There are some of you of whom I almost have no hope for your salvation. God can save you, but I can’t figure out how he will do it. Certainly the Word does not seem likely to be blessed.
You have been called and pleaded with: early and late in your life we have pleaded with you. Our hearts have yearned with tenderness for you, but up to now it has all been in vain. God knows I have been hammering away at the granite, and it has not yielded yet. I have struck hard at the flint, and it is not broken. Some of you almost break the plow; you are such hard rocks that it seems in vain to plow on you. As for all your troubles, I don’t see that they will likely do you any good; for if you are struck again, you will revolt more and more; your whole head is sick already, and your heart is faint; you have been beaten, till from the top of your head to the sole of your foot, there is nothing but wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores. You are poor-perhaps your drunkenness has made you so; you have lost your wife-perhaps your cruelty helped to kill her; you have lost your children, and you are left a penniless, friendless, helpless beggar, and yet you will not turn to God! What now is to be done with you? O what will God do to you? Will he give up on you? How can he give up on you? How will he make believe? The heart of mercy still yearns after you. Return to God! Return to God! God help you to return, even now!
Others of you have not suffered any of this in the past, but are just now enduring a part of it. Let me beg you by the mercies of God and by the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ that you do not despise him who speaks to you. God does not continue to send his messengers forever. After he has labored with you for a time he will leave you in your sins and to face his eternal wrath. Patience does not last forever. Mercy has its day. Look, the king runs up the white flag of peace and comfort today, and he invites you to come to him. Tomorrow he may run up the red flag of warning, and if that red flag will not make you turn, he will run up the black flag of execution, and then there will be no hope. Beware! The black flag is not run up yet: the red flag is there now in trials and troubles, which are God’s warnings to you, commanding you to open your heart that grace may enter: but if the red flag fails, the black flag must come. Perhaps it has come! God help you with a broken heart to cry to him that you may be saved, before the candle is blown out and the sun is set, and the night of the dead comes without the hope of another sun rising on a blessed resurrection.
What is the point of all this? My point is this. If right now, some of my words could make you come to the king this morning-I know it won’t unless God the Holy Spirit compels you to do so by his irresistible power-but if he would bless my words, I would rejoice as one who finds great treasure. Why do you resist God? If the Lord has chosen to give you eternal salvation, then your resistance will be in vain, and how will you hate yourself in later years to think that you resisted for so long and enduring all that pain and suffering! Why do you resist? God’s battering-ram is too mighty for the walls of your resistance; he will make them fall. Why do you stand against your God, against him who loves you, who has loved you with an everlasting love and redeemed you by the blood of Christ? Why stand against him who intends to set you free from the slavery of sin, and to make you his rejoicing child? “Oh!” says one, “if I thought there were such mercy as that, I would yield.” If you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, this will be evidence that such mercy is ordained for you. O that the Spirit of God would enable you, sinner, to come just as you are and put your trust in Christ. If you do so, then it is certain that your name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, that you were chosen of God and are precious to him, and that your head is one on which the crown of immortality is to glitter forever. O that you would trust Christ! The joy and peace it works in the present is worth more than money could ever buy, but oh! the glory, the overwhelming glory which will come after death will belong to those that trust in Jesus! May God give you this morning the faith to cast your souls upon the finished work of Jesus. His blood can cleanse; his righteousness can cover; his beauty can adorn; his prayer can preserve; his coming will glorify; his heaven will make you blessed. Trust him! God help you to trust him; and he will have all the praise, both now and forever. Amen and Amen.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
