By David Coory
Why Jesus had to die on the cross
The Bible from the very first book leads up to the death of Jesus on the cross at Calvary. It ends describing his glorious return to earth. This returning of Jesus Christ is to happen in these Last Days. I’m familiar with the signs of the return of Jesus, for he and the prophets foretold them in the Bible. They are all around us.
Why then did Jesus need to suffer and shed blood on a cross? He did it so that we might not have to suffer for our own sins. He atoned for them by his blood. That’s why his suffering is called The Atonement. There is an eternal law in this universe that requires an atonement for every hurt we do to another person. Sin is the hurting of another person. In other words, if we cause suffering or offence, we must suffer equally our self at some time in the future. Otherwise, God who is our Heavenly Father, would not be just.
An important condition to The Atonement of Jesus
There is an important condition to this atonement of Jesus. We must be humble enough to confess our sins and to forsake them. Otherwise we must pay the heavy price ourself. A day of judgement awaits all of us. The Bible talks about this constantly. The first Judgement will be at the time of our death, or when Jesus returns or. It will be too late then for us to repent. We need to do so now, before we die or before Jesus comes.
Now is the time to repent
So now is the time for us to repent, before it is everlastingly too late. Unless we are clean from the guilt of our sins, we cannot enter heaven with its light and happiness. Jesus said that no unclean person can enter heaven. His words apply to every one. There is no safety in numbers. Even if we are millionaires, we will certainly die. We need the blood of Jesus to atone for our sins. The blood of Jesus Christ is worth more to us than all the silver and gold in the world.
A spirit of Satan may whisper to us that we are leading a good life and have no serious sins to repent of. But when we read the Bible we see that we are being deceived. The Bible says, “Be not deceived, no fornicator, no idolater, no adulterer, no male prostitute, no sodomite, no thief, no greedy person, no drunkard, no slanderer, no swindler, will inherit the kingdom of God.” All these sins and any other sins must be repented of and forsaken. Repentance must be full and sincere. Heavenly Father cannot be deceived. Ask him to show you the uncleaness in your life as seen through his holy eyes.
Death-bed repentance is a myth. It is too late. You will have missed out forever on the glorious future that could have awaited you.
How to be forgiven of your sins by a loving Heavenly Father
God our Heavenly Father loves us dearly. At least as much as a parent loves his or her own children. That’s why he permitted his Son Jesus to shed his blood at Calvary and to die. Heavenly Father probably suffered as much as Jesus. Perhaps more so. What parent does not suffer when they see their own child suffer?
The love of our Heavenly father for us can be seen in the parable of the prodigal son that Jesus told. The son came back home from his sinful life to his father. The son was prepared to go and live with his father’s servants. His father would not let him. His father’s heart was too filled with love for his lost son. He just hugged him. He told the servants to put shoes on his feet and to put a ring on his finger, to kill the fatten calf and make merry. He told them, “My son who was lost has come home. The wanderer has returned.” The old man rejoiced. So does our Heavenly Father rejoice when we, one of his children, humble ourself before him and sincerely repent of our sins.
Repenting is a simple act. You can do it right now. The very moment you are willing to kneel down and humble yourself before your Heavenly Father and confess your sins, and mean it, he is willing and ready to receive you. He delights in forgiveness. It does not matter how vile your life has been. If you are willing to turn to God, He is willing to receive you. Jesus says, “There is joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons.”
Do not treat sexual sins lightly
Do not treat sexual sins lightly. God destroyed the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of sexual sins. (It was unjust for little children to grow up in such conditions.) Those sinners are still in the lost world of spirits which the Bible calls hell. Sexual sin is the great sin of today. It mocks the sanctity of the family.
Adultery does not carry the death penalty today as it did in the time of Jesus, but it remains a serious sin in the eyes of our loving God. It breaks up and destroys families. Innocent children suffer. Paul’s teaching in the Bible is clear, fornicators and adulterers who have not fully repented can never enter heaven. They must inhabit a lost world of darkness for eternity. They are forever cut off from glory of our Heavenly Father and Jesus.
Repent today if sexual sin is part of your life. Do not delay. Spirits of darkness will of course provide an excuse for you not to act, or place a fear in your mind. That’s their business, making excuses and creating fear. Satan’s job is to rock us off to sleep in a cradle of excuses and fears. But when we stand before Jesus on the Day of Judgement, and we all will, not one excuse will stand up to the light of eternity. We must blot out the guilt of our sins by the blood of Jesus Christ.
When we die, and our spirit body is freed from the flesh, we will have a perfect memory of every one of our unrepented sins. They will haunt us as the eternal centuries roll by in the darkness of hell, cut off from the love and light of our Heavenly Father. Jesus describes this world of hell as “outer darkness, where they will weep and grind their teeth.” The fire of hell is not literal. Heavenly Father is not sadistic. It describes the mental anguish of losing what might have been. It is a dreadful, endless state, compared to living in the glorious presence of a loving God. You would not want to be in hell. You are forever cut off from the light and joy of God. This is why we should lay everything aside until this greatest matter of our eternal happiness is settled.
Why there is evil in the world
You might think, “I cannot believe in a loving Heavenly Father who allows so much evil in the world.” But it is God’s gift to us of free will that makes evil possible. Freedom to choose for ourselves is the only thing that makes love possible, or goodness, or joy that is worth having. Our Heavenly Father is a God of love. Jesus said, “Be perfect, as your Heavenly father is perfect.” We cannot grow to be like him without freedom of choice, and the spiritual growth that comes from suffering in this temporary world. There is no other way.
Satan is the god of this world, along with the swarms of evil spirits that follow him. That is where evil in this world comes from. They influence men to disobey God.
But all innocent suffering and injustice will be made up on the Day of Judgement. God says, “I will wipe away all tears.” All who have died will be resurrected back to life. Little babies who have died will be resurrected and grow to their full stature. Even now, the spirit of every person who has ever died, is alive in the world of spirits. Those who died as children or who have repented, live in varying degrees of light and joy. Those who died in their sins, in varying degrees of darkness and misery.
Baptism, your entrance to heaven
After you have repented, if you choose to do so, continue to pray (just speak from the heart, as if your Heavenly Father were in the room listening) and read the Bible every day. You will eventually be guided by the Holy Spirit to loving believers. They will teach you and help you. Eventually you will be baptised. By being baptised you are making a solemn covenant with your Heavenly Father, publicly witnessing that you will continue to follow his son Jesus Christ.
You might have been christened as a baby, but true baptism is something you must choose for yourself. Innocent children cannot sin. True baptism involves immersing your whole body in water, just as Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist in the river Jordan at age 30. It is essential. Jesus taught this plainly. He said, “No one can enter the kingdom of heaven unless he is born anew, of water and of the Spirit.”
The water of baptism represents a washing away of all your past sins. Being immersed symbolises a burial of your old self. The coming up out of the water symbolises being born again.
You come up out of the water pure and clean. You are now ready to have hands laid upon your head and be given the Holy Spirit by a person who already has the Holy Spirit. Pray to your Heavenly Father to be certain that this person does have the Holy Spirit. Look for joy and peace and love in their personality and a zeal for Jesus Christ and for the word of God, the Bible.
You will then be on the pathway to eternal happiness, but you must endure to the very end. Satan will tempt you to return to sin. However the Holy Spirit will now be your constant companion and give you strength to resist. So will the Bible. Continue to read from it every day. You will come to love the word of God. It will help you to overcome any addictions. You will have the desire and power to do much good in the world. Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches. My Father is the gardener. He who abides in me and I in him will bear much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”
When the laying on of hands is done, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and remain with you forever, provided you do not drive Him away by returning to your sins. Up until this point, the Holy Spirit will have come and gone. But now you will have His peaceful influence and power always.
We love God more as we get to know him better, through the Bible and prayer. God the Father is a gracious God of love. What makes heaven so attractive is not the jewelled buildings, the musical choirs and the beautiful gardens, but the loving glorious presence of our God and Jesus Christ. The more we know of God, the more we love him.
We can become like Jesus
When we have the Holy Spirit to guide us, and repent fully and follow Jesus and surrender ourselves to him, everything that lies ahead of you is glorious. God’s promises are unfailing. “His love endures forever.”
When we die it gets even better. Paul tells us in the Bible, that these bodies we have now, so full of weaknesses and infirmity are “…to be raised again in glory and fashioned to his glorious body.” He means the glorious body of Jesus Christ.
As C.S. Lewis puts it, “If we will let Him, Jesus will make the lowliest of us, into a creature like himself. A dazzling, radiant, immortal being, pulsating with energy, joy, wisdom and love, far beyond what we can now imagine. Jesus is going to make good his word.”
The Bible says, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those who love him.”
Why it matters greatly what you believe
You might think it does not make much difference what we believe when it comes to religion. But that is wrong! Completely wrong! It might be true if we were only going to live 80 years. But we are going to live forever. Our whole eternity is profoundly affected by what we believe and act upon.
Believing a lie does not make it a truth. Suppose I go down to the port and there are two ships. One is sailing to my destination and the other is to another country. Suppose I board the wrong ship. When I’m out at sea I ask the captain when we will arrive at the place I want to go. He will say to me, “You are on the wrong boat.” If I then say to him. “But I believe this boat will take me to my destination,” he will think I’m a fool, and rightly so.
But that is exactly what people are doing. They have faith that their earnestly held beliefs will earn them a place in heaven. They have faith in their church or their minister.
You must have faith in Jesus Christ himself, and follow the path He has laid out in the Bible. Jesus said, “Not every one who says to me Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, only he who does the will of my Father in heaven.”
Jesus tells a parable of the ten virgins, only five made it to heaven. The five diligent ones.
“There is always hope for a person when he begins to think about eternity. If you are willing to confess your sins and admit that you have wandered from God, God is willing to receive you. The very moment you are willing to kneel down and humble yourself, that same moment your Father in heaven is willing and ready to receive you. He delights in forgiveness. It does not matter how vile you have been. If you are willing to come back, God is willing and ready to receive you.
Nearly every sinner has a false idea of God. He or she thinks God is not ready and willing to forgive them. But God is full of love and mercy. If the old father of the prodigal son had dealt in justice he would of barred the door and said to his son “You can not come into my house.” There is no father on earth who has as much love in his heart as the God the Father has for you. There is not a sinner on earth that God will not receive if he repents.”
Do not be concerned what your unbelieving friends will think of you. Unbelievers are headed for a lost world of darkness, unless they too believe and repent. You should try and save them, and be a fine example, but do not live as they do.
The life following Jesus Christ is the only happy one. Without it something is always lacking. The only way to be happy is to live the laws that Jesus gave us in the Bible.
How to be saved
It is not complicated. You do the will of our Heavenly Father by reading or hearing the Word of God, from the Bible. Then you must believe in and trust Jesus Christ his Son. Then you must sincerely repent of all past sins. You can repent today. The Bible teaches you what are sins if you are not sure. “Be not deceived, no fornicator, no idolater, no adulterer, no male prostitute, no sodomite, no thief, no greedy person, no drunkard, no slanderer, no swindler, will inherit the kingdom of God.”
Then you must pray for guidance from the Holy Spirit. If you continue to pray you will be led to believers and become baptised and then obtain the fire of the Holy Spirit by laying on of hands by someone who has the Holy Spirit.
Then we surrender our life over to the ‘Rock of Ages’ who is Jesus. You’ve probably heard the famous old hymn:
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide, myself in thee.”
We have all the proof any man could ask for. Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Some of the best men on earth at that time went and looked into his tomb and found it empty. Then Jesus was seen ten different times. He appeared to his followers for 40 days. Then in front of them all he ascended into heaven. Two angels appeared. What did they say? “Ye men of Galilee, this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.”
Repent today
Perhaps because your parents were long-lived people, you think you are going to live long also. How many are deceived in that way. There is that age-old lie and deception from Satan, “There is time enough to repent. Time enough to cry out to God.” Death-bed repentance is a myth. Satan will seal you his. Repentance must be sincere, or it cannot be accepted by God. Now is the time to repent. God must have time to test and prove your faithfulness to him.
This is vitally important. You should lay everything aside until this greatest question of your life, of time and eternity be settled. If you will take my advice you will not go to bed tonight before you repent and receive the joy of having your sins forgiven. You will never have more power than today to repent and be baptised.
But you have to reach out to him. Jesus said, “I stand at the door and knock.” But you have to open the door. Jesus is not going to force you against your will. He is going to draw you by his pure love.
Humbly repent of all past and current sins
Don’t be scornful. You must be humble. Jesus was humble, he said, Learn from me, for I am meek and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls.” Kneel humbly alone and pray to your Heavenly Father. Ask him to forgive your sins through the blood of His Son Jesus.
Sins are actions that offend or hurt another person, or offend God.
After being baptised you can have the peace of the Holy Spirit with you forever. The Holy Spirit of God will always lead us right. He never makes mistakes. Just open the door of your heart and let the Spirit come in.
It will be a hundred times better for you in this life, and in the life to come. But there is a price to pay. There are conditions. You must turn away from your sins. You must forsake your old sinful friends.
Who is it easier to serve – Jesus or Satan?
Some say it is a hard thing to serve God. Are they saying that Satan is a easy master? It is the devil who is the hard master. The Bible says, “The way of the transgressor is hard.” Look at the convict in prison, in the bloom of his manhood He’s been there five years and must remain for five years more. When he comes out of that miserable cell, he becomes a branded convict. Will that young man tell you way of the sinner has been easy?
Go ask the drunk, the slave of alcohol, who is hastening towards a drunken hell. Ask him if he has found the way of the transgressor easy. He will look at you with disbelief. No, the way of the transgressor is hard and gets harder and harder every day.
Ask the womaniser, the gambler, the drug addict. With one voice they will tell you that life has been very hard. “Whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.”
I’ve been in the Lord’s school for 35 years. I testify that I have found an easy master. Jesus said, “My yolk is easy and my burden light.”
“Come now, and let us reason together, us says the Lord, though your sins be a scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”
Go down to the lost world of darkness, to where the spirits are awaiting their resurrection and summon up one who has been there for 1000 years. Bring him up from the dark caverns of hell to tell of his woe and agony. He will tell you that it is not only hard in this life to follow Satan, but ten times harder in the life to come.
But go and ask the humbler follower of Jesus Christ, one who has been walking with him the last 20 years. Let him speak to you. Look into his eyes. There is the pure light from Calvary shining, flashing around his face. Let that man tell you of the peace and the joy he has in serving Jesus Christ. How the way is lighter and lighter as he journeys on. How his hopes become brighter and brighter as he nears his eternal home.
What if we could go up into the glory of heaven and bring down one that has been there for the last 1000 years. If he could come from the world of light and tell you of the joy and peace and the glory of the upper world. You will find there is a vast difference between a person who serves Satan and one who serves Jesus Christ.
Treat sin seriously. It is a fearful thing. It makes life dark. “Be not deceived. God is not mocked.” There will be no laughing when the reaping time comes. Cain would have given anything to change places with Abel when his reaping time came. We must learn to hate sin. Ask God today to forgive you and help you do right.
The Bible tells us of heaven with all its glories, but it also tells us of hell and all its horrors. You don’t hear much about hell today. The world of the lost. We don’t like to be reminded of hell. We are too educated for that. Men joke about it. Satan whispers the lie to us that there is no heaven, nor is there a hell. But the Word of God preaches it plainly. The fire of hell is not literal. God is not sadistic. But it is a dreadful state you will not want to be in. You are forever cut off from God. For no unclean person can enter heaven. What makes hell doubly terrible is the knowledge that we might have spent eternity in that world above of light and joy.
A whole lifetime of memories can be crowded into a few vivid seconds of time for a drowning person. When we die and our spirit body is freed from the flesh, we have a perfect memory. Every one of our sins comes back. Unless they have been blotted out by the blood of Jesus Christ. They haunt us as the eternal centuries roll by. We will have a bright recollection of all our guilt.
Jesus told the parable of Lazareth and the rich man who had neglected the poor. The rich man cries out in his torment to Abraham. He wants Lazareth in heaven to be sent back to earth to warn his brothers to repent, so they will not come to that terrible place of torment. But Abraham says to him in the parable? “They have the scriptures.” In other words, “They have the Bible.” And so do we. We have no excuse.
Satan will creep along again and with his smooth lies, try and lull you back into fatal complacency. Just like most of today’s deluded generation. He is good at it. There is no safety in numbers. If one person can be lost, two hundred million can be lost. The only safety is in following the words of Jesus Christ as found in the Holy Book.
If you do not want to buy this Condensed Bible, buy another one. But obtain one you can understand and study it. Put aside all excuses. Read a few pages every day. Continue this for the rest of your life. Before you read each day, pray that the Holy Spirit will enlighten your mind. This is important.
In the lost world there will be no Bible. Had we not better read it now while we can? If we die not having repented the years in the lost world, will stretch before us, dark and endless, without hope. We must save ourselves and our loved ones before it is eternally too late.
Heavenly Father and his Son Jesus Christ and repent of sins. Your sexual sins. Your dishonesty. Your addictions. Your angry feelings. Your lack of forgiveness. But be sincere, tears will normally come. Ask for God’s help to see your repentance right through. It will be a major turning point in your life. feel the peace of the Holy Spirit come over you. If not immediately, it will soon come. Have the courage to surrender your life fully to God. He will make more of your life than you ever will. Your life will become rich and fulfilling under God’s direction. But you must be sincere. God cannot be deceived.
Excuses
How many of you who have an excuse right now on the end of your tongue? Satan is ready to help you make one. That’s his business, making excuses. What will people think if you? You will have to give up ????? Satan’s job is rocking people off to sleep in a cradle of excuses. When we stand before God not one excuse will stand up to the light of eternity.
We are not the same person after hearing about Jesus Christ. We have now been warned. We no longer have a valid excuse.
If you want to get near to God, just obey him. That is the quickest way to get near him. The truest sign that we love God is that we obey him. How can God believe that you love him if he sees you everyday doing the things that he forbids. Jesus said, “If you love me, keep my commandments.”
God does not want sacrifices if there is disobedience. Some people want to do good works or make a sacrifice instead of obeying God. It is easier to do that than to surrender our lives to Him.
They think they can gain heaven by sacrificing their money or their time. But Bible says, “To obey is better than sacrifice.”
Suppose a father sends his boy off to school, but he wags and goes fishing instead. He thinks in his mind, “I will take the fish home to my father for a gift. It will please him.’ Will the fish will please his father? No, not by a long way. His father wants obedience, and until his son obeys, his gift will be loathsome.
There is a great reward in keeping God’s laws, but a great curse upon them that disobey God.
Forgiveness
“When your sins are forgiven by Jesus it’s as if you had never committed sin. His blood covers them all up. All you have to do is repent of them and trust in Jesus Christ. What a wonderful thing. Not one sin against you. It’s as if you owed someone a huge debt, and when you went to pay it, he said, “Somebody has paid it for you.”
Baptism
As you continue to pray you will be guided to other believers who will teach and help you. Eventually you will be lead to baptism. By being baptised you are making a solemn covenant with God the Father. By baptism you are publicly witnessing to your Heavenly Father that from this point on in your life, you are taking upon yourself the name of His son Jesus Christ. That you are turning your life over to his guidance. That you telling him that you intend following all of His teachings on love
You might have been christened as a baby, but as you will read in the Bible, true baptism is something you must choose for yourself. True baptism involves immersing your whole body in water, just as Jesus was by John the Baptist in the river Jordan at age 30. Stay far away from any man or church who thinks baptism with water and the Holy Spirit is not necessary. Jesus taught plainly that it is essential for adults. He said, “No one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born anew, of water and of the Spirit.”
Baptism is symbolic in two ways. The water represents a washing away of all your past sins. Being immersed under the water symbolises a burial of the old self. The coming up out of the water symbolises being born again. You are now a new person. If you have repented fully, you come up out of the water pure and clean. You are now ready to have hands laid upon your head by a person who has the Holy Spirit. Pray to be certain that this person does have the Holy Spirit, and also the man who baptises you. Look for joy and peace and love in their personality, and a zeal for Jesus Christ and for truth.
When the laying on of hands is done, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and remain with you forever, provided you do not drive Him away by returning to your sins. Up until this point, the Holy Spirit will have come and gone. But now you will have His peaceful influence and power always.
The Holy Spirit
A great many people say they are not interested in God, or don’t believe. But when the Spirit of God comes upon them they soon become interested and they believe alright. Trying to be a Christian without the Holy Spirit is like trying to switch on a light when the electricity is disconnected.
Spiritual gifts
You will also receive one or more spiritual gifts, such as healing, or wisdom, prophecy, miracle working, or speaking in tongues or interpreting tongues. There are many gifts. You might have had some spiritual gifts to a lesser extent before, but now they will be in full bloom. You can read about these gifts in the Bible, especially in the book of Acts and the letters of Paul. The gift of tongues is one of the more obvious gifts. This gift came upon the apostles on the day of Pentecost greatly empowering their preaching. Tongues can be an either an earthly language, used to teach the gospel to others, or you understand a foreign language you do not normally understand, or it can be the pure language of God to enhance your prayers. Some Christians even sing beautiful songs in tongues.
Just trust in Jesus
The word ‘believe’ in Bible is the same as the word ‘trust.’ People accept the word ‘trust’ better than ‘believe’. Seems to me a simpler word. Means the same. Trust in Jesus Christ. Trust him to save you. Trust him like a little child trusts his parents. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put trust in the opinions of men. Jesus said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word will not pass away.”
But this trust also requires action. When Abraham Lincoln signed the proclamation freeing slaves in the southern United States, copies were sent throughout the land. Suppose a slave had the proclamation read out to him. He would now know he was free. But if he still continued to serve his old master as a slave, the proclamation would not amount to anything for him.
The Bible is like that proclamation. It tells us Jesus died on the cross so we could be forgiven of our sins. Provided we repent of them. It is of no help to us unless we do actually repent of our sins, and surrender our lives to Him.
We must also guard against trusting in churches. Many people are converted to a church. They say “It is a beautiful church and there is beautiful singing. I like the organ. There is a good preacher.” And so they are converted to the church and to the singing and the organ and the minister, or perhaps they are converted to the people who go there. But that is not being converted to God and to His Son Jesus. Churches are good in their place, but when we put them in place of our eternal salvation, they become a snare. All the churches in the world cannot save you. Which do you trust most? The word of your church, or the word of God in the Bible. If you by-pass all that and come direct to Jesus Christ and put your trust in Him, you will have peace and rest. “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord. For he is like a tree planted by the waters. His leaf shall ever be green, neither shall he cease from yielding fruit.”
Those who know the most about God, trust him the most. It‘s those who don’t know God, who don’t trust Him. I have studied the Bible intensively for 35 years. I have more confidence in God than I ever have before. It increases every year.
Almost everything we believe, we have not seen for ourselves. We believe because we judge the person who told us to be trustworthy. All history falls into this category. A map is based on what hundreds of people have found out by actually visiting the place. It’s the same with the Bible.
Some people accuse churches of working for gain. They say that they are just after their money. Perhaps some of them are. But you can’t accuse Jesus of that. His cradle was a borrowed one. The donkey He rode into Jerusalem was a borrowed one. It was a borrowed room where He ate his last supper. It was a borrowed grave where they laid Him. What other motive had He for coming down here to earth, apart from His love for you?
These words are not going to convict anybody. It is the that Holy Spirit that convicts men.
Second coming
The world watched for the first coming of Jesus Christ and he came. We now wait for his second coming, an he will come again. “You shall see the Son of Man … coming in the clouds of heaven. Are you ready to meet the Lord if he comes tonight. Jesus said He will return, “In such an hour as you think not.”
It will then be too late if you have not repented. The Bible tells us 300 times of the return of Jesus Christ. All the signs Jesus foretold us are around us.
This world is becoming a wrecked vessel. God has given us a life boat in Jesus Christ. We must save all we can. The world is getting darker and darker. Ruin is coming nearer and nearer. If you have any unsaved friends on this wreck get yourself and them into the Lord’s boat.”
Overcoming your addictions
Some people are laden down with addictions – tobacco, alcohol, pornography, gambling. Their addiction is a barrier between them and their Saviour. You will overcome a serious addiction when you call on the help of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Jesus said, “What is impossible for men is possible with God.”
A man who was addicted to alcohol said, “I humbled myself before God in my misery and my helplessness and my sin. I admitted to him it was impossible for me to keep clear from drink. But from that night to this moment I have not had the slightest desire for drink.”
The need to act now
But please act now. Do not trifle with this important matter. Satan will whisper to you, “there is plenty of time.” That’s his favourite lie. But right this minute people are dying. About 90,000 people have died this past hour. Two million people die every day. Your own death date is rapidly approaching. Or the return of Jesus Christ which could be sooner. It can easily be too late unless you act now. You may never hear this message about your Saviour Jesus Christ again. It is so easy to get tangled in the busyness of the world. Time slips by and one night you die and wake up imprisoned in a dark and joyless spirit world, where no songs of joy are ever sung.
Those in earthly prisons will one day be released, but there is no release in eternity. We are forever cut off from God. Jesus said, “Where I am they can not come, worlds without end.”
Jesus has comes to save us from that terrible hell. A lost world, full of violent men, sexual offenders, drunkards and murderers. May God help you repent and accept the sacrifice of love by Jesus on the cross. To accept the cleansing by his blood. And eventually you will walk the bright pavements and flower gardens of heaven. You will hear the joyful music and the singing of the birds. You will be uplifted by performances of talented musicians, actors and singers.
But you must leave old associates here on earth. They will lead you back into sin. You must always walk the straight and narrow path that leads towards the light of heaven and continue faithful unto the very end.
Most people in the world have not got peace of mind. Peace of mind comes from the cross. There is no peace for the wicked. The Bible says, “They are like the troubled sea that cannot rest.” Calvary is the only place to find peace. Peace comes from following Jesus Christ.
A skeptic or a sinner or an intellectual will tell you that he will not believe anything in the Bible that does not correspond to his reason. Why? If the supernatural is true he may be called to account to God for his sins. These men reject their only hope. The Bible is their lifeboat in the flood but they just tear it up.
“No. It is contrary to my intellect.”
Take out the supernatural and you have to throw away the whole Bible. You can’t read about Jesus Christ from his birth until he was risen up in glory, but it is supernatural.
If any man is willing to trust the Lord with all his heart, he will no longer have any doubts. The great trouble is that we do not trust him with all our heart, God says, “You shall find me when you search for m e with all your heart.”
Satan can change your feelings and make you feel almost anyway he wants. But he cannot change the Word of God. Our feelings change but the Word of God does not change. “Trust in the Lord with all thy heart and lean not to thine own understanding.”
We are easily deceived and lead astray by own dark mind and dark heart.
Jesus Christ was without spot or blemish. You can find no fault with him. Don’t follow anyone else until you can find a better man. Skeptism takes everything away and gives you nothing in return. Jesus has come in to the world and he said, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and lonely in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yolk is easy and my burden is light.” No man that ever trod the earth dared to say that.