Urgent Call to Repentance Amid Life's Calamities

Now here you see our Lord is taking up and dealing with something that is very common amongst us human beings. Let me put it to you like this: I suppose that there is no truer or more exact way of discovering where every one of us really stands from the standpoint of Christianity and our relationship to God, no more sure or certain way of finding exactly where we are and what we are and what our true position is than our reaction to the things that happen round and about us. [00:04:49]

Sin is the most devastating thing that has ever entered into the world. You know the effect of an atomic bomb or even an earthquake is nothing compared with a devastating effect of sin. There is no ruin that any calamity, natural or man-produced, has ever taken place. There is no calamity that has led to consequences such as sin and the fall of man have led to. There is no end to the effects of sin. [00:07:27]

The first thing that sin does to the mind is to produce a kind of general paralysis of the mind. Sin seems somehow or another to damage our mind at its very root. The whole immense thinking as the result of sin is a kind of paralyzed thinking. It's an incapable thinking. Our Lord uses this expression himself after his resurrection as he talks through the two men on the road to Emmaus. [00:09:27]

Man is brilliant perhaps in business or in the arts, in science or in his profession. There is a man, well, he's wonderful. Everybody pays attention to his judgment, everybody's ready to listen to him. But you'll sometimes find that the same man in his own life is a fool. It's the only thing to say about him. He may even be seated upon a bench as a judge of some sort. [00:12:42]

There is a wrong way of looking at these things. There is a right way of looking at these things. There is a message to be garnered and gathered from these things that can prove salvation to us. Now then, let's look at them. First of all, let us take the wrong way of looking at these things. Of course, it's typified by these people who put their question to our Lord. [00:20:00]

The wrong way to look at all this is to be raising any one of these particular questions because as long as I'm simply raising these or stopping with them, I am missing the real point. What is that? That's my second point. There is a right way of looking at these calamities. What is that? Well, there is no doubt about this. Our Lord has repeated the same thing twice over in five verses. [00:29:19]

The right way of looking at the calamity is this: not to raise my theoretical questions. Were these people worse than others because that happened to them? Were those people there in Morocco worse than others because it happened to them? Why does this happen in a family? Why is a little child born? Is it because they've sinned? You know these questions. [00:33:49]

Why am I still alive? There are people of like passions with myself living in the same world, so much alike in every respect. They're dead, I'm alive. Why am I alive? Why am I still alive? Is it because I'm an exceptionally good man? Is it because they were on pleasure bent and I'm not? I live to serve God and to worship him and to praise His name. [00:38:34]

The purpose of preaching the gospel is to remind men and women who are doing everything they can in this world at this moment not to think about death, to think about death. The television and the wireless won't let you think about it, will they? No, no, the program keeps on and on and on you go, and you see you can go on looking and reading and thinking and reading your novels. [00:47:23]

Why are we still alive? Why are we still spared? Why isn't the whole world long since been destroyed by a righteous and a holy God? There's only one answer, my friend. It is God's love, the love that he has revealed in and through his son. Our Lord puts himself here into the picture in the guise of this particular dresser of the vineyard. [00:49:33]

Repentance, except you repent, that's it. Acknowledgement, confession of it absolutely without reservation. What then? Oh, taking advantage of this process of digging and dunging, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Though I may have sinned all my life and lived as a fool and as a rebel, I am confronted by a message which tells me that God so loved me. [00:56:21]

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ as you are and you shall be saved. Though you've been barren until this moment, though there has been no fruit in your life until this second, yield, believe, let him dig, let him dung. Don't resist, yield yourself to his entreaties, respond to the tender pleadings of his holy spirit. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. [01:01:20]