Gooding, David: Religion and Sacrifice

Spoke to you last evening, last Sunday evening, on the political situation as it will be in those days just before our Lord Jesus returns again. This evening, with our Bibles in hand, I would like you to follow me as we think together about the state of religion universally in that same period just before the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. We shall be thinking especially of the end of religion, that is to say, of the end of false religion. And because I shall have so much to be saying about false religion in the course of this lecture, I want to make it abundantly clear from the start that I do not thereby wish to be disrespectful to any true religion where so ever found. I am not here this evening to throw stones, far be it from me to discourage any true religion wherever it be found. But then the very fact that the Bible talks of true religion, true religion is to visit the fatherless and the widow in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. The very fact that the Bible talks of true religion will show us plainly that there is a religion that is not true. We shall be thinking specially of the end of false religion. So to begin with, I propose to read to you from the book of the Revelation and chapter seventeen, where we have in symbolic form a picture of the state of false religion at the end of this age, just before our Lord Jesus shall return again in power and great glory. I want to read at some length from this chapter seventeen of the Revelation, from verse one, and I shall be reading from the revised version. There came one of the seven angels that had the seven bowls and spake with me, saying, Come hither, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot that sitteth upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth committed fornication, and they that dwell in the earth were made drunken with the wine of her fornication. He carried me away in the spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations, even the unclean things of her fornication, and upon her forehead a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and of the abominations of the earth. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. And when I saw her, I wondered with a great wonder. The angel said unto me, Wherefore didst thou wonder? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and the ten horns. The beast that thou sawest was and is not, and is about to come up out of the abyss and to go into perdition. They that dwell on the earth shall wonder, they whose names, whose name hath not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast, how that he was and is not and shall come. Here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sitteth, and they are seven kings. The five are fallen, the one is, the other is not yet come. When he cometh, he must continue a little while. And the beast that was and is not is himself also an eighth and is of the seven, and he goeth into perdition. And the ten horns that thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive authority as kings with the beast for one hour. These have one mind, and they give their power and authority unto the beast. These shall make war against the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them, for he is the Lord of lords and King of kings. They also shall overcome that are with him, called and chosen and faithful. And he said unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the harlot sitteth, are peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues. The ten horns which thou sawest, and the beast, these shall hate the harlot, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and shall burn her utterly with fire. For God did put into their hearts to do his mind, and to come to one mind, and to give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God should be accomplished. The woman which thou sawest is the great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth. There painted for us in the most lurid colors is a picture of what I submit to you is false religion as it shall be at the end of this age. Perhaps I better, at the beginning, justify my suggestion to you. How do I know that this woman, this filthy, unfaithful woman, here called Mystery Babylon, is meant by God to be a picture of false religion? I submit to you there are many reasons for fo- so thinking. First of all is that this woman stands in vivid contrast to another woman mentioned in this book of the Revelation. In later chapters, we are introduced to the great heavenly city called the New Jerusalem. We're bidden to watch this city come down from heaven, from God to men, and it is specifically stated that this new heavenly Jerusalem is the bride of the Lamb, the bride of our Lord Jesus Christ, the bride which he loved. For just as husbands ought to love their wives, so we read in scripture that Christ himself also loved the church and gave himself for her, that he might cleanse her and sanctify her with the washing of water by the word. To the end, when our Lord shall come, he is to remove, as we saw in our first talk here two weeks ago, he is to remove from this earth all genuine Christians, whether they still be living or whether they have died and been buried, he is to remove them to heaven. There shall take place in the presence of God that glad event styled in scripture, the marriage supper of the Lamb. When all the redeemed from every country shall be united together with their Lord, and so shall they ever be with the Lord. But standing in vivid contrast to the genuine Christians, the holy church of our Lord Jesus Christ, standing in vivid contrast to the bride, pure and undefiled, is this other woman, pictured as mystery Babylon, dirty and unfaithful. It is evident indeed that she is meant to stand as the complete contrast to all that is genuine and true and holy. Instead of being a virgin, a spouse to Christ, to use the language of the Bible, she is an unfaithful woman that has granted her favors to all comers for her own present. It ought not, in fact, to surprise us that there is, and there will be even more evident than now upon the earth, false religion. It may be perhaps if we have been thinking quite a deal on the charitable side of this consideration, thinking in our hearts how well it would be if there were no divergences of opinion in religion and all people thought the same, that we shall just be a little reluctant to think that there is or could be, or that anybody ought to say that there is a broad false religions. Somebody may in fact say to me, but Mr. Lecturer, isn't it more the Christian attitude to think that all people, whatever their religion, are trying to serve God in their own way? And however much we may personally disagree with somebody else's religion, we oughtn't to call it a false religion. We ought to think that all people are honestly trying to serve God, and that in as much as they are sincere, all will be well in the end. But then I do submit to you very strongly that we cannot possibly take that view. For did not our Lord himself speak repeatedly and clearly beyond all doubt on this very point, telling us that there would be false religion, not merely false religions completely outside of Christianity, but within what he called the kingdom of God, our Lord indicated that there would be spurious elements, false professors. I remind you of the parable in which he likened the kingdom of heaven to a field in which the farmer sowed good seed, but while he slept, his enemy sowed bad seed. He sowed tares in among the wheat, and at first, when they grew up, they were practically indistinguishable, and yet, as they came to ear, the difference would become slowly manifest, that mixed in with the genuine good wheat, there was this false counterfeit tares. A parable, I say, given us of the Lord Jesus to indicate that even within the fold of the kingdom of God, all would not be well. It would not be unmixed good. There would be the counterfeit as well as the true. We must brace our hearts and minds to face this unpleasant truth. I say again, we are not now thinking of outside people who make no profession of Christianity, make no profession of God whatsoever, and are against the things of God. We are thinking now of the kingdom of heaven itself, which our Lord Jesus said would be composed part of good and part of evil. In fact, the Bible is insistent upon this. Nowhere in all the field of human experience is deception more dangerous and more widespread than in the field of religion. Deception, the Bible says, can here come from one or all of three sources. To start with, the Bible reman- reminds us that the human heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. We have waited for the psychologists of the nineteenth and twentieth century to begin to point out to us how true those words are. How it is possible for a person to develop strong feelings or fears against God or about sin, and to smother them completely by rationalizing them, quietening the voice of his conscience until, uh, he is convinced himself that all is well. The Bible comes and unmasks this tendency of the human heart to rationalize and to excuse itself, and warns us that the human heart in us all, the human heart is deceitful. We cannot trust its notions. We must ever bring them to the pure, holy, true word of God, or we all of us stand to be deceived by the rationalizings of our own mind. Not only are our own hearts deceitful, but our Lord once more explicitly warned us that there would be false prophets among the people. Beware of false prophets. And I remind you again that these words were not spoken by some quack in religion, some soapbox parson, some alarmist. These words were spoken by our Lord himself, said he, beware of false prophets. For wide is the gate, wide is the way that leadeth to destruction. Narrow the way and narrow the gate that leadeth unto life. You see the connection between the remarks, I hope? Beware of false prophets, said Christ. Beware of imitations in the realm of religion. The true thing is marked by its entrance being narrow. Narrow is the gate that leadeth to life. It is marked thereafter by a path that is narrow. But, said Christ, be warned that there are false things around, false imitations of the true. They too have a gate. They too have a road. There's a way in. Ceremonies and what have you, according to your choice. It is followed by a way of life, a system of teaching. But the vital difference is this, that that gate is a broad gate. And the way that follows is a very broad way. And it leadeth not to life, but to destruction. Then our Lord and the Bible consistently warns us that deception in the realm of religion can come not merely from the human heart and its deceitfulness, nor only from false prophets with their counterfeit conversions and religions, but it may come from Satan himself. It surprises many people when first they read it in the Bible, that the Bible describes Satan the devil as the god of this world. I say it surprises many people to find out how intensely Satan is interested in religion. In many people's minds, their conception of Satan is somewhat like they did in the Middle Ages depict him, a great dragon with horns and hoofs. And certainly in the Bible he is pictured in the form of a dragon. But he has many characteristics. And elsewhere the Bible describes him as an angel of light, posing as a minister of God. It describes him as the god of this world, head of its religion, its false religion, busy engaging people with religion, thereby to satisfy their sense of need, and all the while a false religion. Of those people who do not believe the gospel, the word of God explicitly says that in them the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not, lest the light of the knowledge of God should shine into them and they be saved. Well, my dear people, I again, I again wish to stress it heavily. I am not here setting up Aunt Sallys that I may knock them down. Nor am I attempting to be alarmist or melancholy and lugubrious. I am merely repeating to you what Scripture itself says, with a common and unanimous voice, that from three deadly sources is it possible for us to be deceived in the realm of religion. Therefore, we may spend a few moments thinking together this evening with the help of Scripture, of that fearful state of affairs in which religion shall end up, in those days just before our Lord Jesus comes again. The state, as I say, pictured here in this woman whose description we have read. I pause a moment to point out to you what right we have to think that this description is in fact a description of what shall be in those days when our Lord is about to come again. Remember, we were thinking together last week about the s- international government that shall come. That international government that eventually shall make war against the Lamb at the moment of our Lord's coming again, and shall attempt by force to prevent his coming. Tonight I want to point out to you that this woman called Babylon and representing false religion is found sitting astride that beast which represents that international government. She is str- sitting astride the beast in an attempt to control him. Long forgetting her calling to be faithful to our Lord Jesus Christ, she is dabbling now in the affairs of politics, struggling to control this beast that represents an international government altogether hostile to God and to Christ. And if it be evident that this government is the final form of government, at least in the West, in the days prior to our Lord's coming, then it must be evident that the woman who sits on that beast and who is eventually destroyed by that beast depicts religion not so much as it is now, but as it shall be then, in those last days. Her name is significant. She is called Babylon. That very name indicates that the principles for which she stand did not originate in New Testament times. In fact, you will trace this name way back into the remote parts of history described in the very first book of the Bible. Babylon is but another form of the name Babel. And if we would get some idea of this religious system, we must for a moment follow the clue that is given us in her name, Babel or Babylon, back to that city of Babel that once men attempted to build in those far off days. It was the first big effort at unification. God had, after the flood, you remember, commanded mankind that they should separate and scatter after their families. They were found certain very influential people in those days who said, no, we will do nothing of the sort, we will not scatter. Come, said they, let us make a big name in the earth. Let us build us a tower, said they, in their poetic language, that shall reach unto heaven. It was a tremendous get-together in the defiance of God's explicit command that mankind scatter on the face of the earth. And that defiance of God would have been successful in the establishment of this great get-together of mankind, unless God himself had intervened and confounded their languages and forced them to scatter. Babylon. It stands, first of all, for that great desire in the human heart to get to big organized togetherness. We might make ourselves a name in the earth. It will lead us to think and to scrutinize very carefully all movements that nowadays become prominent, aimed at the unification of religion. I hasten to make my meaning clear. I do not respeak in any way discouragingly of all those good Christian people who are sincerely grieved at heart, as we all should be who call ourselves Christian, at the shocking state of disunity in the Christian church. Let me take my blame, and you too, if you feel guilty, for anything that we have done or still are doing to perpetuate those sad, those sad divisions which so dishonor the name of the Christian church and of Christ before men. May God encourage with all his power, all who are truly peacemakers amongst his people. All who have it in their heart to see that the prayer of our Lord Jesus Christ be fulfilled, that all his people might be one. I mean that with utter sincerity. But I should be false to my charge this evening if I did not warn myself and you that there are dangers lurking just here. As in Old Testament times, so it is true in New Testament. It is possible to cry, peace, peace, when there is no peace. There is a true unity of Christians. It is a natural unity. We see it clearly expressed in that very prayer of our Lord that I have just quoted. He prayed that all who believed on him might be one, and prayed, how shall they become one? Why, said he, it is a question of this, thou in me and I in them. The purpose for which I have come, said our Lord Jesus, is that I should give eternal life to all that God has given me. The very life of God within them, eternal life. I'm come for that end. This is Christianity. Says the word of God that to as many as received Christ, to them gave he power to become the children of God, even those who were born not of their own will, but of. In other words, our Lord Jesus is talking about a unity that is achieved when people receive this very life of God within their own hearts. If you have eternal life within you, and I have eternal life within me, though you and I have never met before, yet are we truly and deeply one? In fact, I would go as far as to say that the only thing that can possibly produce unity amongst people that is true and genuine is this miracle of that, of the new birth by which this life of God is imparted. Find me two people, be they ever so peaceable, be they ever so well-intentioned, be they ever so religious, and yet if they do not possess this eternal life that Christ has come to give, if the life of God is not in them, then any unity they have is but a facade, is but a counterfeit of the real thing. It is because the human heart is so ready to be deceived by what is not good enough. It is because the human heart is in danger of being deceived by a counterfeit that does not come from God, that our Lord himself was constantly insisting upon this. Of course, let all be one. Oh, how glorious if it were true. But let us see it clearly, the only way it can be. Only by receiving the very life of God within. Now let me put you a blunt question, if I may. The Bible says, to as many as received him, to them he gave this power to become the children of God, to be born of God, to receive this common life. You cannot become something that you already are, can you? When we receive him, we become what we never were before. We become the children of God. And my blunt question is this: Are we all of us here present this evening satisfied that we have become what we were not to start with? Have we become the children of God? Oh, but you say, surely we are all the children of God. Why should we fight amongst ourselves when all mankind are his children? But my dear sir, my dear madam, I must bring you up there. We are not all his children, are we? All mankind are not God's children in this sense. And I am not preaching here party politics. I am preaching you the word of Christ. Only they who receive him are given power to become what they couldn't have been before, to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name. In other words, our Lord is indicating at the only they who receive him are given power to become what they couldn't have been before, to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name. In other words, our Lord is indicating at the base of true Christian unity is this personal work of God in the heart, by which God imparts his spiritual life, and in so doing, thereby constitutes all who have it, one in Christ. And I am happy to say that every true person that has believed on Christ and so received him has received this eternal life and knows it. Every single one is in God's true church. We are all of us one, with an indestructible union. God help those of us who have this eternal life, who are one in this spiritual sense, to show that oneness to our fellow men. But if I do speak to anybody here, and that somebody cannot honestly say, yes, yes, I wasn't, of course, by natural birth a child of God, but I have received Christ, and I have become a child of God. If I speak to just one such, and you are not sure on that matter, oh, I beg of you, I beg of you to notice there is no true Christian unity without it. All else is a horrid deception. Unchanged, it would end you away from God eternally. This name Babylon does not only remind us that this woman stands for a very big join-up of religion. False religion. It reminds us of what Babylon came to be as that famous city in ancient time. That Babylon, for instance, over which Nebuchadnezzar was king. A city famed amongst all the idolatrous cities of the ancient world as being the idolatrous city par excellence. A city where idolatry was to the full. A city where black magic and occult science was practiced so widely that the Gentile name Chaldean came in the ancient world to mean a soothsayer, a somebody dealing in occult science and black magic. Idolatry is, for the most part, a perversion of something that is basically true. For instance, if you will search the idols and the mythologies of ancient times, you will frequently come across the motif of a mother and child. You do not have to wait till the Christian era before you begin to find statues of the mother and child. You will find them sprinkled about history long before Christ ever came, before Christianity was. The motif of mother and child. Pray where come from? From the original promise of God to Adam and to Eve, surely, that the seed of the woman would bruise the serpent's head. Glorious promise of God given to our first parents after the fall, but gradually perverted by means of idolatry, until its original significance was completely lost sight of, and it had descended to something exceedingly unworthy. Babylon stands for idolatry, for perversion of the truth of God. Once more, as we think of the great movements that are afoot in the world for the unification of religions, we need to think very, very carefully. There can be no true religion based on anything but God's holy word. There are movements abroad, you may know of some of them. They crop up even here in the north of Ireland, that would tell us that there is good in all religions. There's good in Mohammedanism and Hinduism and Shintoism, as well as in Christianity, and they would bid us Christians not to be so exclusive and exclude all the others. Can we not take the good out of all religions? I say that a unity formed on such methods would be disastrous in the extreme. For central to Christianity is the claim that Jesus is not a son of God, but Jesus is the unique son of God. No one comes unto the Father but by me, he said. No one comes unto the Father but by me. If you will find fault with the exclusiveness of Christianity, then surely you must find fault with Christianity's founder himself. It is not with some narrow-minded interpretation of Christianity that you have to do. It was the very head of Christianity who claimed it. No one cometh unto the Father but by me. I must ask you as Christian people, do you think that you can keep Christianity and contradict the basic claim of Christ himself? Oh, it sounds so charitable. But it's a false charity. It's the kind of thing this woman shall do in the end, instead of remaining a faithful, chaste virgin to Christ. She shall compromise his interests. The great Apostle Paul used this same figure, I remind you. Talking to some Christians at Corinth, he said, I have espoused you as a chaste virgin to Christ, and I fear if by any means that old serpent, the devil, shall corrupt the simplicity of your minds towards Christ. A girl, before she is betrothed, may keep her heart open for any suitable comer, but let that girl once give her word of betrothal. Then it becomes immoral for her to entertain other possibilities. I have betrothed you as a chaste virgin to Christ, unique because there is only one Son of God. And to compromise with religion that compromises his exclusive claim, that the Bible calls spiritual fornication. Let us not be softly sentimental. All the value of true, holy love to God is involved here. We would claim the name of Christian, we must be true to his person. But alas, let me speak sympathetically as a Christian, it has not been outside Christendom that we have heard these kind of claims. In the last hundred and fifty years, Christendom has lived to see people professing Christianity and professing to teach it, denying practically all the basic facts about our Lord Jesus. It is a commonplace nowadays that his virgin birth be denied in many a theological seminary. I am not throwing stones, I am quoting you plain facts. It is commonly taught that our Lord's views about the Old Testament would be only the views of the people of his day, and in some particulars quite mistaken. And if one challenged such statements that our Lord Jesus was mistaken, then one will be told in these quarters, but you see, if he couldn't make mistakes, he wouldn't have been human, which is utter nonsense. It is a part of fallen humanity, sinful humanity, to make mistakes. It is not necessarily a part of humanity, unfallen, to make mistakes. To suggest our Lord Jesus make mistakes in the important realm of the revelation of God to men, that is to suggest that he is a fallible and erring guide in that very particular in which he came to speak to men. In my short life, I have known prominent Christian leaders to tell us that we needn't necessarily believe in the bodily resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ to be a Christian. That we can find room within the folds of the Christian church for people who refuse to believe that he rose from the dead. While God's own word tells us plainly that if Christ did not raise, rise from the dead, we are yet in our sins. There is no hope. We are found liars if Christ did not rise from the dead. We have lived to see it taught in many a pulpit and in the classroom to many a child. The Old Testament is but a patchwork of myth and primitive, unworthy, pagan ideas, witnessing to us the gradual evolution of religion, much of it now being unworthy of God, being seen now to have been mistaken and false and untrue. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I say again, I'm not wanting to raise Aunt Sallys. I am not wanting to foster any party strife in the Church of God. But what Paul warned the Corinthian Christians about has in fact come true. There is abroad even now a wide outlook that would claim to be a Christian and yet deny these fundamental things. That is unfaithfulness. That is spiritual uncleanliness. That is precisely what this description of this woman is calculated to teach us. She is described, I say, in forgetting her absent lord, in trying to control the political government of the day, allowing her great authority and her fascination over men to be used by these political authorities to gain their political ends. So does she give her favors. Let us, who would profess allegiance to a Christ who is still rejected of men, watch that we do not compromise his claims. Watch that we do not be guilty of what the Apostle Paul warned the Corinthian believers about. Said he to them, you have reigned as kings without us. I would to God that you did reign, said he, for then we should reign too. There's coming a time when the Christian shall reign, when Christ returns, and Jesus himself shall reign from sure to sure. Almost certainly will he reign. And then Christians shall reign with him. Let us remember the words of the Lord Jesus. We reign with him if, if, if we suffer with him. And the professing kingdom of God that so far forgets that her Lord has been rejected, that she can be unfaithful to his character and person, and herself reign as a queen in the very world in which he was and still is rejected. That woman, I say it advisedly, will never reign with Christ. Her end is depicted here. When being unfaithful to lo- her Lord, and dallying with powers hostile to Christ, she is in the end used by them for their convenience, and in the end, when it suits her, they tear her to pieces. Our false Christendom, false religion the world through. That has become unfaithful to God and his revealed truth and unfaithful to Christ shall meet its end at the hands of ungodly men who have nothing but utter contempt for religion that professes the name, but all the while has dilly-dallied with men who at heart quite freely confess that they've no interest in God or Christ either. You gain nothing, my dear Christian friend. You gain nothing in the respect of this world if you compromise the claims of your Lord in an attempt to spread your influence for good. While we have been thinking so much about the final doom that shall overtake such an unpleasant state of false religion, we should not be wise merely to pass an hour thinking of those future things without perceiving that they have an exceedingly eloquent voice for ourselves. We may not live to see those times. Again, I tell you, I cannot, and I have no authority for saying when these things shall take place, when Babylon shall be judged, when our Lord shall come. I cannot tell you, and I do not attempt to do so. But that same false thing that shall be seen in full then is already working now, and has been working for centuries. And if it is the fact that humans can be deceived, we surely should be exceedingly pharisaical and foolish if we didn't own to ourselves the possibility that we too could be deceived. Are we somehow special? Are we so much more clever than all the rest of humanity that it is possible that we should never be deceived, and they would? Surely not. None of us would be so proud. In face of the clear positive warnings of God and of Christ and his apostles, surely it behoves us all to ask ourselves, am I sure that what I have is the right thing? After all, scripture is given to us not that we should throw stones at somebody else, or attempt to cast out beams out of other people's eye or moats either, but to examine ourselves. And in the few moments remaining to me, I do propose to lead you in such an examination. Have we? The real thing. This is such a vital question that you will find our Lord and his apostles constantly talking of this. Several of the letters that the apostles wrote to Christians in those early days were aimed at this very thing, warning people against false religion. The letter, for instance, that the great apostle Paul wrote to Christians at Colossae was aimed at holding them back from three spurious forms of religion. There were those who observed days and months, as though there were some special value in observing days and feast days and fast days. There were those who thought there was some value in penance, in in rigorous treatment of the body, as though that made them somehow holy. There were those who went in for the worship of angels and saints. There were those, on the other hand, who felt that they could not be complete without philosophy. The letter to the Colossians that we find in our New Testament is the inspired warning that all these things mentioned are will-o'-the-wisps. They are no use when it comes to the human heart finding God and being saved. Of no value, says Paul, of no value. Pray, let us be warned. There is no value in your penance, sir. There is no value in your feast days and your fast. And your philosophy will but lead you into the dark, sir, apart from Christ. There is salvation only in Christ. But even to those who profess faith in Christ, Paul had to write. He wrote another letter that we call the letter to the Galatians. May I remind you that from the very first letter to the last in that epistle, the whole argument is directed to warning us time and time and time again, that when God talks of our being saved by faith, he means that we are saved by grace plus faith plus nothing. Oh, how we need to preach that. To a Christendom that has it well at heart somehow that our works contribute to our salvation. Ask many men, ask many women, are you saved, sir? And ask it as courteously, courteously as you can. And they will say, well, I do my best, and I really hope so. Clear evidence at heart that they think that their being saved does depend on what they do. Fatal error. Fatal error. So eternally injurious to the human soul that anybody that dared tell people that they were saved by any observance, any ritual, any work that they did themselves, the inspired Apostle Paul called down two anathemas upon their head. All this is not bigotry, my dear people, it is the warning of a heart that loves. God would have never given Christ to the cross if we could have been saved by our own efforts or by our rituals. And it calls for men who are faithful to preach to people that there is no salvation in your ritual, not even if it be a Christian ritual. There is no salvation in works. There is salvation only for him who, abandoning faith in all else, trusts only and personally in our living Lord Jesus Christ, in his death upon the cross and his sacrifice for sin, in his resurrection to God's right hand. I say this was not only a constant theme with the apostles, but as I close, I remind you once more of the words of our Lord Jesus Christ. From him we started, with him let us finish. None loved us more than he. These are the words of him who died for us to make it possible for us to be saved. I say again, none loved your soul more than he. He said in the last times the kingdom of heaven would be likened to ten virgins, five of whom were wise, five were foolish. I could hope that his proportions were wrong, but he said five wise and five foolish. Outwardly, they all looked virgins and were. Outwardly, all dressed the same. All knew that the bridegroom was coming. All went forth to meet him. All had lamps. All had oil in their lamps. But whereas five not only had oil in their little vessel, but had great pitchers full of oil ready to replenish their store, the others had no oil in their, in their pitchers. They were not linked with the great supply. They all went forth to meet the bridegroom, but in the moment that he came, five found that they were not prepared, and the door was shut against them. I suppose all of us who here sit tonight would like to be thought of as decent characters, virgins in the spiritual sense, and so we all may be. All of us have some kind of a lamp of profession, haven't you, sir? Do you not profess to be decent? And you, madam? Oh yes, you have some light. Have you not read the Bible frequently? Are you not to be seen carrying it sometimes? Have you not sing, sung those delightful Christian hymns, full of Christian truth and light? Yes, you have some little light. But oh, my dear sir, may I, may I plead with you to make sure that in addition to all that, you are linked with the great supply personally, that you personally have the Holy Spirit of God, that you have received his eternal life. Unless you have here and now eternal life, unless before this life ends and before the Lord comes, you receive this eternal life, the very life of God within. I must tell you, sir, I must tell you, madam, that the little flicker of light that you may have will go out in utter darkness, and the door will be shut against you. When once the master of the house is risen up and has shut to the door, said Christ, there shall come people knocking, saying, but look, we ought to have been inside. They honestly thought they were qualified to be in heaven. They find out too late that they were never qualified at all. So Christ said. He cannot be accused of raising up Aunt Sallys to knock them down. He was no scaremonger. He told us the truth. Shall we not ask ourselves now claim clear- clearly and plainly? Have I that oil? Have I that eternal life? Am I right with God? Have I received the Savior? Have I become what I never was before? Have I become a child of God? Am I a member of his body? Or am I just religious? I ask myself that question, and I ask you. I have no desire to make anyone unsettled who is a Christian. Let it not be thought that this is a difficult thing in which deception is so easy that none of us can be sure. I would do you wrong, so to say. As I let you go, I point out that it is the birthright of all who trust the Savior to be sure. It is the hallmark of genuine children of God that they are sure. These things are written that you might have eternal life. Yes, and more than that. These things are written not only that you might have eternal life, but thank God that you might know you have it. And I freely confess that if you don't know you have it, it is quite possible that you haven't got the real thing at all. May I ask you, perhaps to use that as one, one kind of a test now in God's presence, as a kind of a test as whether you've got the real thing. Do you know that you have passed from death to life? Do you know that you have become what you were never before, a child of God? Do you know it without any fear of contradiction, that you are ready for Christ's coming? Do you know it? Oh, pray God, if you don't know it for certain, that you will take the steps to get that knowledge as soon as ever you can. The glorious thing is that you can have it. You, even you. You could have it. You could have it this very night. You could know it because God says it to you with unshakable certainty, and yours would be the wonderful experience. Go in peace, the very peace of God within you, and peace between you and God. Because that is such a great and real possibilities. These warnings are given us that none of us might rest short of getting the real thing, that none of us being deceived with mere religion, should eventually find ourselves unprepared and shut out from heaven. Shall we pray?