilometers and distances
and continents and islands and space and topography
and mountains and towns.
He came, of course, to Palestine.
Of course he came to Bethlehem.
Certainly he came to the Near East.
Certainly he came to the little land that
lies between the sea.
Sure, all that's true, but that isn't what
it meant here, and that isn't why he
came.
God sent his son into the world means
he sent his son into the human race.
The world here, that God so loved the
world, doesn't mean God so loved geography, doesn't
mean that God so loved the snow-capped
mountains or the sun-kissed meadows or the
flowing streams or the great ice peaks of
the North.
God may love all them, I think he
does.
I think you can't read Job in the
Psalms without knowing that God's in love with
the world he made.
But that's not what it means here.
God sent his son to the human race.
He came to people.
Jesus Christ came to people.
We can only remember that, friends.
Jesus Christ came to people, not to white
people, not capitalists, not communists, not Republicans, not
Democrats, not carpenters, not artists, not writers.
He came to people, people, people.
These other things are only incidental, but it's
people that he came to.
For some reason, God loved people.
Lecture 11 Justification and Sanctification 4 We can
use generic terms and general terms, and pretty
soon we become scientific in our outlook.
Let's break that all down.
Let's dump it out the window.
God sent his son to the people of
the world, and his son came into and
unto and upon the people of the world.
He even became one of those people.
God sent his son to the people of
the world.
He sent his son to the people, living
people.
Look at them, think of them, call them
before us tonight.
Imagine if you could be like Puck and
Draw, ring around the earth in forty winks.
Imagine if you could be like some star
above or the moon and gaze all over
the world in twenty-four hours.
Imagine what you would see.
You would see the crippled and the blind
and the leprous.
You would see the fat and the lean
and the tall and the short.
You would see the dirty and the clean.
You would see them walking the avenue bold
and upright without fearing a policeman.
You would see them skulking in back alleys
and crawling through windows.
You would see them twitching and twisting in
the last agonies of death.
You would see them kicking football over the
field or running around the track.
You would see them tiny and sick, and
you would see them great and brawny and
strong.
You would see them ignorant, not being able
to put one letter behind the other.
You would see them walking gravely under the
elms in some college town, dreaming deep dreams
of the fourth dimension or dreaming up some
great poem or play to astonish and delight
the world.
People.
You'd see plain people, black people, people whose
eyes slant differently from yours, people whose hair
is not like your hair at all, people
whose diet's not like your diet.
You'd gag on what they love, and they'd
gag on what you eat every morning for
breakfast.
Their customs are not the same, their habits
not the same, but they're people.
Nevertheless, they're people.
Their differences are external, their similarities internal.
Their differences have to do with custom and
habit.
Their likeness has to do with nature.
So there would be there the thief and
the liar, the truth teller and the martyr,
the mother of many and the dying soldier,
and the boy in the basket who was
sent away to the sound of the star
-spangled banner and came back in the basket
to be forgotten out of time's hospital.
People, nevertheless.
God sent his Son to the people.
He is the people's Savior.
Jesus Christ came to people like your family
and mine and people like us.
God sent his Son into the world to
people like you and me.
Not to the learned theologians, not to the
men who can spout Greek and Hebrew only.
He came to them, too.
Their ability to spout Greek and Hebrew, that
is only incidental.
What they are is exactly the same as
the ignorant boy whose language simply will not
order itself.
You see, you scratch a professor and you
find a belly.
That's all you have to do.
You just take a pen or a knife
and pick the skin a little of that
dignified lady with the carefully groomed eagle-cloth,
walking around with the latest book under her
arm, or on her way, don't you know,
to hear some opera.
Prick her a little and she's just one
more swollen woman.
Scratch her a little and you've got one
more female.
And as the sarcastic old couplet has it,
Judy O'Grady and the Colonel's Lady are
sisters under the skin.
Out on the bus.
Oh, I saw this on the streetcar.
I shouldn't tell it, but I saw this
on the streetcar, oh, some time ago.
I saw a colored, no, a white man
this time, but he was drunk.
And he was just drunk enough to be
humorous.
You know, they go through stages.
They get bright-eyed and then they get
humorous.
And then they get mean and then they
get vomiting.
He was in the humorous stage and he
was standing up in front clowning and now
he was funny, that's all.
And everybody was laughing, including your undersigned.
But a dignified lady sat there with a
little boy, a junior.
He had been brung upright and no doubt
she'd been off to finishing school.
I don't know what she was doing on
the streetcar.
I thought that was for us plain people,
but there she was.
And the little guy would look at this
drunk fellow who was going through his contortion
and making his funny remarks and he'd giggle.
And she'd pat his shoulder.
It's not funny, Charles.
And I had as much amusement watching that
dignified mother trying to tell her boy that
that funny guy wasn't funny.
But listen to me now.
Three feet back of this dignified, well-groomed
woman who wouldn't stoop to laugh at a
drunk man may have been a woolly stuff,
not too clean, grumpy, loud-talking, laughing colored
woman on her way to do somebody's voice.
Different from each other, you say?
Scrape the skin of it.
You'll find just the same.
A dignified, learned, cultured lady and a happy
-go-lucky, uncultured woman on her way to
do somebody's voice.
See, woman?
Jesus knew that, and he paid no attention
to class.
Class.
The Lord knows nothing about this class business
everybody talks about.
He came to people.
God sent his Son into the world to
people.
He came to us people.
He didn't say, how's your I.Q.? He
came to us.
He didn't say, have you traveled much?
He came to us people.
So thank God we sent him, and he
came.
Both of those are true.
No contradiction.
God sent him, and he came.
He came because he was sent, and he
came because his great heart urged him to
come.
Now, what was the mission on which he
came?
We've stated here already half a dozen times.
But you know what I was thinking?
If you knew that the Son of God
was coming to the world, and you'd never
known the Son of God was coming, let's
think ourselves out.
Let's think ourselves back to paganism.
Let's saw a revival in the New Book
in our two thousand years of printing tradition.
Let's say we've never heard, and somebody suddenly
arrives with a proclamation, God is sending his
Son into the human race.
He's coming.
What would be the first thing you thought?
What would your heart tell you immediately?
You'd run for the trees and rocks, and
hide like Adam among the trees of the
garden.
I won't add one shadow to your heart,
but I'll ask you, ask your own heart,
what mission, logically, should he have come on?
God being a holy God, high and lifted
up, and we being the kind of people
we know we are.
I ask you, what should have been his
mission?
He was a man with a mission.
What should that mission have been?
Why did God send the angels to saw
them, to determine and decide and fix judgment,
take two or three out and burn the
rest to cinders?
Let your own heart tell you, why would
the Son of God come to our race?
Our own hearts tell us why.
Sin and darkness and deception and moral disease
tell us why.
And the lies we've told and the temper
tantrums we've thrown and the jealousies we've felt
tells us why.
They tell us why.
The sin we can't deny tells us why
we might have come.
To judge the world.
If he hadn't told us that, the Holy
Ghost never would have said, not to judge
the world.
Why did he ever say it?
Because he knew that the human conscience could
only say one thing, Oh God, if you're
sending someone from your throne, find a place
for me to hide.
For my heart tells me I ought to
die.
My heart tells me that I've piled up
iniquity and I should be sentenced and I
should die.
And if the righteous one is coming, then
I ought to die.
But says the Holy Ghost, he didn't come
to judge us.
He sent his Son into the world, true,
but he sent his Son not to judge
the world.
That wasn't his purpose at all.
He came that men might be saved.
Ah, not to condemn but to reclaim was
the mission of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Why did he come to men and not
to fallen angels?
I have said before from this pulpit and
I'm the only person that ever says it,
so I could be wrong, but also I
could be right.
I believe he came to man and not
to angels because man had been originally made
in the image of God and angels hadn't.
I believe he came to fallen Adam's brood
and not to the brood of fallen devils
because the fallen brood of Adam had once
been made in the image of God.
And I believe that was a morally logical
thing, that when Jesus Christ became incarnated, he
could become incarnated in the flesh and body
of a man.
Because God made man in his own image
no fallen and lost and on his way
to hell.
He has the potentialities that could take the
incarnation.
God Almighty could pull up the blankets of
human flesh up around his ears and be
a man to walk among men.
But there was nothing of like kind among
angels and fallen creatures other than man.
So he came not to condemn but to
reclaim.
Now I would close, but I would ask
you to think of this in personal terms.
God sent his Son into the world.
The cross is not mentioned here, and the
cross is not mentioned in John 3.16.
We who preach sometimes imagine that we have
to open our mouth and in one great
big round sentence say of all the theology
there is to say, God is not so
squeamish.
He says it all somewhere in the book.
The cross stands out like a gray, bright,
shiny pillar in the middle of the scriptures.
And without that cross on which the Savior
died, there could be no scripture, no revelation,
no redemptive message, nothing.
But he didn't say anything about the cross
here.
He simply said he sent his Son, and
he gave his Son those two words, sent
and gave, in the verse above and this
verse.
He gave his Son, he sent his Son.
Later it developed that in giving his Son
he gave him to die, but he didn't
say so here.
And I want you to think of this
in personal terms.
Christ taught us to do this in that
story of the prodigal son, which Dickens said
was the most pathetic, that is, it had
more papers in it than any other story
ever told by mortal man.
He was afraid we would get generic and
theological with it all, and get it into
a book and put a period on there
and have Article 1, Section 2, subdivision B.
He was afraid of that.
So he said, now I'll tell you about
a boy.
He said a father had two boys.
One of them, the youngest one of them,
or younger of the two, came to him
and said, Father, give me my goods that
follow to me.
So he divided under them his living.
Not many days after, the younger son gathered
all together, took his journey into a far
country, where he wasted his substance with riotous
living.
And then he joined himself to a citizen
of the far country, who sent him into
the fields to feed swine.
And he fain would have filled his belly
with the husks, which the swine did eat,
but no man gave unto him.
So one day he came to himself and
he said, How many hired servants of my
Father have food to spare, and I perish
here with hunger.
I will arise and go to my Father.
Notice I, I, I, I, I.
So he says, I want you to personalize
this.
I don't want you to be thinking about
this racial.
I came to save people.
I came down here for folk, people.
And I want you to think about it
in personal terms.
So he told us that wonderful story.
I, I, I will arise, I perish, I
am hungry, I remember my Father's house, I
will go.
He said, I.
So he rose and went.
His father ran, you know the story too
well, so well, perhaps he's lost part of
it's meaning, and he threw himself at his
father's feet, and the father pitted him out
and pulled the cap and filled the house
with unseemly music.
That's what one person thought.
But why all this nonsense?
Why all this music around here?
Why always somebody getting married?
What all this music?
And the father ran out shining-faced.
He forgot all about his angina.
He came tearing out and down the steps,
you know, like a boy of fourteen.
He said, your brother's back.
And this sour heresy exploded on him.
Turned a glowering face and said, I was
with you from my babyhood, and you never
gave me as much as I could.
And now this, thy son, wasn't even on
him.
Didn't save my brother.
Used to call him buddy, you know, in
the early days.
But slept with him, loved him when he
was little, but now a religious jealousy had
gotten into his heart, and he didn't even
call him by his little old nickname, said,
dear boy.
He wasn't his brother anymore.
He said, he's devoured his living with horrors.
Used the roughest language he could use.
Most shoddy.
He said, and he gets a fatted calf,
and the father almost turned pale, I suppose,
and said, why boy, I never knew you
felt this way about me.
Why, everything I had in you.
He said, can't you see?
Something's happened tonight.
Your brother, my son, he was dead.
He's alive.
He was lost.
He's found.
After that one little blow, I think he
bounced back and went tearing back up the
steps to tell somebody else.
Strike up the bank.
God is capable of getting you morally excited,
you know, in the right sense of the
word.
But I want you to think about you
tonight.
God sent his son into the world to
save you.
Not to save the heathen, save you.
Heathen, sure, but only as an individual.
Save you.
And you've got to have faith about yourself.
Now, I want to say that, and I
was afraid to say it.
Even I sometimes am a little afraid of
certain phrases, fear somebody will get down on
my neck and write me a dirty letter.
But I want to say this.
You've got to have faith about yourself.
Not faith in yourself, but faith about yourself.
Faith in Christ and faith about yourself.
That is, you've got to believe that you
are the one he meant.
If you don't, all this general faith you
have in God won't do you any good.
See?
The Lord is the shepherd.
I shall not want.
No, he couldn't have said that.
Or if he'd said, the Lord is one
shepherd, one shall not want, he'd make it
one to lie down in green patches.
He'd have got an A on that in
school.
But it wouldn't have meant anything because it
wouldn't have been personal.
He said, he's my shepherd, I shall not
want, he'll make it me to lie down.
A prodigal son could have said, one's father
has good things to spare, and one perishes
with hunger.
One should arise and go unto one's father.
Make it general like that, make it religious.
And it didn't amount to anything.
But he said, I'm the hungry boy, God's
my father, my father is back home, I'm
going back home.
Now, you make that personal and see if
it doesn't mean something more to you.
You see, unbelief always hides behind three trees,
here they are.
Somewhere else, some other time, somebody else.
Those are the three trees of the garden
behind which unbelief hides.
Somebody preached a sermon on John 3.16.
We sit and say, yes, somewhere else it's
true, of somebody else it's true, some other
time, but not now.
Faith believes about itself, believes in him and
about itself, and says, wait a minute, if
God sent his Son into the human race,
that he might redeem the human race, he
can't redeem the human race en masse, he
has to redeem and save human beings as
individuals, that must mean me.
Don't pay attention to grammar.
Don't say, that must mean I, that's right,
but that isn't right.
Say, that means me, Lord.
Believe about yourself and say to yourself, well,
now wait, not somewhere else, but here.
Not some other time, but now.
Not somebody else, but me.
In that most famous, most wonderful, and most
terrible of all hymns, the Maccabee tells me
how to pronounce it, but I pay no
attention, the Dias Ira Dies Illa.
He says, in one place, he pictures the
judgment and the world coming apart like an
old tent, and the dust and shock and
terror of it, and graves opening, and men
screaming before God's bar of judgment, and the
world on fire, one of the old-fashioned
general judgment ideas.
Then he prays this tender, lovely little prayer.
He is going to be there, and he
says, Oh, remember Jesus, I was the cause
and reason why thou didst come on earth
to die.
He says, in that awful day, God, in
that awful day, Lord, remember Jesus, I was
the cause and reason why thou didst come
on earth to die.
What is your name?
Mary?
All right, let's suppose it's Mary.
I don't know how many Mary's there are
these days.
More surely than Mary.
Let's call it Mary.
Oh, Jesus, remember I am the cause and
reason why I, Mary, didst come on earth
to die.
John, is it?
Oh, Jesus, remember I am the cause and
reason why I, John.
Single yourself out.
Not somebody else, you.
Actually you.
Jesus Christ came not to condemn you, but
to save you.
Knowing your name, knowing all about you, knowing
your weight right now, knowing your age, knowing
what you do, knowing where you live, knowing
what you ate for supper and where you
eat for breakfast, where you sleep tonight, how
much your clothing costs, who your parents were.
Knowing you individually as though there wasn't another
person in all the world who died for
you was certainly as if you had been
the only lost one.
What about it tonight?
If you're out of the fold and away
from God, why don't you put your name
in there and say, Lord, it's I, it's
I, it's I.
Remember, Lord, I am the reason, cause and
reason why thou on earth didst come to
die.
That's faith, you see.
That positive, personal faith in a personal Redeemer.
And that's what saved you.
If you don't just rush in there, you
don't have to know all the theology in
the wide world.
I got two calls on the telephone last
week.
One wanted to know what the Greek word
for cousin was, in order they could find
out whether Jesus had brothers and sisters or
whether they were his cousins.
So I looked it up in Geert Strong,
who is my strong refuge.
And another fellow wanted to know if Jesus
could ever sin.
Now, what in the wide world would a
poor, lost, fallen man worry his poor, little,
old, empty head about theological niceties, when he
ought to be saying to himself, in view
of the judgment, O Jesus, remember I am
the cause and reason why thou on earth
didst come to die.
I am the one, Lord, all the little
theological niceties that men argue about, let them
go.
I am the one he came to die
for.
Do you believe that?
Will you tonight believe it means you?
Will you put your name in there?
Now, I insist on it.
Put your name in there.
Don't you go out of here tonight.
Put your name in there.
Write it in, whatever that name is.
Put it in there.
Write it down in your heart and say,
Jesus, this is I, thee and I, I
and thee, as though there were no others.
That kind of personalized believing in a personal
Lord and Savior, once that takes place in
the human breast, they don't fool with that
fellow anymore.
The Lord God Almighty witnesses within his soul
something has happened there, and he belongs to
God, and God to him.
You don't have to feed him on a
nipple and run around with lukewarm watered-down
milk for him.
He grows in grace because he's had that
personalized individual experience of knowing it means I.
Oh, but blessed Lord Jesus, blessed Lord Jesus,
thou didst come on a mission.
Our trembling hearts tell us thou shouldst have
come with pleasing eyes to be our judge.
Thou shouldst have come as our executioner to
put to death such moral vermin as crawl
over the face of the earth, polluting each
other and ourselves, that thou didst not come
to condemn the world.
Thou didst come that the world through thee
might be saved.
What can we say, Lord, to thank thee,
O gentle Savior?
How can we borrow language to thank thee?
For this thy dying sorrow and pity without
end.
We thank thee, Lord Jesus.
Lord Jesus, we won't fight about thee, and
we won't argue about hypotheses.
We will only kneel and say, My Lord
and my God, we have found him of
whom Moses and the prophets did write, Jesus,
the Son of Mary.
The Son of God.
We have found him, hallelujah.
We have found him.
We thank thee.
We pray thee for the friends present tonight.
We thank thee for those who responded last
week.
Lord, we pray thee tonight, thou grant that
there may be those who will go out
of this place now with a solemn, lasting
conviction that this means the personal, individual person,
the one, knowing, knowing, knowing that it was
for them he came this way.
Blessed Jesus, help us as we wait upon
thee just a little longer tonight, in the
name of Christ.