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Remember: All men's hearts are evil, only God is true! -
11-08-2011, 05:27 PM
Friends, the Lord has moved me to share some thoughts on sin with you all assembled in the name of the Lord here today. Let us remember that the wages of sin is death; that it is written, and cannot fail, the soul that sinneth, it shall die. Let us remember that we are born in sin, in son did our mothers conceive us - sin reigns in all our members, sin is the foul heart's natural liquid, sin looks out of the eye, amen, and leads to lust, sin is in the hearing of the ear, and leads to folly, sin sits on the tongue, and leads to murder. Yes! Sin is the the only heritage of the natural man, sin bequeathed us by our natural father, that fallen Adam, whose apple sickens and will sicken all generations living, and generations yet unborn! It was sin that drove the son of the morning out of Heaven, sin that drove Adam out of Eden, sin that caused Cain to slay his brother, sin that built the tower of Babel, sin that caused the fire to fall on Sodom - sin, from the very foundations of the world, living and breathing from the heart of man, that causes women to bring forth their children in agony and darkness, bows down the backs of men with terrible labour, keeps the empty belly empty, keeps the table bare, sends our children, dressed in rags, out into the whorehouses and dance halls of the world!
Woe is me. Woe is me. Yes, there is no righteousness in man. All men's hearts are evil, all men are liars - only God is true. Hear David's cry: 'The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.' Hear Job, sitting in dust and ashes, his children dead, his substance gone, surrounded by false comforters: 'Yea, though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.' And hear Paul, who had been Saul, a persecutor of the redeemed, struck down on the road to Damascus, and going forth to preach the gospel: 'And if ye be Christ's, then ye are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise!'
For God had a plan. He would not suffer the soul of man to die, but had prepared a plan for his salvation. In the beginning, way back there at the laying of the foundations of the world, God had a plan to bring all flesh to a knowledge of the truth. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God - yes, and in Him was life, hallelujah, and this life was the light of men. When God saw how men's hearts waxed evil, how they turned aside, each to his own way, how they feasted on ungodly meat and drink and lusted, and blasphemed, and lifted up their hearts in sinful pride against the Lord - oh, then the Son of God, the blessed lamb that taketh away the sins of the world, this Son of God who was the Word made flesh, the fulfillment of the promise - oh, then he turned to His Father, crying 'Father, prepare me a body and I'll go down and redeem sinful man.'
Fathers, here tonight, have you ever had a son who went astray? Mothers, have you seen your daughters cut down in the pride and fullness of youth? Has any man here heard the command which came to Abraham, that he must make his son a living sacrifice on God's altar? Fathers, think of your sons, how you tremble for them, and try to lead them right, try to feed them so they'll grow up strong; think of your love for your son, and how any evil that befalls him cracks up the heart, and think of the pain that God has borne, sending down His only begotten Son, to dwell among men on the sinful earth, to be persecuted, to suffer, to bear the cross and die - not for His own sins, like our natural sons, but for the sins of all the world, to take away the sins of all the world - that we might have the joy bells ringing deep in our hearts tonight!
Woe is me, for when God struck the sinner, the sinner's eyes were opened, and he saw himself in all his foulness naked before God's glory. Woe is me! For the moment of salvation is a blinding light, cracking down into the heart from Heaven - Heaven so high, and the sinner so low. Woe is me! For unless God raised the sinner, he would never rise again!
Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!
O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it--for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation... he who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter, but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
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