Having introduced our subject already, namely the Resurrection,
Christ's and Ours, which is to comprise a
study of this mammoth 1 Corinthians 15, I
want to confine myself this evening to a
kind of general introduction to the theme itself.
I believe that it is quite important for
us to see what a strategic place the
resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ holds, not
only in the Christian faith, but in Christian
experience too, and in Christian hope.
But it is true to say that this
and the doctrine of the person of our
Lord Jesus Christ, the doctrine of his full
deity and atonement, these three have been very
especially attacked by various people throughout the course
of human history, and I thought it might
be helpful if we just tried to see
things in context as we come to examine
the remarkable chapter that we have before us.
I would begin then by saying again that
the 15th chapter of 1 Corinthians is of
monumental significance to our entire Christian faith.
Both doctrinally and practically, its importance simply cannot
be overrated.
Having first established the indubitable fact of our
Lord's resurrection, the Apostle Paul then points forward
with great confidence, with joy and anticipation, he
points forward to the certainty of the resurrection
of the Lord's people.
Now I would like you to notice that
that is the order in the New Testament,
and it's a very important order.
It is important to grasp the fact that
the prospective resurrection of the people of God
is related to, is based upon, and is
guaranteed by the glorious historical resurrection of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
The foundation and the mainspring of our hope
does not lie in the seasonal cycle, that
spring follows fall and winter, or anything like
that.
Neither does it rest upon any subjective experience
of ours, though if we believe in Christ
risen, we shall have certain personal and subjective
experiences, most significantly the experience of regeneration.
But the hope of our resurrection lies four
square upon the fact that he is risen.
If he is not risen, you and I
have no hope of resurrection.
But if he is risen, and we are
properly related to him, our resurrection is as
good as done.
I believe that's the language, that's the focus,
that's the point of view taken in the
New Testament.
This being so, then, it will be readily
obvious that the resurrection of Jesus Christ himself
is the main artery of our Christian faith.
Not in isolation, of course.
None of you would jump to that conclusion,
but let me say it, let me say
the possibility.
We are never thinking of the resurrection of
our Lord Jesus as something hanging in midair,
unrelated to what has gone before, and what
is coming after.
Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, in the opening
verses here, puts it all in its proper
context.
Christ became man.
He was born, he lived, he died, he
was buried.
Then he arose again, and he arose again
in order to ascend to the Father's right
hand, and to involve himself in his session
there which is unending.
And it is because of that, that we
are able to come into the presence of
God tonight, and have hope to enter the
presence of God at last, and share his
glory.
Because he ever lives to make intercession for
us, he is risen from the dead, he
is ascended up on high, he ever lives
to make intercession for us.
Therefore, he is able to save to the
uttermost those that come to God by him.
Now, we need to see, then, the resurrection
in its context.
It is the first movement towards our Lord's
glorification.
His humiliation has come to an end.
Oh, he has many enemies still, but they
can't touch him.
They can't wound his body anymore, his physical
body.
They can wound his people, and they can
defend him, but they cannot rob him of
his ultimate glory.
He has now taken that first step toward
the ultimate, and one day he will appear
in glory ineffable, glory the kind of which
we have never, never yet dreamt of.
Now, since the resurrection occupies such an important
place in the faith of the Christian, it
is obvious that it should be found everywhere
in the New Testament, and it is.
I would like to remind you that there
are only a few, one, two, three, four,
five of the shortest writings in the New
Testament that don't mention the resurrection by name,
and even they presuppose it, and in total
they only come to seven chapters.
They are Paul's letter to the Philemon.
He doesn't mention the resurrection by name there,
though we know, of course, that Paul, the
writer of this letter to the Corinthians, believed
wholeheartedly in it, and that there was no
gospel without it.
Then, too, Peter doesn't mention it, but Peter
certainly mentions it in other places, so that
Peter unquestionably believes in the resurrection, and it
is again presupposed in his second epistle.
In two and three John, comprising just two
chapters between them, it is not mentioned, but
John most certainly mentions it, and in his
first epistle, in beginning of chapter two, he
has some, and elsewhere, he has some great
things to say about the resurrection of our
Lord.
And then again Jude.
Jude does not mention it by name, but
there it is in the gospel, in the
New Testament, in the Gospels, in the epistles,
everywhere.
It is there in the background, if it
is not specifically in the foreground.
Even so, during the course of history, this
along with every other major tenet of our
faith, but with some in particular, it has
been subjected to ridicule and disbelief.
Previous ages like our own have also found
the gospel of Christ to be a stumbling
block, and especially the doctrine of the resurrection.
Now, I would like to, just to try
and recapture some of that hostile atmosphere tonight.
In order to see the glory of the
resurrection, in order to recognize its significance, you
see, the enemy invariably sees the strong points
of the Christian faith.
And the enemy only attacks something that is
worth attacking.
And in attacking the resurrection of our Lord
Jesus Christ, the enemy was attacking something that
he knew to be strategic.
Now, how have people attacked or denied the
fact of our Lord's resurrection, and the doctrine
that is based upon that fact?
First of all, some people have queried the
trustworthiness of the New Testament records themselves.
Now, you are familiar with this, and I
don't need to dwell upon it at any
great length.
But it is important to notice, some people
have attacked the resurrection by saying that the
records that we have of the resurrection are
really not reliable.
And if the records are not reliable, well,
we can't be sure that there has been
a resurrection.
If those who report the fact of the
resurrection are shown to be false witnesses, or
if we can bring any reasonable suspicion in
relation to what they record or report, then
of course we are left in the nebulous
state of uncertainty.
This attitude has lingered despite the monumental work
of very competent scholars, proving the amazing accuracy
of Scripture, and the way in which writers
like Luke and Paul go to their sources
and report so accurately things that they do
report.
Now, this skepticism prevails, for example, in the
attitude of folk who have come to be
known over the last number of years as
form critics.
Let me read to you a few lines
from Dr. Meryl C.
Tenney, who in one of his books wrote
in this way concerning the form criticism, as
it is called, from its German source, Formgeschichte.
Dr. Meryl Tenney writes, Recent literary objections have
been focused on the Formgeschichte method of documentary
study.
Formgeschichte, or form criticism, as it is called,
advances the hypothesis that the Gospels consist of
individual anecdotes of the life of Jesus, collected
and organized in a theological framework supplied by
the writers.
The Gospels are thus, says Dr. Tenney, according
to these people, the products of the Church,
designed for homiletical or liturgical purposes, and they
are in no sense critical biographies.
Consequently, they contain a large amount of pious
commentary and legend, which may have had didactic
and devotional value for their time, but which
cannot be classed as an exact transcript of
what really happened.
Now, Dr. Meryl Tenney is not giving his
own views there, he is giving the views
of the form critics, a school of critics.
Now, here you notice the trustworthiness of Scripture
is attacked, and it is attacked in a
very special way.
It's attacked on the alleged basis that it
was never meant to be an exact statement
of things.
No part of Scripture was meant really to
give you a record, an exact record of
anything.
What you have in Scripture is a number
of anecdotes, of little stories brought together about
this and that, having liturgical or a devotional
value.
So the Gospel writers are not recording facts
per se, but they're giving us nice thoughts.
And provided the thoughts are lovely thoughts, well,
they have a devotional value.
They give you something to think about, something
to chew on, but whether they're accurate or
not is neither here nor there.
Suffice it now to say that this criticism
is simply not true to the facts.
Any objective reader of the Gospels, the Book
of Acts, and of the Epistles, I believe,
will have to come to the conclusion that
the Gospels do state facts, and do record
events as events.
We would find it very...
and not only that, they do so with
accuracy.
I suggest to you that we would find
it very difficult to find four witnesses to
any event who would write their respective reports
with such unanimity, such accuracy, and sometimes reference
to detail as we encounter in the four
Gospels.
It would be very difficult if four people
who were in this service this morning were
to write a report of this morning's service
that would so converge and make one whole
as the four separate records of our Lord's
life and death do, as given us by
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
And sometimes they go right down to some
nitty gritties.
As Peter, for example, when he records how
the linen clothes were lying in the empty
tomb of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to
the Gospel of John, he gives us some
very specific and pointed details which can only
be given by someone that has really noticed
things.
And so also are the sermons in the
Book of Acts.
They're not anecdotes.
I just can't understand anybody saying that who
has read Peter's sermon on the day of
Pentecost, who has read Stephen's sermon for which
he was martyred.
Was Stephen martyred because of a bunch of
anecdotes?
I tell you not.
He was martyred because of his exposition of
the Old Testament scriptures and its application to
the people that were listening to him.
These were not anecdotes.
These were not stories that he was telling.
He was expounding the Word of God and
applying it to life as the truth of
God.
And the same, of course, goes for the
Apostle Paul's preaching in the Book of the
Acts of the Apostles, whether it be in
one place or another.
The case against the Gospels being accurate is
not so much objective and scientific as a
matter of fact, but what it is is
a subjective and philosophical presupposition.
It is not based on evident realities.
It is based on a philosophical point of
view.
Now that's one thing then.
People have queried the trustworthiness of the records
of the resurrection.
And so they tell us that whatever we
have in the New Testament, these people could
never have meant us to believe that Jesus,
who died on the cross and was buried
in a tomb, actually came out again and
was seen and touched and handled and heard.
They never meant to say that.
Well, what do you think?
But the second thing.
Others have tried by various means to explain
away the New Testament references to the alleged
historical and actual resurrection of the crucified slain
and buried Lord.
They've tried by various means to explain these
things away.
Not now so much to say oh, they
didn't mean to say that Jesus was risen.
Perhaps they did mean it.
But we would rather explain the thing spiritually
than historically.
The spiritualizers in the church have invariably been
dangerous people.
Now, how has this been done?
Well, let me remind you that it has
been done almost from the second century anyway,
probably before, and it has been done right
up to our own day and age.
It has been done tonight.
A way back in the second century, a
man named Celsus saw the belief of the
disciples in the resurrection of Jesus as simply
a piece of self-deception.
Now, this is unbelievable, but this is what
he said.
It was simply a piece of self-deception
and intentional fraud.
Now, I don't propose to attempt an answer
to all of these, but I think you
will see how very difficult that would be
to prove.
Because if there is one thing that stands
out about the writers of the New Testament
and the preachers of the New Testament, it
is that they were good men.
They were not all clever men.
They were not all school men, college-trained
men.
But they were good men.
They were holy men.
They were men who were indwelt by the
Holy Spirit.
They were men who believed in God and
died for God, having lived for Him.
And it is very difficult psychologically to say
that at one point in their life they
became liars and deceivers.
Indeed, we had reference to this this morning.
And our brother Mr. Charles Colson has in
his book on Loving God a chapter which
is very very relevant to this, how Watergate,
the Watergate experience, was to him the means
for whereby he came to realize the importance
of the resurrection.
And the significance of it that the disciples
could not have figured, could not have made
it up.
Because they couldn't keep, as he mentioned this
morning, he referred to it, they couldn't keep
a lie for so long a time and
be prepared to die and lay down their
lives and go to all the world to
preach what they knew to be a fabrication
of the truth.
You can't do that.
You may be able to do it for
a while, but sooner or later, as they
say, it has to come out.
Someone or other will bring it out.
In the 19th century, to jump over the
centuries, we have the famous Friedrich Strauss, who
explained away the objective fact of the resurrection
as reported and witnessed by the gospel writers,
and who put in in its place some
kind of subjective experience, which the disciples according
to him must have had, and which they
explained in terms of the resurrection.
Now, Strauss was quite clear about this.
These men in the gospels had a great
experience of God.
And whoever Jesus was, through Jesus, God came
to these men and something happened to them,
something big happened to them.
And they explained all this in terms, they
explained the resurrection in terms of this experience.
They weren't witnesses to the resurrection as they
claimed to be, but this arose out of
their experience of God brought about through Jesus.
He claimed that the whole thing was subjective,
in other words.
There was no objective resurrection, but the resurrection
was purely in their minds.
They couldn't understand their own experience, save in
terms of the terms they used to describe
the resurrection.
Let me quote from his book, Leben Jesu.
Now, this is the view of Strauss, not
mine, but listen to how he puts it.
A powerful impression of the magnificent personality of
Jesus will doubtless have been capable of inspiring
his immediate disciple to visions.
There arose in the disciples automatically, he says,
the psychological need to resolve the contradiction between
the final fate of Jesus and their own
assured opinion of him.
Thus, the Jesus who had been executed in
shame was not lost to them, but remained
and retained.
He had only, they thought, entered through death
into his messianic glory.
How easy it is finally, he said, how
easy it is finally to imagine that these
feelings were occasionally intensified in a purely subjective
fashion in individuals.
I'm sorry to say, he adds, especially women.
A little bias, isn't it?
They were imagined to become real visions, whereas
on others the sight of an unknown person
occasionally perhaps made the impression of a revelation
from God, or the very appearance of Jesus
himself as risen.
And so he builds his case on that.
And there have been hundreds and thousands of
people during the years who have been influenced
by this man.
Let me pass on.
Adolf von Harnack, again in the 19th century,
wrote quite a lot about this.
He attempted to explain away the fact of
the resurrection by a compound of two elements.
He says that following upon the death of
Christ, Peter had a vision.
Peter had a vision.
That vision, he says, was inspired by what
Peter saw on the Mount of Transfiguration.
Now there's no evidence for this at all.
It's amazing, you know, people will believe it.
But Peter had a vision.
And the vision found its roots, its source,
back in what he saw on the Mount
of Transfiguration.
He saw Jesus glorified.
And the vision was so real to Peter,
it became infectious.
Everybody caught the vision.
And Peter shared it.
And they all came to believe that Jesus,
whom Peter saw on the Mount of Transfiguration
as glorified, they all came to believe that
Jesus was still alive.
Have I got a D.D. for writing
that?
I don't know.
But people have got degrees for writing that
kind of thing.
From time to time, some objectors to the
gospel testimony have claimed that the disciples suffered
from some pathological condition or other that gave
rise to a hallucination or hallucinations.
And they have deliberately said that when they're
talking about the actual, physical, bodily resurrection of
Jesus, they were really hallucinating.
Now again, I'm not able adequately to reply
to any of these, but let me throw
out to you one or two thoughts.
It is very rarely, if ever, that hallucinations
arise out of such circumstances as those recorded
in the gospels in which the disciples claim
to have seen and witnessed Jesus to be
risen from the dead.
You may hallucinate if you're unwell and the
atmosphere is very heavy and drowsy and various
other phenomena combine together.
But you will notice that the people who
witnessed to the resurrection of our Lord Jesus
Christ, even though in one or two places
they are in an atmosphere that could have
been a little heavy, as in the upper
room when the windows were closed and barred,
if there were any windows, the doors were
barred anyway.
But they do not only witness that Jesus
appeared in the upper room when the doors
were closed and barred, and where perhaps the
air was a little heavy.
They witnessed to the fact that they saw
Jesus alive and risen from the dead early
in the morning when the wind of the
sea was blowing in their faces.
They've seen Him in a myriad life situations,
in many life situations.
And not only have they seen Him, but
they've touched Him.
And they've heard Him.
He spoke to them.
And He commanded them to go to all
the world and preach the gospel.
And they went.
Which means, of course, they really believed what
He said.
They not only heard Him, but they believed
Him.
And they believed that He was Lord.
It's very difficult.
It's impossible, I would say, to make anything
of the nature of a genuine hallucination out
of the kind of records that we have
in the New Testament.
The so-called existentialist views of men, as
represented by people like Bultman and others, are
not far removed from some of these theories
already mentioned.
It's alleged by them that the tragedy of
Calvary was overcome for the disciples by some
leap of faith, taken in what they call
the existential moment.
But we must not understand their reference to
the resurrection in any literal sense.
They don't believe that it happened literally.
What they mean is this, that one, in
one moment, somehow or other, people became suddenly
and strangely aware of the resurrection of our
Lord Jesus Christ, all of the fact that
He is alive.
An existential encounter, that it's something quite different
from what we have in the New Testament.
They say they saw Him.
They say they heard Him.
And not only one person, not one particular
psychological type, but all types, men and women,
now an individual, now two, now ten, now
eleven, now five hundred at once.
And on one occasion, they tell us that
He cooked a meal for them, and that
meal was breakfast.
And I don't hallucinate about my food, I
don't know what about you.
Not a few have claimed that just as
you encounter, and this is something different, there
are some who have tried to be rather
religious about this, more religious than others.
Not a few have claimed that just as
you encounter theophanies, that is, appearances of God
under the guise of a human being, just
as you encounter theophanies in the Old Testament,
you remember how Joshua near Jericho, for example,
met a man.
He didn't know who it was.
It was the Lord appearing to him in
the guise of a man.
We refer to it as a theophany.
So too, that's what we have in the
resurrection.
God appearing, it's a theophany.
There's a sense in which that is true,
of course.
God did appear and appear as a man.
But there's a more vital sense in which
it is not true.
The thing that we are talking about is
He appeared in Christ, but the Christ in
whom He appeared bears the wounds of the
nail prints in His hands, and He's been
buried for three days and three nights, and
He's risen again.
Or some others have been, or very much
the same point of view, believe that what
really the apostles had was some sort of
vision, something like what Elijah had, I'm sorry,
Elisha had, and his servant after him.
You remember how Elisha near Dothan, and he
knew that the enemies were around Dothan, trying
to get him and to bring his life
to an end, and his servant was afraid.
And Elisha said to the servants, all right,
he says, they that before us are far,
far more than those that be against us.
And the young servant really thought Elisha was
off his nut.
Where are they?
And the young fellow looked out of the
moor, the multitude that were for Elisha and
his servant, they couldn't see anything.
Dear old Elisha went on his knees and
said to the Lord, oh Lord, he says,
open the eyes of a young man.
And the Lord opened his eyes and he
saw the chariots and the horses all around.
Now say some people, it's something like that.
But that's not what the writers of the
New Testament say.
What Thomas says is this, that he insisted
that he would not believe that Jesus was
risen if he could not put his finger
in the wound and thrust his hand into
his side.
He touched.
And there are others, I must come to
a close.
There are others who say that it was
some experience, like the experience of Isaiah's call
in chapter 6, something mystical, something strange, or,
if you like, something like a charismatic experience.
Now what is significant, of course, is this,
that Paul, the writer of this chapter, if
ever a man was sure of his call,
he was.
But he distinguished between his call and the
resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.
His call to the ministry was something quite
different from that which took place when Jesus
rose from the dead.
Not only that, Paul knew something about charismatic
experiences.
He tells the Corinthians that however much they
experience La Salelia speaking in tongues, he says,
I speak in tongues more than any of
you.
But he says, I don't do it in
public, but I do it, he says.
He knew what charismatic experiences were.
Nevertheless, he distinguished between all that and this.
Suffice it now to say that, concerning it,
it is noteworthy that all the witnesses to
the appearances of Jesus as risen from the
dead ultimately identify him in this way.
They had seen him before he died.
Many of them were with him, some of
them lived with him for over three years.
They got to know him.
They saw him die.
Some of them were there when he was
buried, saw him buried, saw the seal, the
Roman seal, put on the mouth of the
tomb.
And they couldn't understand things, they were bewildered.
They were shattered, even though Jesus had forewarned
them that all these things were going to
take place.
Yet they couldn't take it all in.
But on the morning of the third day,
they saw not only the seal rolled away
and the tomb to be empty, but they
met the risen Lord himself, saw him, heard
him, touched him, ate with him, got him.
So much so that the resurrection became an
integral part of their message, both in Jerusalem
where he was actually crucified.
And you see, we must get the challenge
of all this.
To preach that Jesus was risen in Jerusalem,
whose leaders had been largely responsible for his
crucifixion.
You see, this was a very dangerous thing
to do.
But they could not keep silence.
We cannot but speak the things that we
have seen and heard, says Peter.
We've seen him.
And not only did they speak about it
in Jerusalem, but they went to Rome.
And the great Apostle Paul could not be
silenced, could not be stopped until, as far
as him lay, he would make his ultimate
way to the very capital of the world,
the center of the world, Rome itself.
Now he didn't eventually get there as he
expected to get there, but he got there.
And he witnessed to the fact that Jesus
was risen there.
And he wrote a letter saying that to
the Roman Christians.
These attempts to deny the trustworthiness of the
records or of the testimony so unitedly and
consistently born to the resurrection of Jesus need
to be seen for what they really are.
Now I'm coming to a close.
They are subjective, subjective ideas concerning
the resurrection, and they're based not upon fact,
but upon a philosophy.
Now this is important.
The criticism of the records and of the
historicity of the New Testament concerning the resurrection
is not based on fact, it is based
on a philosophy, namely the philosophy that dead
men do not rise.
Have you ever seen a dead man rise?
No they don't, it doesn't happen.
And you see, because you and I haven't
seen it, because it is not the normal
thing that happens, on the basis of that
these people say it could not have happened.
Let me read to you from Tenney, a
few words again.
I've got a lot of help from him.
The scientific objection to the historicity of the
resurrection is founded on the axiomatic principle that
death is terminal.
The syllogism may be formulated as follows, he
says.
Dead men do not rise again.
Jesus was unquestionably dead, therefore he could not
have risen.
While it is true that according to ordinary
observations, as Tenney, death is final, such an
argument is utterly unsound, for it assumes the
impossibility of resurrection before any proofs are offered
and considered.
A truly scientific attitude would investigate all the
pertinent phenomena and evaluate them, rather than to
exclude arbitrarily any evidence that might bear upon
the subject.
Asserting that dead men do not rise, and
then rejecting the resurrection of Christ for that
reason, is just arguing in a circle.
Of course the dead do not usually rise,
for if they did, the miracle of Christ's
resurrection would lose its distinctive quality, and become
only one more of a series of common
occurrences.
If the resurrection proves to be an exception
to the ordinary cycle of human life, it
must be treated as a fact which may
call for a new explanation of experience.
All this brings us to this.
We are concerned for the truth.
What really happened on the third day?
We want to know, writes John Stott, what
actually happened.
What then are we to say to those
who declare that the resurrection is a myth?
And John Stott answers his own question.
We must say to them that the resurrection
myth is itself a myth.
That is, it's a popular idea without any
historical foundation.
It is said by some to be the
only respectable view to hold in a scientific
age.
But it is the very opposite, writes Stott,
for it can only be held by suppressing
the evidence.
The only historical evidence there is for what
happened after the death and burial of Jesus
is of the resurrection.
Of this there is abundant evidence at the
end of the gospels.
To this the early church bore witness clearly,
bravely, unfalteringly, unanimously.
There is no other evidence.
It is quite unscientific to ignore or reject
the only evidence there is and substitute another
story for which there is none.
To do so on the a priori ground
that it couldn't have happened is sheer obscurantism,
not science.
Now, my friends, I don't often do things
like this.
But I felt I had to do it
tonight.
And I want to do it because I
want to come to a point where you
and I can see the glory of this
chapter before us.
It shows the evidence for the resurrection.
But it does more than that.
It shows us that the resurrection for which
there is evidence is sufficient basis for faith
in God as revealed in Christ for time
and eternity.
And it shows that the resurrection of Christ
himself is the basis of a hope that
is undimmed by death.
Who was it who said that the empty
tomb became the cradle of Christian hope?
You see, by faith in the crucified Lord
Jesus Christ, we are made one with him.
It's a remarkable union, that between the Lord
Jesus and his people.
You may be a young Christian tonight, but
you know, you belong to the Lord Jesus
Christ in such a remarkable way that you
cannot be separated from him.
You are inseparable from him.
See, not only does the New Testament speak
of him as the Savior and his people
as the saved, you may possibly drive a
wedge between those two, at least linguistically, if
not actually.
But it also speaks of the vine and
the branch.
Well, you can also lop the branch off
the vine.
That is humanly speaking now.
It also speaks of Jesus as the shepherd
and his people as the sheep, of Jesus
as the king and his people as subjects.
But wait a moment, there is one analogy
which shows that Jesus and his people cannot
be separated.
He is the head, and we are the
body.
Carefully, the head of the body, the head.
And the body is not tacked on to
the head, it is an extension of the
head.
It is one organic whole, the head and
the body.
And you cannot separate the body, the corpus,
from the head.
Listen, my friend, the head of the church
is risen from the dead, is ascended upon
high, he is seated at the right hand
of the majesty and the glory from whence
he will come to judge the quick and
the dead, he is coming in all his
ineffable glory, the head is coming.
It is not long before the body will
share in the glory of the head.
Every member, every solitary member, black and white,
red and yellow, old and young, rich and
poor, cultured and illiterate, if you are a
believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, you are
a member of his body.
One day, though you be buried in a
tomb, or you go through a furnace and
be burned, your ashes will be gathered.
You and I will receive not only a
new body, but we shall be made spiritually
like him, as our body will resemble his,
and something of the glory of God in
Christ will become the portion of his body,
the church.
Hallelujah.
Is it your faith?
Is it your hope?
If it isn't, come to Christ tonight with
faith, trust him, rest upon him, yield to
him, give him yourself and give him your
all, and receive from him his all.
He never gives less than his all, and
his all includes.
I go to prepare a place for you,
and if I go to prepare a place
for you, I will come again and receive
you unto myself, that where I am there
you may be also.
To his name be all the glory and
the praise.
Amen.