Greetings, radio friends, in the ever-precious name of the Lord Jesus our Saviour. We welcome you to the closing study of God's Word for this week's messages, and turn again to the second epistle of Timothy chapter two. I would like to read today, beginning at verse one, all the way through verse six, and thus cover what we have seen through the week concerning the exhortations of the Apostle Paul in relation to our faithfulness to the truth of God. Thou therefore my son be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses. The same commit thou to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also. Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No man that wartheth entangleth himself with the affairs of life, that he may please him who had chosen him to be a soldier. And if a man also strives for mastery, yet is he not crowned, except he strives lawfully. The husband, then, that laborer, must first be partaker of the fruits. May the Lord bless the reading of his word, and may we summarize as we come to this message today, one has preceded and now consummates the examples of character. that God would challenge us to be in relation to the last days of Christianity. I am greatly burdened to stir the hearts and consciences of God's beloved people in relation to their responsibilities to Him and the truth of God in these closing days of the divine testimony which is the Church. I am fully persuaded that the Church's testimony upon the earth is soon to be ended. It will be ended by the coming again of the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, from heaven, descending, when the dead in Christ shall rise, and when the living saints at the same time will be changed in a moment, and we shall ascend together in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and then we shall be forever with the Lord. Now I want to repeat it. The coming of the Lord is near. The end of the church's testimony is very apparent. But at the end of the testimony of the church in the days we live, we have perilous, we have difficult, we have dangerous times. I commend only the reading of Second Timothy chapter three and the first five verses, which we shall study in detail later on, for you to realize we are in the days that are the end. And those days as described are days of moral and spiritual decline, such as never has been known worldwide in the Christian testimony. Now we are being challenged. We are being challenged to hold the truth of God in chapter one. We have already been challenged in chapter two to teach the truth of God. And we have been specially seeing in verses three, four, five and six some of the characteristic features that should be ours to stand out in such days of declension. We have found ourselves to be likened unto a good soldier of Jesus Christ. I wonder again, my friend, without apologizing for the repetition of it, What kind of a soldier are you and what kind of a soldier am I for Jesus Christ? We also have seen that we should be good athletes. We are running in a race and we should be striving to win the coveted crown. Our eyes should be set upon the goal. our heart should be before us upon that blessed goal ahead. As Paul says in Hebrews chapter twelve, looking unto Jesus, let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of faith. And at the end of the race, we're going to see the Lord Jesus. At the end of the race, Christian, you're going to meet the Lord Jesus. Do you feel like meeting him today? and you don't know when that race is going to be finished. It will finish in one or another way. It will finish by your death, or it will finish by the coming of the Lord to take his own out of the earth. Now we look at the sixth verse of our chapter today, where we find that the Christian is to be not only a soldier, not only a good soldier, not only a good athlete, but he's also got to be a good worker, a good laborer. And Paul says the husband, man that laborer, must be first partaker of the fruits. And here you've got work involved. It likens one to a farmer, if I may put the suggestion in that manner. A man that labors upon the ground and with the ground and pills the ground. And before he can be partaker of his fruits, he has to work and kill the ground and labor and cultivate that which he is sowing and that which he has sowed and that which he is seeking to cultivate. He has to work in that field. And he, of course, naturally, deserves to be a partaker of the fruit of what he earns and what he works for. My beloved, I want to tell you one thing, when it comes to the service of the Lord, there's work to do. Again, I repeat, unfortunately, the truth of this is evident. We have too few who are working for the Lord, and I'm speaking of Christians. When it comes to the work of the church, I know that it is done. The real work is being done only by a few. I know that from experience, I know it from observation, I see it on every hand. And it's just like the beehive. We certainly have few labors, but we do have a lot of drones who cannot produce any honey. Oh, beloved Christian, listen. You and I are to be workmen. Now we're going down in the chapter later on, but I do want to refer to the fifteen verse of the same chapter for a moment, where Paul says, Study to show thyself approved unto God a workman that needeth not to be ashamed rightly dividing the word of truth. For when I look at the vineyard of my Lord, I hear my Lord say, Go work in my vineyard. I think of a question that was once asked a young boy. The young boy's father had made a profession of Christianity. And some of the believers who had noted that man's profession had somewhat of a doubt concerning the reality of his profession of faith. And one of the Christians spoke to his young son and said to his young boy, Sonny, do you think your father is really a Christian? The lad thought for a moment and in the truthfulness of his young heart, he answered and said, Well, he said he's a Christian, but he said he's not working at it. Now you know the situation to that problem. My radio Christian friend, I want to ask you a question. Do you claim to be a Christian? Do you claim Jesus Christ as your Savior? Do you claim that you belong to him? Do you claim that you're one of his children? Now, I want to ask you, are you working for him? Well, I tell you very frankly, when the Lord saves you, he saves you to work for him. He says, son, go work in my vineyard. And I want to ask, what are you doing in service for him? Now, listen, I want to be very careful to qualify this. I'm not asking you whether you're working for the church. But I put the question in its proper way. Are you working for your master, the Lord Jesus? For you will find many people that may be working for the church but not working for Christ. So-called. But I put the question to your conscience and heart, are you working as a Christian for the Lord? You see, what can I do? Well, I look back gratefully. to the days when God saved my soul. I was only in my teens, but I recognized when God saved my soul, I wanted to do something for him. Very naturally. There is a responsive cord of gratitude and gratefulness to the one who saves the person from the burnings of hell. What can I do for the Savior who saved me from going down to hell? What can I do for him? And of course there is no question of doubt. As in my own young heart, There was the desire to do something by telling others of the Lord Jesus. Now what can I do? I'm not a preacher. I'm not able to preach. I'm not able to understand the Word of God and teach him. But I tell you what I did find. I could witness to others, but there was one thing above all other things I saw immediately I could do, and I did as a young boy. I fill my pocket with gospel tracks. I wish today I was as faithful to it as then. But my young coat bulged with gospel tracks in my pocket. And wherever I went, I gave out gospel tracks. I couldn't preach. I couldn't teach. But I could work in that way. And oh, there's so many other things. that you and I couldn't enumerate as being works of the Lord in the present day of Christianity. And I want to tell you that there's a great deal wrong with the church and with the assemblies of God's beloved people wherever they gather today. There's only a few that are doing the work. And the majority of Christians are laying down on the job. And God says, go work in my vineyard. And Paul says here, the husband man must labor. And if you want my humble opinion, I've always thought that farm work was a work that took the longest hours of any day for any man. I was going to say from sun up to sundown, but I've known farmers to get up even in the night to begin their day's work very early in the morning and labor until sunset. Oh my Christian friend, I feel condemned in my own heart that even I myself certainly need to realize more than ever before the need of working for the Lord today. You work well for your boss and you work better for yourself. But how much do you work for your Savior, the Lord Jesus? So you'll never taste of the fruit of it. You'll never taste of the fruit of it. Unless you do something. And I want to tell you the fruit of serving the Lord, the fruits of working for the Lord, he's the best master to work for. I wouldn't want to work and I couldn't work for a better master than for Jesus Christ. I do know what kind of an employee you are or an employer you may have. But I want to tell you this, the best employer you can work for if you're a Christian is the Lord Jesus Christ. And I earnestly encourage you, be a good workman. Oh, Christian, labor on. It's not in vain. And then you that are not even working for the Lord, not even saved, I wish you'd get in the service of the King. Come to Christ, make him your Savior, shall we pray. Father, bless thy word. Stir the hearts, the lives and consciences of thy people. And say sinners, in Jesus' name, amen.