Part 11 (1/2)
”What must I do to be saved?” You must do something, but there are many things that we are doing that will not save us. If you expect to be saved, in the first place, do not depend on your own goodness. ”All your righteousnesses are but as filthy rags.” Do not count on your own decency. No man was ever saved that way. I challenge you to find one single one. I was holding a meeting some years ago and I met a young fellow who told me he was good enough without Jesus Christ. Of course he was not saved. A man who says that virtually tells Christ that He has misunderstood his case altogether and that Calvary was a wasted tragedy so far as he himself is personally concerned.
Neither will you be saved trusting in the other man's badness. I know what some of you are saying to yourselves as I preach. You are telling yourselves one of the oldest lies that was ever told. You are saying, ”I would be a Christian but there are so many hypocrites in the Church.” How many men give that as a reason, but it is no man's reason. And I never knew one man to be saved by it. Believe me, the shortcomings and the sins of my brother are mighty poor things to depend on for my own personal salvation.
Again, you will not be saved by seeking an easy way. You will never win by catering to your own pride and cowardice. I was conducting a revival in a Texas city some years ago. At the close of one of the services a young lady came forward to shake hands with the preacher.
As she did so she said, ”I am going to become a Christian.” I congratulated her upon her decision, but she answered, ”Oh, I do not mean right now. I mean I am going to be very soon.”
”You see,” she continued, ”it is like this: I am going in a few days to visit some of my relatives that live way back in the country. There is going to be a revival nearby. It will be easy for me to make the decision there because n.o.body knows me. But here it is different.
Everybody knows me here and I simply haven't the courage to come out and take an open stand for Jesus Christ.” She went into the country as she planned but she was not saved. Of course not. n.o.body ever found salvation by catering to his own cowardice and pride and seeking an easy way.
”What must I do to be saved?” There is an answer to this question. It is an answer that is absolutely dependable. There is nothing in all the world of which I am more sure than I am of the correctness of the answer to this question. I am as sure of it as I am of my own existence. I am as sure of it as I am of the fact of G.o.d.
I wonder if you are interested to know the answer. Remember that it is the answer to your supreme question. It is the answer to the most important question that was ever asked. It is the most important that you will ever be called to act upon in this world. Does the prospect of an answer quicken your heartbeat? Does it shake you out of your lethargy into intensest interest? It ought to if it does not. For the answer that I give is not the answer of a mere speculator or dreamer.
It is the answer of inspiration and it is an answer whose truth has been tested by the personal experience of countless millions. ”What must I do to be saved?” Answer: ”Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”
What is it to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? It is to believe that Jesus Christ can do what He claims to do and what He has promised to do and to depend on Him to do it. Mr. Moody tells us how that he was in his cellar one day when he looked up and saw his little girl making an effort to see him. She could not because it was dark in the cellar.
”Jump,” said Mr. Moody, ”Daddy will catch you.” And instantly the little girl jumped. Now, that was faith. That was believing on her father. So the jailer believed on the Lord Jesus Christ. He depended upon Him then and there for salvation.
And what happened? He was saved. That very moment Christ came into the man's heart and he became a new creation. He became possessed of a new joy. He became possessed of a new tenderness.
Did you notice what he did? He took water and washed the stripes of the preachers. Paul and Silas were bleeding when they came to the prison but the jailer did not care. But now that he had found Christ he has already begun to be a partaker of the divine nature. A new love has come to him. He has become tender where he was cruel before. Even so does the power of Jesus Christ make men over.
Now, this question: do you want to be saved? If you do you can be.
It's the surest thing in all the world. It is as sure as the fact that night follows day. It is more sure than the fact that if you sow wheat you will reap it, that if you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ you shall be saved. Test the matter now and you will know the blessed fact in your own experience.
XII
THE MOTHER-IN-LAW--NAOMI
It is thoroughly refres.h.i.+ng to come upon this exquisite bit of literature called ”Ruth.” It follows, as you know, immediately after the bloodstained stories we read in Judges. It shows that while there was war and confusion and hate there was also friends.h.i.+p and love and romance. It is a bit of exquisite beauty elbowed on either side by ugliness. This delightful story comes to us like a glad surprise. It is like finding a spring bubbling up in the desert. It is like plucking roses amidst ice bergs. It is like finding a violet in the very crater of a volcano.
I hope you have read the Book of Ruth and are familiar with it. If you haven't you have slighted one of the sweetest and tenderest stories ever told. If you haven't you have neglected about the most delicate and winsome idyl to be found in ancient or modern literature. I have read some good literature, first and last. I have read poetry that lifted the heart and ”set the soul to dreaming.” I have read prose strong as granite and songful as a mountain brook. But I confess to you, if I wanted to find a finer piece of literature than the book of Ruth, I would be at a great loss to know where to search.
The author sets you down at once amidst strange scenery. And the characters, while genuinely human, are also full of the witchery of romance and poetry.
Here is the story. The rains have failed in the Bethlehem country and the harvests have been exceedingly meager. A certain little family composed of husband, wife and two children, is having a hard fight to keep the wolf from the door. Elimelech, the husband, can find no work and Naomi, the wife and mother, ”kneads hunger in an empty bread tray,”
and goes through the daily torture of being asked for bread that she is not able to supply.
Then one dark day the husband comes home utterly discouraged. He takes up the discussion where it was left off the day before. ”Yes,” he says, ”there is nothing else to do. There is no bread in the land.
There has been rain in Moab. We can go there. I do not know how they will receive us, but at any rate, they can only kill us and that is better than starvation.”
And Naomi's sad face becomes a shade sadder and she says, ”The will of the Lord be done. But I had so hoped that we might be able to remain in the land of our fathers. You see, my dear, it is not of myself that I am thinking. We have two boys. We do not want to rear them in Moab.
Moab, I know, is not far off physically, but it is a long way morally.
If we go there we may lose our children. The time may even come when they will break the law of Moses and marry among the Moabites.”
But, hard as it was for her to consent, at last she was driven into it by sheer starvation. And we see the pathetic little family scourged by hollow-eyed hunger from the land of their fathers into the land of the heathen Moabites. Just what their reception was there we are not told.
However, I am quite sure that they were received more kindly than they had expected. Their want and their own kindness seemed to have opened the hearts of the strangers among whom they went to live. Certain it is that the husband and father was able to find sufficient work to keep from actual starvation. By and by times grew better. The pinch of poverty let up, and they began to feel somewhat at home in the land of their adoption.
But the boys were playing with the children of the Moabites. Of course they were. All children are alike. They know no barriers of kindred, of cla.s.s or of religion. A child is the true democrat. Sad to say, we soon train him out of this. But he is a thorough democrat by nature.