I come to you today, friends, with a
burden upon my heart.
It's a great burden indeed, because I know
this message, from personal experience, can change the
rest of your life.
Hear me now as I bring it before
you.
I pray God's Spirit will take it and
make a difference in your life for you
with it.
God makes a statement in Ezekiel 18.4
that pertains specifically to you, friend.
Hear now as God's speaking to you, and
you better pay attention.
Behold, all souls are mine, as the soul
of the Father.
So also the soul of the Son is
mine.
The soul that sinneth, it shall die.
That means hell and its misery awaits every
individual who dies in his or her sins.
No exceptions here, friends.
The soul that sins shall die.
That means eternal damnation and ruin for all
eternity by the second death in the lake
of fire.
The least little sin you ever did, friend,
from your youth up till now, will send
you straight to hell.
Listen, you have an adversary who absolutely hates
you.
He hates Christ.
He hates the very name of Jesus.
And he hates all men and women who
have taken the name of Christian.
And so he hates you with a raging
passion and a seething envy.
And the devil will stop at nothing to
destroy you.
And he will not stoop too low to
entice you into moral failure and even suicide.
Satan lurks in the shadows of your life
like a serpent hides among the rocks waiting
for his best opportunity to poke out his
head and strike his victim.
Satan will take a good man like King
David and give him rest from all his
enemies and peace in his household and riches
and reputation and extra sleep upon his sofa
and too much self-reliance just so he
can place a naked Bathsheba within his eyesight
to have him stop just enough to gaze
upon her naked flesh long enough to arouse
his passions and lust until he is inflamed
by them.
So David will stop at nothing now to
satisfy his sensual cravings even adultery and murder
will no longer out of the ballpark with
him.
But the hiss of Satan bites the nighttime
air with the victory of being instrumental in
the fall of a good man to his
hurt.
Satan will lie in wait for you, friend,
and rob you of your sleep and steal
your nerve with life's worries and unforeseen disappointments
to bring you down emotionally and spiritually to
the place of sin and grievously against the
very Christ who bled and died for you.
And the hiss of the serpent will bite
your nighttime air with the victory of making
you his victim.
You can bet your bottom dollar, friend, that
the devil is coming for you.
The tale of my message today is the
devil at your door.
He'd like nothing more than to destroy your
family and ruin your testimony and clutch you
in his claws while he drags you down
to hell.
I had a very vivid dream some time
back that woke me up in the middle
of the night.
It was so real and vivid.
I dreamed the devil was traveling at lightning
speed across a crowded football stadium to end
up in a back room behind closed doors
with a well-dressed young evangelist.
And the young evangelist had his hand extended
in a handshake and in the palm of
that young man's hand was a single claw
from a hoof.
A deal was made and worldwide fame was
given.
If only the gospel would be compromised.
The devil knows how to bring you down,
friend, and he will get you to give
a little one way or another if you're
not on your guard continually.
George Whitefield, the great British evangelist, was bothering
the devil in his awakening ministry in London
preaching to 30,000 people in the open
air at a time.
And many unconverted ministers in the Church of
England were envious and furious and frustrated by
the young Whitefield.
They had closed their pulpits to him and
they sought ways to get rid of him.
The Bishop of London suggested to them that
if they wanted to put a stop to
George Whitefield, all they had to do was
to make him a bishop.
But that didn't work for young Whitefield.
He'd rather have Christ than a title.
Some men are put out of service to
God by promotion.
Some men are put out of service to
God by success.
Yes, sir, the devil's coming for you, bud,
and you don't see it coming.
Let there be a final judgment for all
mankind, for every mother's son will stand before
God and give an account of himself.
I feel sorry.
It makes me sick to my stomach for
the sleepy-headed pastor, lazy in his ministry
and protective of his reputation, with the blood
of his congregation on his hands for failing
to warn them.
A holy God declares, The soul that sinneth,
it shall die.
Why won't he tell them that truth?
Why does he hide hell and its punishments
from them?
Why doesn't he say that hell and its
torments await every individual outside of Christ, redeeming
blood?
God spoke plainly in Ezekiel about the watchman's
duty to warn the souls of men.
When I say unto the wicked, O wicked
man, that thou shalt surely die, if thou
dost not speak to warn the wicked from
his way, that that wicked man shall die
in his iniquity, but his blood will I
acquire at thine hand.
I tell you, friends, how you can spot
a false prophet at the judgment.
He'll be standing there with bloody hands, and
his baptized congregation will be screaming and hollering
in hell.
I'm here to tell you, friends, you better
get the wax out of your ears.
I'm going to be honest with your souls
today.
Like we say in the South, I'm going
to give you the oil straight from the
can.
You hear me now when I say, the
soul that sinneth, it shall die.
You hear me now when I say, the
devil's out to get you.
When you made a public profession of Christ,
what you did was to abandon the sins
you could get along with best without.
For years you've been carefully concealing the ones
you couldn't live without, but they're stacking up
against you now, and all it takes is
for a man to commit one little sin
to qualify for God's declaration that the soul
that sinneth, it shall die.
One sin, friend, can bring you down.
You're standing upon a bridge, and on one
side is heaven, and the other side is
hell, and you're a smack dab in the
middle, and your time is running out, for
the devil is hard at your heels, ready
to pounce.
You must decide.
It's high time you lump your sins in
one big pile on that bridge, stack them
there, and take a torch to that bridge,
and say, I will follow Jesus.
No turning back.
And once you do that, friends, biblical repentance
is when the love of sin dies.
You must repudiate it, turn from it, all
of it, and forsake it, and cast yourself
upon a bleeding and dying Christ, and believe
on Him, and saving faith means you take
Jesus, take Jesus as your Lord, as well
as your Savior.
Anything less than this isn't salvation, for when
a man is saved, he undergoes change.
The Spirit of God comes and implants a
new disposition in him for holiness.
He may still slip along the way and
go into some backsliding, but the good shepherd
will come and pick him up, and dust
him off, and set him back, because he's
always on the narrow way.
He's always seeking heaven's way.
He always wants a better way.
Don't be fooled by the devil, friend.
He'll get you in the end.
I've seen people near the end of their
journey go to the devil in smoke and
ruin, but believe me when I say the
soul that sinneth, it shall die.
You must get to Christ, and get under
His blood.
In Revelation, we read, unto Him that loved
us and washed us from our sins in
His own blood.
I've seen families ruined by the devil.
I had a good Christian friend who was
a leader in his church, and he had
a good testimony as a Christian within his
community.
He had a loving wife and three adorable
little children.
We would get together often for lunch, and
he always just wanted to talk about Jesus
and share with me Bible verses that had
impacted him that week.
He was one of those individuals that when
you were with him, he made you thirsty
for Jesus.
And as his success in business grew, so
did his passion for his business, and we'd
have lunch, and oddly, he no longer wanted
to talk about Jesus anymore.
He just wanted to talk about work and
talk about how much money he was making
and how he could travel now and buy
this and that now and do this and
that for his family now.
The world was crowding out his love for
Jesus.
Well, this man hired a pretty new secretary
who was half his age, and it wasn't
long that we all found out he had
fallen into an adulterous relationship with this woman.
His moral failure broke up his family, and
his marriage ended in divorce, and all he
once held dear was taken from him.
He, who was my biggest inspiration, became my
biggest warning.
You can't live, friend, with one foot with
God and the other playing footsie with the
world, a divided heart is proof positive of
a backslidden heart.
If you call yourself a Christian and you
love your family, then please, I beg you,
rededicate your life to Christ today.
Get serious with God, friend, and he will
get serious with you.
Get down on your knees in a quiet
place alone with the Almighty and admit your
laziness and confess your sinfulness and ask him
to make you the person he knows you
can be by his grace.
Ask God Almighty to put up a hedge
around you and your family and to seal
it with the blood of his Son to
keep the devil out of your home and
to keep the devil out of your life
and to make you a watchman who does
not go to sleep on his watch.
Don't give the devil an inch, friend, because
if you do, he will take a mile
off your hide.
My friend traded his family for a lust
-filled affair.
Maybe you are walking a chalk line with
God and the dividing lines getting fuzzy between
good and evil and right and wrong and
you're slipping on the other side.
Things are getting blurred.
It's not too late, friend, to turn back
to God now and give yourself wholeheartedly to
Him in submission to Him and surrender your
all to the Lordship of Christ Jesus.
Charles Finney, in his book, Lecture on Revival,
speaks the backslider in heart who desires to
repent and return to God.
Finney quotes Hosea 10-12.
Break up your fallow ground, for it is
time to seek the Lord till He come
and reign righteousness upon you.
Finney goes on to say the Jews were
a nation of farmers.
Scripture, therefore, commonly draws illustrations from that line
of work and from scenes farmers and shepherds
would know well.
So when the prophet Hosea addresses Israel as
a nation of backsliders, reproving their idolatry and
threatening them with the judgments of God, he
uses fallow ground as his illustration.
Fallow ground is ground once farmed but which
now lies waste.
It must be broken up again before it
is ready to be planted.
Sometimes your heart becomes matted down, hard and
dry, and fall into waste.
It'll bear no fruit until it is broken
up.
It is this softening of the heart, making
it feel the truth, which the prophet calls
breaking up your fallow ground, so says our
friend Finney.
Oh dear friend, don't play with that devil's
fire that inflames you and ultimately will ruin
you.
Jesus, the good shepherd, is on the lookout
for his straying sheep.
Call upon him now, friend, and break up
the fallow ground of your sin-laden heart
and ask the Christ who saved you to
come rescue you and deliver you and carry
you back upon his strong shoulders.
Let me pray for you now, friend.
Great God, I beseech you for your mercy
and grace.
We need your power from above.
We need your protective blood.
Say in your heart, friend, say this, friend,
say, Lord Jesus, I give it all to
you, all I have I give to thee.
I ask you to watch over me, make
me the person you know I can be.
Come, Lord Jesus, and change my life.
I lay it all on your altar.
I lay everything before thee.
Oh, I pray these things, friends, in the
strong name of Jesus.
Amen.
And dear friend, sing with me in your
heart.
Sing with me in your heart, friend.
I have decided to follow Jesus.
No turning back, no turning back.
The world behind me, the cross before me.
No turning back, no turning back.
Hallelujah!
Blessed Jesus!