Poe, everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money, come ye buy and eat. Yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Wherefore ye spend money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which satisfies not. Parkin diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness. Incline your ear and come unto me, here and your soul shall live, and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David. Behold, I have given him for a witness of the people, a leader and a commander to the people. Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not, and nations that knew not thee, shall run unto thee because of the Lord thy God, and for the holy one of Israel, for he has glorified thee. Seek ye the Lord while he may be found. Call ye upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways, my ways, saith the Lord. Context continues through that chapter, but I'll just stop there and maybe refer to it as we go on. But when you think of the term gospel, gospel is an old Anglo-Saxon word. You probably know that. It means literally the spell of God, the spell of God. And it was used by the King James translators to translate the Greek evangelia and the parallel Latin vulgate term that we would say evangel. And the concept of euonglia is the concept of the good news, the good news. So as far as we're concerned, gospel no longer means the spell of God, but it means the good news. And of course, the spell of God is to be saved through God's love and to enter into the truth of the good news. So you can run a circle on those things all night long if you'd like to in a linguistic sense. People play with words, love to do that sort of thing. Congregations get weary of it. They say, well, just say it one way and let it go at that. So in a nutshell, the gospel is the good news of God. And in a chapter like this in Isaiah fifty five, the good news of God stands out in a beautiful way. It's the truth that God invites us to blessing. That's the good news. God invites us to blessing. He doesn't invite us to condemnation. He doesn't invite us to greater trials and difficulty. He invites us to blessing. And he gives that in a general sense to the prophet Isaiah. So the world will hear it and anyone who will listen to it, he invites us to blessing. And I like to take those things and turn them into sentence form. And I say it just pretty simply this way tonight. Let those who are weary. for any reason at all, turn to God. That those who feel lost in the universe, that those who feel at odds with God, that those who feel an emptiness of life, that those who feel a depression in the course of things, let them all, let them each one, turn to God. God invites us to blessing. God does not invite us just to a party, but to know himself and to blessing, to know forgiveness and redemption, and to know assurance in our hearts of what he means to it. God invites us to blessing. I get invited to a lot of things that are not blessing, like wedding receptions. I do not regard them as a blessing. It's a blessing for the couple. I'd love to see them get married. Have it after a prayer meeting on Wednesday night. Get it over with. Everybody says, good night, goodbye, and you go home. Three weeks later, when they're home, you can come and walk and congratulate them or something like that or throw something at them if you want to. But whenever we get invited to a wedding reception, I don't feel like going. And we do go to a lot, especially if you perform the wedding. We go to a lot, but I don't feel like going because I don't think the reception is a blessing. I get invited to parties too. I'm not very big on them either. Sometimes, well, you just have, I won't go through all my weaknesses. But I'll tell you this, I get invited to a lot of things that are not blessings. And it gets to a point where somebody says I'd like to invite you to something that I worry about from time to time. And I think sometimes I've invited people to come and hear the gospel, and that's how they felt too. They kind of felt that they were being invited to something that they didn't want and something that really didn't mean much to them. But the great word in Isaiah fifty-five is that God invites us to blessings. And he says on a broad sphere to anybody that will listen, whatever your need is, whatever your problem is, whatever your shortcoming is, come to me, come to me. That's reiterated in the New Testament many times too, and I'll work with it this evening for just a little while for you. Let those that are weary turn to God. Whatever the particular concept is, let those who are weary turn to God. We used to sing songs like that. Are you weary? Are you heavy laden? Tell it to Jesus. Tell it to Jesus. If I start quoting songs, I get in trouble because I actually want to sing them. Nobody wants to hear that anymore. In fact, nobody ever did want to hear it. They certainly don't want to hear it anymore, but I can think of them. And a lot of times the big appeal in the gospel is just that simple fact, just that simple fact, that if there's a need in life, if there's an emptiness of soul, if there's a doubt about eternity, if there's a fear of God, he invites us to blessing. Listen, he says, whoever you are, just simply turn and come to me. Whoever you are, simply turn and come to me. And that becomes the very heart of what we have to say to people in the world about us. We invite them to come and know Jesus. Now, in the world where we live, there are lots of statements given along those lines, and I'm not able to solve all those problems, and you wouldn't want to go into them anyway. A fellow said to me, he said, I don't want to hear you preach a lot of easy believism. I don't want to do that either. And Dan touched on that this afternoon too. I don't want to do that either. But I don't want to make salvation sound like something that you have to have a master's degree from MIT to get. I don't want to do that either. I want people to understand that salvation is largely a matter of believing God and coming to God in his terms. And you can say it in almost any way you want, but fundamentally it breaks down to that. It's God who's provided it for us. It's God who looks at it and asks us to come. It's God who encourages us to come. It's God who receives us. It's God who gives us assurance. And the gospel is the good news. The good news that God loves us, that He invites us the blessing, and that anyone who is weary should simply turn to God. You'll notice in the passage in Isaiah two or three striking things, striking to me. One is that it's God who makes the offer. It's not some preacher or some theologian, it's God who makes the offer. Everyone that's thirsty comes the waters. It's a speech figure, of course. You have to know what it is to really be thirsty. I haven't been that today because we've had lots of beverages here. In fact, I haven't been really thirsty for a long, long time. But I have once or twice one of those all-day hikes when you don't get any water and you just feel like you could jump in and drink up a mud puddle if it showed up at the right spot, that kind of a thing. Anyone who is thirsty, it's a speech figure for anyone who has a need of soul. He's obviously not talking about liquid and whether you've had enough to drink today. Anyone who's thirsty, anyone who's hungry, don't worry if you don't have money. Don't think about what you can have or what. Come and receive, without money and without price, the blessing of God. It's God who makes the offer. I kind of like that. If we made it today, it would have some sales tag attached to it, and Friday wouldn't work either. But this is free and works every time for those who will come at God's invitation and receive what God will give. God makes the offer. I've often read in the New Testament in John nine where the Lord Jesus deals with the blind man and down at verse thirty five after the healing the blind man I think is a believer before that but after the healing the Lord puts the question to him do you now believe in the son of God a simple thing you've been blind now out of your weakness you turn believing to me and the end result of that is that the man does believe and is part of the great family of God that we know today you remember the account of the Philippian jailer in Acts sixteen thirty one you remember when he said what must I do to be saved And the Lord Jesus didn't give him a list of things to do. He said, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Come and drink. Come and eat. Come and take what God offers. When I was working my way through seminary a long time ago, everything's a lot. I said that already today, but you better believe it. Everything gets to be a long time ago. One of the things I had to read was Luther's work on good works. I don't recommend it for nighttime reading, but it is good to read. It's good to read. Luther emphasizes again and again that no good work can save you. The only good work you can do, and he styles it that way, is to believe in Christ. That's all you can do, to believe in Christ. And he goes through all the good works that the other churches prescribed at that time, and all the things they want you to do from chrism on up and down, and denounces them all. None of them save. The only good work is faith in Jesus Christ. But faith in Jesus Christ comes as a result of feeling a need, knowing that there's an emptiness, knowing that there's a lack, knowing that somehow we're separated from God. And God says, whoever you are, If you feel those things, come to me. Come to me. It's really a kind of a simple thing. We make it sometimes complicated and make it sound along artificial lines by wanting people to think exactly as we do. But the concept is that they come to him believing what he said. They don't come to God and say, yeah, yeah, I'm not taking it. They don't come like that. They come to God in emptiness of soul believing what he said. He challenges them in verse two. He says, why do you spend money for that which is not bread? And why do you work hard for those things that don't satisfy? Just listen to me. Take what I have and delight yourself in what I give you. Turn your ear over. Just listen to me and let your soul live. I'll make a covenant of life with you based, as our brother said this afternoon, on his name and on his word. I'll make a covenant of life with you, which will guarantee life for you forever. God makes the offer. I always impressed myself with that. I, too, once was a salesman. I wasn't very good at it. I would say either, but I don't know who else. A lot of you may have been good at it. I was a door-to-door salesman for a while. because it was the only job I could get. And I needed a job pretty desperately. I survived for nine months on it. Survived is a kind of a limited word. It's before I was married, so I didn't have to feed anybody but myself. And I even had some kind friends that were doing that, feeding me. But I survived on it, but barely, barely, barely, barely, barely. But I was selling door to door. It did help me later on when we go out giving out Christian literature door to door. But that was about the only benefit we really had out of it, and I was glad for that. But I'm working selling door to door. And every month the company had some offer to offer to people. I worked for a good company. They were wonderful to me. They supplied everything necessary. And I think the product was good enough that I could say I recommended it without reservation. You only made fifty cents a day on your commission. I felt I could, actually it did a little better now to get sold well, but I felt I could recommend. So there was nothing wrong with this. but all the offers were there. And anytime I made the offer, it was made in the name of the company. And an offer in that case is only as good as the company that offers it. We had a company that sold us a water softener that was guaranteed for a hundred years. The company went broke three years later, and that guarantee that offer was worthless three years later. And a few years later, the water softener was worthless, and I used my great mechanical skill to take it out and throw it out of the house. But whatever the case happens to be, that's not the way it is in Isaiah fifty-five. God makes the offer. God, the creator of the universe, God who determines all things, God who makes all things move in a course. He makes the offer. And what does he say? He says, come unto me. That's what he says. He says, come unto me. And that's what we say to people too. We say in the place of God, it's this representative. Come unto God. Whatever your weariness may be, whatever your emptiness may be, come to God. And once in a while someone will say, I really am a believer. I'm a believer, but I'm deeply troubled and deeply bothered. I'm sympathetic to those problems. And I simply go back to this passage and say, come to God. And they say, well, I already know God. That may well be the case. But it may well be the case that you're allowing the old nature and other things to crowd in and deprive you of the joy of the experience of knowing God and His Word and His promise day by day. It may work that way. So I've simply said, turn to God. It's kind of like the picture of a father whose arms are open wide. Turn to God and come to him and receive the things you need. That's really the gospel. Now, if we break that down, somebody says, well, I need money. Will he give me money? I can't tell you what God will or will not give you, but I can tell you this. The primary thing God gives is the right to live, Isaiah fifty-five too. The primary thing he gives is life. And if he gives you life, an eternal life in that sense, then there are a lot of other things you can work with and work for as you go on your way. But he says it very simply, let your soul delight itself in fatness. I will cause you to live, he says in verse three, life will be your lot. And that's what he offers. And of course, the Lord has blessed us in many other ways too. But if someone says, I'd like to be saved so I can be rich, and they've got the wrong motivation in mind. Someone says, I'd like to be saved so I can die an easy death. They kind of have the wrong motivation in life, too. What we want is deliverance from the things that ruin life. That's what we want. We want life. That's what we want. And the Lord says beautifully. He says, you come unto me, and I will give you life. We were used in the offering business to make sure that people had enough money to pay for it. Now, mind you, when you're only offering a toothbrush that costs ninety-eight cents, it doesn't take a lot of money to pay for it. I understand that. But we were interested in that sort of thing. The concept is that if people have enough money, they can buy a lot of good things. But God says, no, for the things that really count, you don't need any money. No money. There's no price set on it. There's no works value set on it. All you have to do is come to me. You come to me believing, understood. You come to me saying, Lord, fill me. Lord, meet my need. If your need is the fact that you're afraid of God or don't know if your sins are forgiven, God will meet that through Christ tonight. You'll meet it immediately. If your fear is the sum temporal or earthly thing and you come to God confessing your trust and need, God will meet those things too. There is no need that God cannot meet in his providence and in his time if we come to him. Sometimes we make up needs and imagine things we don't need at all. So we have to leave matters in God's hands. But you can read the text yourself. The promise is that without money, without income, without goods, without anything that the world thinks is necessary, I will give you, he said, the things that make for life. That's the concept that we work here. I was interested in the passage that Dan touched on this afternoon in Titus one three. Interested in that passage and the things that God has promised eternal life that God has promised it. And that promise of Paul says, I'm a minister of that thing for the glory of God. I'm a minister of that thing. And it's a great thing to know that God gives that to those that come to him. I'd like to tell you without a lot of history that my family was not a church family. We were just a bunch of people say, what was your religious background? It was American paganism. That's what it was. American paganism. We didn't have an idol in the house. We just didn't believe anything. And it wasn't that we were hostile. We just didn't believe anything. We were a bunch of cultural ignorami. I don't know if that's the real plural of ignoramis or what, but I can't remember if it's the third declension or fourth declension Latin word, so you can work on it in your own spare time. But we were just people who didn't know anything. And there was difficulty in our family. There was always a lot of difficulty there. that the difficulty had reached the climax of my mother and she had started going to church. It was a two-mile walk for mother, but she had started going to church because she thought anything had to be an improvement over the present situation. And about the third week that she was going to church like that, they announced that in the next week they were going to have a series of special meetings at the church in the evenings. And my mother began making those meetings too. I would say kind of, I won't count them out. You know how many days there are in a week, but Monday through Thursday, she didn't miss a day. It was a long walk from Mother Over and a long walk back on the dark country roads in Western Pennsylvania. Doesn't that strike you in a dramatic way? Yes, yes. On the fifth night, they were having a night in honor of the Boy Scout troop. This Boy Scout troop leader was a Sunday school teacher in that country church, and he had asked the boys to come. He didn't say we had to go. He asked the boys. Mother had been going for four nights. I didn't think there was any harm in my going with the Boy Scout troop, especially since I was old enough to wear long pants. So we all sat. We sat over in that side and the Boy Scout troop sat in that side. The man who preached preached much too long. He preached much too loud. He used a lot of vocabulary. He said, I didn't understand, but I'll tell you something. He talked about what sins were and what our sins did to us, and I understood that perfectly. And when he got through with the message, which was much too long, but when he got through with the message, he said that Jesus Christ had died to give us forgiveness for those sins and that all we had to do was to trust him. There are a few more words than that. I can't give you the whole sermon. I'm trying to get through one of my own tonight. So whatever the case is, he said that. And then he said, if there are people in the audience, he said that know that they haven't got their sins forgiven by God. He said, I'd like them to come and pray with me. An altar call we'd call it. And the assemblies were half afraid of those things for a lot of different reasons. But that's where we were in the church that night. And my mother almost jumped over two pews. Embarrassing to a boy, unless your mother making a display of herself like that. My mother almost jumped two pews with great tears of repentance as she went down to receive Jesus as her Savior. I did not follow her immediately, but that night I too trusted Jesus as my Savior. I came to him. We had nothing to offer. We didn't have enough good works to write on the side of a postage stamp. We certainly didn't have any money. We didn't have anything credible in the community. Our family was known in the community for intoxication powers. You have to work in that on your own. We had nothing to offer, but we came in our poverty, and God made us rich through his good news. He invited us to come. It wasn't worked out by the church. It wasn't invented by evangelists. It wasn't put together by a bunch of theologians. It was God himself who said, if you have a need of soul or heart or life, come. Don't worry about the price. Just come and receive what I will give you, life eternal in our dispensation through faith in Jesus Christ. And that's still what we say to people. And that's what we say to you. I suspect that a lot of you know that just as well as I do. And I say, praise the Lord. But if anybody doesn't know it, if you don't know the forgiveness of sins and peace with God, if you don't know what it means to be saved, if you don't know the joy of that salvation that Dan has described us so well today, if you don't know those things, Then tonight God looks at you. Maybe for a final time, for all I know, that God looks at you tonight and says, come, come. He gives the invitation. Secondly, he shows the proof that it's real. That's what he does. He shows the proof that the invitation of the guarantee is real. He said, I'll tell you something. I'll make you an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David. I've given him for a witness to the people. David is dead. But David's line continues, and David's great successor will be the Lord Jesus. I've given him for witness to the people, a leader and a commander. And the time will come when you'll call a nation that you don't know, and nations that didn't know you will run after you because of the Lord your God. That will be the proof, he says. The time will come when people that didn't know you will flock to you because of what God has done. We certainly see that in our age in a powerful way. We see a lot of Hebrew people converted too. I think that if you talk to the people of work in that field, at least unless they've changed their mind in the last six or seven weeks, You'll discover that the number of people in a Hebrew background turning to Lord Jesus in the last two years has exceeded the last century. I'm told that. I don't know who counts them, but I'm told that by people in the work. And I kind of believe it from the people I meet and talk to, too. But apart from that, he says, a great number will be drawn to me. And if you have any doubt about the proof of what I've done or the proof of my invitation, stop and look at the kingdom which I've established. Stop and look at the people I've established, think about the whole history of them, and know that I, God, when I do things, do them eternally, and I do them completely. There's no possibility of a slip with them, no possibility of a failure. Read through the Old Testament carefully and see the number of times that the devil, or Satan, if you will, tried to ruin the promises of God through interfering in the divine plan. Go back to the days of Esther. That's a good place to go. Or go back to the days of Joash. Go back to any of those times. There are a dozen of them, at least, where the enemy sought to ruin the plan of God, and it looked from a surface point of view like he might very well do it. But God had established the truth, and God maintained it and kept it. God shows the proof. I love the concept in Acts seventeen thirty-one. You really shouldn't say I love. We overuse that word. I greatly appreciate the concept of Acts seventeen thirty-one, where the writer tells us that he has set forth Christ and given assurance of him. the real the Greek word behind assurance there is the word for faith he's provided something that everybody can believe in raising Jesus Christ from the dead the assurance is the fact that Christ rose from the dead and that becomes a great object of belief it's one of those things in Christianity which is unique no other religion known to me has a deliverer who died and rose from the dead a lot of them and you can still see the graves where they lay I have a I have a friend. I won't call him atheistic. I'm not exactly sure if he's agnostic, and I haven't seen him for a good while either. That's the way it is with friends. You see him when they come and go. But he claims that the tomb of Christ was in India, and that he was really buried there in India. And you could go and see the tomb. You could actually look in and see part of the body in the tomb. I said to him, I said to him, you know, if that were true, Somebody would have a concession on it, and they would be making a million dollars a year on it. I said, if that were true, I said, first of all, it's not true. But if it were true, I said, there would be a concession on it and a copyright on it and a bunch of other stuff on it, and people would be milking it to death. You just go to Palestine and see what they charge you to see some of the shrines. Somebody would be milking it to death. No, he rose from the dead. The evidence of the scripture proves it in a wonderful way, and you've got to remember the scripture is not one man's account, but the account of many people who knew the truth about Jesus. The Lord says, I'll show you the proof of it. I like the way it's put in Hebrews one, one through three also, where we're told how God spoke by the prophets in the old time, but now has spoken by his son, who having finished the work sat down at the right hand of God, where he makes intercession for us incidentally and gloriously helps us in a wonderful way. And you can tie that truth back into Romans chapter one also. where it talks about Christ being raised from the dead by the power of God. I get enthused about these things. The problem is when you get enthused, sometimes you lose your logical train of thought and sometimes you shout too much and you wave your arms too much. I used to jump up and down. I don't do that anymore. I used to walk along the platform a lot. Once in a while I get off the platform and harass somebody in the first row. Don't do that a lot either. I still get enthused, but I have to show it by just getting excited and talking too fast and forgetting where I was. I know where I was. But I'll tell you it's something you get excited about, that God will accept you for himself without any payment on your part, without any great pledges of everlasting dignification of some loyalty, that God will accept you in his part. You'll simply come to him. Now, you can't come to God in a bargaining way. You can't come to God and saying, well, if you'll save me, I'll be a good kid. You can't say that. You can't come bargaining. You have to come, as he says, without money and without price, trusting what God says. In the military, there were a lot of foxhole conversions. Some of them, praise God, were real. That didn't relate to me because I was never in a foxhole except in training camps. In training camps in Georgia, I dug a foxhole so deep I could already climb out of it. They were going to drive a tank over me, and I was taking no chances on that. So I really went down in the Georgia sand. I could hardly get out of it when the tanks had passed over, and I was supposed to come out and charge the enemy. But whatever the case is, I knew a lot of fellows. who in the thrust of battle looked up to God and said, if you'll get me out of this, I'll walk with you and all sorts of things. Praise God, there were some who meant it sincerely entrusted Jesus, but there were an awful lot of get me out of this trouble, God, and I will love you, and never meant it. They used to tell the story of the two sailors lost at sea back in the days, in the days of Columbus. And the one man said to the other, he said, if I get to the shore, he said, I will buy a candle. and build a candle to Saint Cecilia bigger than myself and burn it for two years. And the other man said, he said, if you get back to shore, he said, where will you get enough money to buy a candle like that for Saint Cecilia? And the first man said, if I get back to shore, I won't need money to buy the candle for Saint Cecilia. You follow that, do you? I'm not going over it again. But there are a lot of people like that that you don't come bargaining to God. You don't come saying, well, I believe in you, God, but you don't say that. You come say, look, Lord, I'm thirsty. I'm hungry. I have nothing. I want the life that you give. And God gives that life. And you may use slightly different words, see, because we can't dictate everything. But God gives that life. He makes the offer. He shows the proof. And in the nature of our chapter, he urges acceptance. He does it through the prophet in verse six. When he says, seek ye the Lord while he may be found. Well, God is not going to get lost. But there will come a day for people when it's too late. In a practical way, that comes when you die. Comes when you die. I'm not a predictor of anybody's death you'll be glad to know. I don't have visions of that sort of thing. But at that particular point, God is no longer available in a saving way. And someday, I believe, I believe someday the church will be moved to glory. I'm not going to argue with you tonight, but I do think there are people saved after that. I do think there are people saved after that. But I think the people who do not respond to the gospel where we are now will be so badly confused they'll hardly know what's going on. The lesson with the gospel is with anything that's true. The time to act on it is when you hear it. The time to accept it is when you know about it. The time to turn to God is when you feel within your heart a need or a lack or a longing and you're willing to say, Lord, I will take the life that you give. I will take. I will take the food, the drink, the spiritual soul. What you give, I will take. And you take it without any arguments or without any running it down. In John fourteen, eleven, the Lord Jesus urged his disciples to believe him for the words he said, or for the works I give. He said, if you can't believe the words, then believe the works. But what he's really doing is saying, I urge you, I urge you to believe. Now he said that to the group in the room with him. You'd say to yourself, you'd say to yourself, why did they need to hear it? Don't you think Judas needed to hear it? But don't you think they all needed to hear it to know the grace of God and to know what God offered to the world through Jesus as time would go on? Don't you think? Yes, sir. They all needed to hear it. And I like the concepts, too, when he argued with the Pharisees in John eight, he says, if you don't believe that I am, you'll die in your sins. He urging them to believe who he was, knowing that if they didn't believe who he was, they would die in their sins. One of the sad things I suppose in life that you face a lot of times are people who hear the truth over and over again and just sit there and look. We can't make people believe. God has invited them to come and trust him. God has offered them proof that his offer is real, and God urges them to act on it while he's still available and truth is still available to them. One of the sad things in visiting with the home for the elderly, I have to say that very carefully at my age, but one of the sad things in visiting in the homes of the elderly are the number of people, elderly, that you talk to about the Lord and they can tell you how they baked pies for the bake sale at the local church years ago. how they sewed blankets for the men in the First World War, how they did a hundred and fifty-two good things. But when it comes down to they really believe in Jesus, they give you that kind of, well, Sonny, if I didn't believe in Jesus, I wouldn't do all of those things. And I'm not saying they don't believe in Jesus, but my heart is fearful for them at that point. Because it's easy for us to be deceived by the flesh and by the enemy, the feeling that we're on better terms with God because we haven't been shot yet for being wicked people. And we go back and read about other wicked people and we say we're better than they were. Surely God will love us, but that isn't right. It isn't the amount of sin, it's the facts of sin that condemns you. And whether you're Al Capone or Joe Schnook, whoever he was, doesn't make a great deal of difference. The fact of sin is condemnatory and we all were equally lost. Warren House had an illustration I always liked. copied a lot of his illustrations. I have to give credit to him because a lot of other people hear him, too. But Barnhouse said if a plane went down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and then he talked for a while about where the middle of the Pacific Ocean was, I don't know, but he talked a while about, he said if a plane went down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and he said if there were three men on it, and one was the world's champion long-distance swimmer, one could not swim at all, and one was an Eagle Scout who'd passed the thousand-yard test, Barnhouse said they are all equally lost if someone does not come to their aid. And consequently, he said, all men, all women are equally lost, regardless of whether they do with bad, wicked, notorious lives or been good, upstanding citizens. They're all equally lost in the sin of this world until they are saved by the grace of God, until they come to him and God brings them to himself. There are a lot of things I don't understand about the gospel and about the whole message. I don't understand why some people jump up like mother did and act so quickly and some people listen to it for ten years. and die in ignorance. I've never understood it. I don't try and understand it. I just see it. And I see you all here tonight. A lot of us have talked about knowing the Lord today, and I believe that certainly the vast majority of you do, that there may be somebody that doesn't. There may be somebody who feels a real need. There may be somebody who feels insecure when we talk about it. There may be somebody who really worries how they could trust and how they could know. There may well be. I tell you, the answer to that is not found in preachers, it's found in God. You come to him and take the life that he gives through faith in Jesus Christ. Preachers will be glad to talk with you about it, glad to look at the scripture with you about it, but basically the offer and the invitation, like the full salvation, is made available by God. And I would tell you tonight, if you're in one of those categories and you leave us without trusting Jesus, you're walking only into the uncertainty of a world that is lost, and you may well be lost with it. I'd be happy to talk with you tonight. I'd even listen to you, see. But I'd be happy to talk with you and look at the scriptures about the reality of salvation. And I'm sure other brethren here would be also. Because what we want to know is that you know Jesus Christ and you're born and the family's gone. But apart from that, there are always believers, too, that are hounded with problems. Hounded with problems. We had a telephone call with my daughter in California today. She's had a tough life. She made a tough life. And a tough life can be tough. That doesn't make any difference. When you got it, you got it. And she would tell you quickly that she's a believer. It's one of those interesting things. But she said to her mother this week on the phone that because of certain problems in her life, she'd gone to another service and heard the gospel preached. And after the gospel was preached, another thing said, she went forward to talk with a preacher because she said, my heart is full of bitterness and hatred. And she said, after we talked and he read some things and prayed, she said, God, delivered me from that. And she said, I'm feeling good right now. And we've had enough experience to know that the bitterness and hatred may come back. But anyhow, we were glad to hear it. And I was reminded again that God not only saves us from sin and from sins, but God delivers us from a lot of temporal things too when we come to Him. But if we keep trying to make it on our own, we just get wetter and wetter into water as we think. No, you won't be lost again if you trust in God because the salvation, as we've heard today, is of Christ and certified by His word and His name. But I'll tell you, you can be pretty uncomfortable in life by just insisting on doing things your own way. And the Lord Jesus said, all ye that are weary and levy laden, come unto me. In Matthew eleven, come to me. So tonight that's what we're saying. We're saying that the good news is that God invites us to blessing. He invites us to blessing. He doesn't invite us to judgment or hell. Those things happen in the course of time in God's providence. But he doesn't invite us to that. He invites us to blessing. He invites us to be free of our sins. To be untangled from the things that handicap us and make us miserable. To be delivered from the loneliness of life and the despair of the world sells all the time. He invites us the blessing. Consequently, those who are weary need to turn to him. They need to turn to him in faith, believing that he will do what he says. And they need to take God at his word and call on him to act on that particular thing and receive the life and the freedom and the liberty that God gives. If you have some special need tonight and you'd like to talk or pray with me about it, I would be happy to do that. You don't really need me. It's God you need. And you can look up to God right where you are and say, dear Lord, but I'd be glad to chat with you about it. Anyhow, see, the good news is that God invites us to blessing. And if you don't know that blessing tonight, it's not God's fault. It's not even my fault. It's the fault of a worldly system in your own heart that will not respond to the love and the grace of God. Let's pray. Dear Father, we thank you for your love and mercy. We can hear the Lord Jesus said, you who are weary and heavy laden, come unto me, I'll give you a rest. We know, Lord, that it covers every condition of life. We thank you. We thank you that you offered to us salvation without money and without price. We couldn't have paid for it anyway, but we thank you. We thank you God that salvation means life to us, life now and life eternally. And Lord, we pray this any with us tonight do not know that life, that they'd open their hearts and believe in Jesus Christ and be born in the family of God. Pray to give them courage, Lord, to speak to some brother or some sister that we might have the joy of seeing them positively know Christ. And some of us do carry pretty heavy burdens at heart, Lord. We bow before you, too. We bow before you as the Lord of our lives. And pray, our God, that your peace and your grace will sustain and keep us alive. and the learned joy of trusting you more day by day. We give you thanks tonight and pray that the Spirit of God might work in our hearts for the blessing to which you've invited us. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen. The meeting is over.