The following message was delivered
on Sunday evening, August 1st, 1993, at the Trinity Baptist
Church in Montville, New Jersey. Please turn with me to the Gospel
according to Matthew in chapter 24. Matthew chapter 24, verses
12 and 13. Our Lord Jesus, speaking in what
is commonly called the Olivet Discourse, says, And because
iniquity or lawlessness shall be multiplied, the love of the
many shall wax cold or be extinguished. But he that endureth to the end,
the same shall be saved. Last Lord's Day evening we began
what I purpose will be a brief series of messages on the theme
of the Christian's danger and duty in an age of abounding lawlessness. The text I attempted to open
up in your hearing in which we studied together is the text
which I have again read in your hearing after spending just a
few minutes to catch the flow of thought in the Olivet Discourse
and the place of these words in that flow of thought. We then
examine the text under three very simple headings. The condition
described, lawlessness shall be multiplied. The declension
predicted, the love of the many, shall wax cold or be extinguished. and the resistance demanded,
but he that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved." Now
from this text it is clear that the great danger we face when
lawlessness abounds is its chilling blast upon the tender plant of
the grace of love to Christ. And if our great danger is the
waning of our love to Christ, then our great duty is to seek
to have our love to Christ be genuine in its nature, warm and
growing in its degree in spite of and in the very midst of the
chilling blast of abounding lawlessness. Tonight, as a natural sequence
to last week's message and as preparation for our coming to
the Lord's table, we shall spend our allotted time seeking at
least to begin to give an answer to this very vital question that
grows out of the text. How can the grace of love to
Christ be kept burning and hot? in an age of abounding lawlessness. How can the grace of love to
Christ be kept burning and hot in an age of abounding lawlessness? In an age when the love of the
many shall wax cold or be extinguished, But the love of the true people
of God will be maintained and sustained and even increased
in those same conditions enabling them to endure to the end. I say it is a question of life
and death. It is a question of persevering
grace. It's a question of salvation
or damnation. How can the grace of love to
Christ be kept burning and hot in an age of abounding lawlessness? My answer to that question will
be set forth in two simple categories. Our love to Christ must be properly
rooted and our love to Christ must be properly nourished. It
must be properly rooted and properly nourished. we take up only the
first of those two heads. Our love to Christ must be rooted
in the powerful application of His saving grace in us. If we would have a love that
will maintain its vitality and intensity no matter how much
wickedness abounds, it must be properly rooted and the only
proper root system of the grace of love to Christ is the powerful
application of his saving grace in us. When the text says that
the love of the many shall wax cold or be extinguished, it is
telling us that many who profess faith in Christ and thereby claim
to love Christ, and have manifested a semblance of what appeared
to be love to Christ, are actually self-deceit. For eventually the
constant chilling blast of an age of abounding lawlessness,
by degrees or with suddenness, extinguishes what appeared to
be love to Christ, thereby revealing that they never had any genuine
Spirit-wrought, Holy Ghost-implanted love in their hearts to Christ,
in the first place. If they had had a supernaturally
implanted love, it would be enduring love. It would be the love that
would enable them to endure to the end in the midst of and in
spite of the abounding lawlessness and thereby enjoy the consummate
blessings of salvation. For it is he that endureth to
the end that shall be saved. But it's equally true to say
that he who is truly saved shall endure to the end. For the scripture
tells us in Philippians 1.6 that he who has begun a good work
in us will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ. But we need to face from the
teaching of this passage that by nature the human heart is
incapable of that love to Christ which will endure no matter how
intense become the blasts and the chilling winds of an age
of abounding lawlessness. The human heart is incapable
of that persevering, enduring love. And this is so because
according to the scriptures, the heart by nature sees no beauty
or loveliness in the person of Christ. Isaiah the prophet said
that there is no beauty that we should desire him. and viewed with natural eyes
in terms of His natural form, and in terms of the only way
we can now view Him in the Scriptures, no man by nature sees any beauty
that makes Christ desirable to him. 2 Corinthians 4 and verse
3 says, In whom the God of this world hath blinded the minds
of the unbelieving, lest the light of the gospel of the glory
of Christ, who is the image of God, should dawn upon them. Satan blinds men's eyes to the
outshining of the perfections of Christ that are seen in the
gospel. The human heart sees no beauty
or loveliness in the person of Christ to make him desirable.
Further, the heart is in rebellion and is belligerent against the
law of Christ. It not only perceives no beauty
in the person of Christ, it is in a state of rebellion and belligerence
against the law of Christ. Romans 8, 7 says the carnal mind
is enmity against God. For it is not subject to the
law of God, neither, indeed, can it be. And nowhere does that
reality come to clearer expression than when we plant a man or woman,
boy or girl, in the presence of the demands of Christ. The
yoke of Christ who says, if any man will come after me, let him
say a resolute, deep, irrevocable no to living for himself. He must say no to self. He must go to the core of living
for himself. take up his cross and follow
me. If any man come to me and hate
not father, mother, brother, sister, yea, and his own life
also, he cannot be my disciple. If you would follow me, your
divorce from sin must be so thorough that sins as dear as right hands
and right eyes must be cut off and cast away, and plucked out
and cast away, and before such law, such yoke turns." The language
of the human heart by nature is that of Luke 19, 14. They sent an ambassador, a group
of ambassadors, after the Lord of the city saying, we will have
this man to reign over us. The heart by nature sees no beauty
or loveliness in the person of Christ. The heart by nature is
in rebellion and belligerent against the law of Christ. And
thirdly, the heart by nature is in a state of indifference
and unbelief with respect to the work of Christ. The fact
that Christ has died for sinners, the culmination of a life of
perfect obedience and the righteousness comprised of that perfect life
and that substitutionary death is regarded as a thing of naught.
As Paul said of his fellow Jewish countrymen in Romans 12, 10,
3, they being ignorant of God's righteousness and going about
to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves
to the righteousness of God. You see, where you have a human
heart that sees no beauty or loveliness in the person of Christ,
is in a state of rebellion and belligerence against the law
of Christ. and in a condition of indifference
and unbelief with respect to the work of Christ, such a heart
cannot, will not, and does not truly believe upon Christ, and
therefore does not and cannot truly love Christ. But in that
condition, and follow closely, in that condition, man whose
heart sees no beauty in Christ, Man whose heart is set against
the law of Christ, man whose heart is indifferent to the work
of Christ, still has a conscience, still is susceptible to religious
instruction, to religious traditions, to religious training and influence,
and by the actings of conscience under the light of the Word of
God, or frightening providences, under the influence of effective
parental training and instruction, under the influence of biblical
teaching in the Sunday school and from the pulpit in the church
to which children may be carried, under felt psychological needs
for identity and meaning in life and acceptance, under the sense
of peer pressure, under natural insecurities and the fear of
death, and for a host of many other reasons, people whose,
follow me closely now, eyes have never been supernaturally opened
to behold anything beauty and beautiful in Christ, whose wills
have never been supernaturally renewed to embrace the yoke of
Christ, and whose hearts have never been so thoroughly crushed
with Holy Ghost conviction to see their utter, desperate need
of the righteousness of Christ, then nonetheless, under the pressure
of these many things, any one of them or any combination of
them, make what appears to be a valid profession of faith in
Christ. They make some movement towards
Christ, whether gradually, under the nurture of a Christian hope,
Or within that context, in a crisis of confrontation where they've
really blown it and come under parental frown and the pressure
of the unusual discipline, as was true in my case periodically,
when my parents dealt with me and showed me the root of my
problem in my sinful heart, there'd be a tremendous emotional upheaval
and weeping and crying and praying and asking the Lord to save me.
While yet, I saw no true beauty in him. While yet my heart did
not reach out to submit to his yoke, and while yet I did not
see my utter destitute state apart from his perfect life and
his death on behalf of sinners being credited to me, And so
our Lord assumes in this text that there will be many who under
the pressure of any one or combination of these things will come to
some profession of faith in Christ and as the apparent fruit of
that faith will profess to love Him. But, but under the constant
chilling blasts of the winds of an age of abounding lawlessness,
That professed love grows cold and is extinguished. It grows
cold and is extinguished, thereby manifesting that there was never
any true love to Christ. And so in answer to the question,
how can the grace of love to Christ be kept burning and hot
in an age of abounding lawlessness, I answer, our love to Christ
must be rooted in the powerful application of His saving grace
in us. An operation of grace that will
take away the blindness which keeps us from seeing any beauty
in the person of Christ. will take away the rebellion
that keeps us from embracing the yoke of Christ and either
the indifference to our sin or the misplaced confidence in another
way of acceptance with God and brings us to see that our only
hope is in the righteousness of Christ. For you see, in the
true convert, the Spirit of God does this powerful application
or effects this powerful application of saving grace. And whenever
he does it, he causes the sinner to behold a beauty in Christ
that makes Christ to him what Christ himself described in the
parable of the treasure hidden in the field and in the parable
of the pearl of great price. You remember our Lord Jesus said,
the kingdom of heaven is like unto. It has similarities with
these realities. And he speaks of the kingdom
of heaven in Matthew 13 and verse 44, like unto a treasure hidden
in the field, which a man found and hid, and in his joy he goeth
and selleth all that he has. and buys that field, many things
were counted and reckoned in his judgment as worthy of being
retained as valuable possessions until he found this one treasure
hidden in a field. And when he found that one treasure,
his sense of values underwent a radical upheaval. Everything
else that up till that time he had accounted worthy of retention,
worthy of protection, suddenly he relinquishes it all that he
might have that one treasure hidden in the field. Likewise,
verse 45, again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man
that is a merchant seeking goodly pearls, and having found one
pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had and
bought it. Here is a man who is a pearl
merchant, and he has many possessions and many pearls. And he's constantly
seeking to escalate the worth of his pearls and trade off pearls
of lesser worth for a pearl of greater worth. But now, something
that he had never encountered before, he found one pearl of
such supreme worth that he liquidated every last asset in pearls. He might have it. It. And if there's any contrast in
the two parallels, it's the contrast of the Lord coming to a man.
who may be utterly, from the human standpoint, utterly indifferent,
utterly without any previous consciousness of God awakening
in him a hunger and a thirst for reality in the things of
God and forgiveness of sins. He is like someone who stumbles
into a field and finds a treasure beneath the bush and the nettles,
and making sure that no one sees him, he furtively goes out, strikes
his veal, and comes back to possess the treasure upon which he stumbled.
In the second parallel, it's the picture of a man on a quest.
He is a merchant seeking, seeking, seeking. Could it be that our
Lord is showing that in some, the work of His grace comes as
a surprise, like a lightning bolt out of a clear blue sky? In others, it comes at the end
of years and perhaps decades of quest. But you see the common
denominator? No matter what the method of
grace may be, wherever the kingdom of God comes to a human heart,
the king himself is always perceived as worthy of being the soul treasure. He shares his place with none,
and if the kingdom of God is come to you in grace, you are
like the one who has found the hidden treasure. and you've sold
all that you have, Christ is of supreme worth to you. You
see a beauty and a loveliness in Christ that makes you say,
if to have Christ I must lose every friend, every single person
that accepts me as a personal friend, if I must lose every
friend, if I must lose even the love of father, mother, brother,
sister, and my own life. I am prepared for this treasure,
for this pearl, to sell all. And the Holy Ghost never savingly
reveals Christ in any other light but that. Never! Never! Never! The Kingdom of Heaven is light! And whenever Heaven's rule of
grace breaks in upon us, God, through the Word and by the Spirit,
gives the sinner such a view of the beauty of Christ that
causes the sinner to choose Him above all else. Further, whenever
God applies His grace in supernatural power, He does that work of marvelous
renewal that makes the sinner gladly embrace the yoke of Christ. It's described in Ezekiel 36
and Jeremiah 31 as a spiritual heart transplant. God says, I
will take out the heart of stone. I will give them a heart of flesh.
I will put my spirit within them, write my law upon their hearts
and cause them to keep my statutes and my judgments. Jeremiah 32,
God says, I'll put my fear in their hearts and they shall never
depart from my ways. in the language of our Lord Jesus
when he says, Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. The picture is either submitting
to the yoke that He holds out, the yoke of His own commandments,
as we heard this morning, that are not grievous, that only have
the glory of God and the sanctity and the well-being of man as
their end. It's either the yoke of His own
will that He holds out to us, for his own yoke that he offers
to share with us, that we may, as it were, pull and plow in
the direction of the knowledge of Christ, of the will of Christ,
the ways of Christ, in company with the people of Christ, to
advance the kingdom of Christ. But in either case, the animal
that comes under the yoke has his actions determined by another. Take my yoke upon Take my yoke
upon you. Take the yoke that is carved
and shaped by me, and that is custom fit to your own spiritual
shoulders, and for which I will give you the grace to bear and
to do whatever I call upon you to bear and to do." And when
the Holy Spirit savingly reveals Christ, the whole concept that
He's meaning, that Christ's ways are straining and restraining
and constrictive, the Holy Ghost takes away all such nonsense
and shows us His yoke is easy. His burden is light compared
to the crushing, bawling burden laid upon us by our sin and by
the devil that causes us to grind and be bent over. For the Scripture
says the way of the transgressor is hard and will ultimately take
us down to hell. His yoke is easy and His burden
is light, for it suited to our renewed humanity. Man was not
made for sin, but made for God and the will of God. Sin is a
wretched, crippling, twisting, destructive abnormality. To come
under the yoke of Christ and to move in the direction of holiness
and obedience to God and living to the glory of God, it is a
light yoke. The lovely little chorus we used
to sing as new Christians. His yoke is easy, his burden
is light. I've found it so, I've found
it so. He leadeth me by day and by night. His yoke is easy, his burden
is light. Oh, dear young people, I've borne
that yoke for forty-one years. But the whole forty-one years
is lighter than one day of that other yoke I was under. that
left me with a condemned and defiled conscience and with a
frightening cloud of judgment and hell and eternity and outer
darkness ever before me. But every fruit I found under
that yoke that looked sweet became bitter in my mouth and more bitter
in my stomach. His yoke was easy. His burden
was light. And when God supernaturally and
powerfully applies his grace in the gospel, sinners not only
behold the beauty in the person of Christ that causes them to
choose him as the supreme object of their affection, but he also
does this work of renewal of the will, so that they with Paul,
Saul of Tarsus, trekking to the ground, cry out, Lord, what wilt
thou have me to do? And then thirdly, he always brings
the sinner to that place where seeing the guilt of his sin,
calling forth divine wrath upon him, that there is nothing he
can do to commend himself to God. There's nothing he ever
has been or ever can become that would answer to the demands of
God's holy law, because the law touches the thoughts and the
motives and desires of the heart, as well as the deeds and the
acts of the body. And so he's ready to throw himself
in the language of Philippians 3, wholly upon the righteousness
of God in Christ. He's ready to count all of his
religious heritage, Philippians 3, Pharisee of the Pharisees,
Hebrew of the Hebrews, all of his practice and all of his devotion,
touching zeal, persecuting the church, External demands of the
law, he said, impeccably blameless. But what things were gained to
me, these I count in loss for Christ. Yea, I count all things
but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus
my Lord, for whom I've suffered the loss of all things and do
count them as refuse that I may gain Christ and be found in Him,
not having a righteousness of my own which is of the law, but
the righteousness which is of God by And the Spirit of God
brings the sinner to where he does something more than in a
nebulous way, nob to the fact Christ died for sinners, and
I've blown it a few times, and I guess I'm a sinner, and therefore
what He did must somehow be of help to me, so I'll ascend to
that. Oh, no! In saving faith, there is not
a casual nob to the cross. With a general notion, I've blown
it, and Christ didn't. Oh, no, my friend. There is some
clear perception that I am a hell-deserving sinner who has broken the law
of a holy God. And in the person of the incarnate
God, Jesus Christ, one perfectly kept that law. and under the
curses of that law hung upon the cross and bore the unleashed
fury of the wrath of God until He drank into His soul that cup
we contemplated a few months ago in our communion meditation. And I see, by eyes illumined
by the Spirit, that in that perfect life and in that immolated God,
man upon the cross, is my only hope of life and salvation and
acceptance with God and with the full, may I use the term,
with the full weight of the soul. The soul has no weight, I know,
but the full weight of the soul is thrown upon Christ. Seek or
swim, live or die. Other refuge have I none. Hangs
my helpless soul on That's the language of faith. Hangs my helpless
soul on thee. Hence faith is likened in Hebrews
6 to a man who is guilty of manslaughter. He did not deliberately kill
a man. He's guilty of not murder, but inadvertent manslaughter. The avenger of blood is on his
heels, and he knows there's a city of refuge some ten k's away,
and though he's fat and out of shape, if he can only get to
the city of refuge, and he's huffing and puffing and wondering
if he's going to have a heart attack, and he flees, and he
stumbles through the gate, and the door is shut behind him.
He breathes a sigh as he lies there panting, and says, I'm
safe. God likens faith to a fleeing to Christ for refuge. He's the
great city of refuge. God's law is the avenger of blood. We are the guilty party, and
when we see it, we don't casually tip our hat to Jesus. We're like
a man who knows the daggers at our back unless we get into him.
And we don't rest, no matter how much our lungs may burn and
our legs feel like lead. We'll run in the way of earnest
seeking and crying after God and for mercy until we know we've
been brought in and the door's been shut behind us. Dear people, that's the faith
called in Titus 1-1, the faith of God's elect. That's not a
natural faith. No man by nature is so stripped
of his own sense of importance that he says, no thing whatsoever,
nothing in my hands I bring. Simply, to thy cross I cling. Follow, I to the fountain fly. Wash me, Savior, or I die. Now that faith That faith, which
is the faith of God's elect, is always a faith that carries
in its very arms the grace of love, whom having not seen, ye
love in whom believing, verse Peter 1 and verse 8. And it is
that faith, which by the grace of God has brought the sinner
to see beauty in Christ. brought the sinner to embrace
joyfully the yoke of Christ, brought the sinner to rest solely
and truly upon the person and work of Christ. It is that faith
alone which will be the mother of that love, which will endure
and persevere, will maintain its heat and its glow through
all the chilling blasts of any age of abounding lawlessness. But anything short of that won't
do it. Remember in the parable of the
sower, Jesus said, Luke 8, these that are sown upon the rocky
soil are those who for a while believe, the word kairos is used,
who for a season believe. But in another kairos, another
season of pairosmos, of testing, they fall away. The season of testing, the age
of abounding lawlessness. And that lawlessness causes their
professed faith and its accompaniment of love to wither and to die. You see Bunyan understood this
and in his own inimitable way captured it in so many ways in
his immortal Pilgrim's Progress. Remember that incident in the
House of Interpreter? Then I saw in my dream the interpreter
took Christian by the hand and led him to a place where there
was a fire burning against a wall. You can imagine now, a fire burning
against this front wall of the church underneath that heating
and air duct vent. and one standing by it, always
casting much water upon it to quench it. Here's someone with
a large bucket, and he's taking a ladle and constantly throwing
water upon the fire, trying to quench it. But Bunyan said, yet
did the fire burn higher and hotter. Yet did the fire burn
higher and hotter! Then said Christian, what means
this? The interpreter answered, The
fire is the work of grace that is wrought in the heart. He that
casts water upon it to extinguish and put it out is the devil. But in that thou seest the fire
notwithstanding burn higher and hotter, thou shalt see the reason
of that. So he had him about to the back
side of the wall. We go around and through the
baptistry. And we look on the other side of the wall, and what
do we find? He took him there, and this is what he found. So
he had him to the back side of the wall, where he saw a man
with a vessel of oil in his hand, of which he did also continually
cast, but secretly, into the fire. How did he get the oil
through the wall and onto the fire that was on the front of
the wall? He did it secretly. Maybe Bandu should have written
magically. I don't know how he did it. So
he was there, and he had his vessel of oil, and somehow the
oil was continually being poured upon that fire, so in spite of
the water being ladled upon it, it burned yet hotter and brighter
in spite of all the attempts to extinguish it. Then said Christian,
what means this? The interpreter answered, this
is Christ. who continually with the oil
of his grace maintains the work already begun in the heart, by
the means of which, notwithstanding what the devil can do, the souls
of his people prove gracious still. And in what thou saw'st,
that the man, capital N, stood behind the wall to maintain the
fire is to teach thee that it is hard for the tent to see how
this work of grace is maintained in the soul. Bunyan the wise pastor saw the
struggling Christian coming to Him in pastoral interaction and
saying, Oh, Pastor Paul, I'm so conscious of the flames of
my remaining sin being constantly stirred up within me. I feel
that the fire of love to Christ will be extinguished. as those
ladles of my own sin are cast upon me, and enticements and
snares from the devil are thrown upon me like ladles of water. And yet all the while that very
awareness and disturbance and longing for more grace was the
very operation of grace within the heart of the sinner, turning
him away from himself, making him acutely aware of and honest
regarding his sin. and looking out of himself to
have the graces implanted, sustained by the power of God. So as I
bring our meditation to a conclusion in preparation for the table
tonight, may I ask you and may you answer with Judgment Day
honesty. Do you, this night, see a beauty
in Christ that makes you value Him above all other people? relationships
and possessions, even life itself. Do you see the beauty in Christ
that makes it reasonable to assume he is to you the pearl of great
price and the treasure hidden in the field? I'm not saying
do you believe he is that in himself. That's your theoretical
theology of Christ. I'm asking you, is he that to
you, sitting where you sit tonight? That's your experiential knowledge
of Christ. You answer. You see, I'm not
asking you, do you profess the love of Christ? For the love
of the many shall wax cold. They professed it. They manifested
what appeared to be the fruits of it. But it was ultimately
extinguished because it didn't have a proper root. They never
beheld Christ in their hearts as the pearl of great brightness.
And so I ask you to answer in the solemn presence of Almighty
God, do you see a beauty in Christ that makes you value Him above
all other people, relationships, possessions, and life itself? Do you love the yoke of His will,
His ways, His laws? I didn't say, do you keep them
as you long to? I didn't say, do you miserably
fail in performing them as you ought to? I asked, do you love
his laws and love his ways and love his yoke? Or is it always uncomfortable on
your shoulders? This children obey your parents,
honor father and mother. I'm sixteen. Well, big deal. God ain't going to come down
and rewrite the fifth commandment because you had your sixteenth
birthday. If you love Christ, the yoke of the fifth commandment
will feel more comfortable at 16 than it did at 50. Because as you grow in knowledge,
you'll grow in appreciation of how good God is to give us parents
to guide us into adulthood and even beyond. We won't always
be chafing with the rules and regulations and all the rest.
You'll see that's Christ's yoke. And as he himself went down to
Nazareth and was subject to his parents, So you in the Spirit
of Christ will do the same with joy. Is that true of you kids? Listen to me now. I want to go
out to the conscience of you kids. Because we've had great
hopes for some of you. We've watched you grow up through
your toddlers, into your pre-teens and early teens. And some of
you profess to love Christ, to truly trust Christ. But that
was before your hormones began to really get agitated. You were
somewhere between, you know how I say the stages, boys and girls
pass through from yuck to mm to hmm. Some of you are between
the mm and the hmm stage. And now a whole new set of perspective
enters. Having your first or second crush.
Having the guys look at you. Having the gals look at you.
Wondering if I look macho. Wonder if they say, hey, you
got a nice bob. You say, you know our language.
Yeah, I do. Let me ask, listen you kids,
let me ask, is it all going to go down the tubes in the next
five years? Are you going to throw down the tubes all the
standards of decency and modesty and chastity? And the kids are
all talking about who's made the bases, and you say, I ain't
even been in the batter's box and took the bat in my hand.
Kids know what I'm talking about. Are you ready to have them mock
you out? That your purity is unstained because your body belongs
to Christ? Even if it's a gal or a guy in
Trinity Church, you want to start using your body for a playground,
are you ready to tell them off and get their dirty hands off
you? That body belongs to Christ and is His property bought by
His precious blight. Is your love to Christ going
to be enough? If you're sexually pure in an age of abounding sexual
lawlessness, if it's real, it will. If it's real, it will,
no matter how many labels that devil throws upon it from every
direction. And I pity you kids. Your innocence
has been robbed and stolen. by the base commercialism and
the vile lawlessness of our day. And I grieve for you, I don't
scold you if I'd scold anyone. I'd scold this society that will
damn the souls and destroy the virtue of a whole generation
of young people to sell a pair of jeans and make a stinking
buck. Sell their records and damn the
souls of young people. by blatant lawlessness and immorality,
but kids, listen to me, God knew such an age would be upon us,
and if you truly love Christ, your love will burn higher and
hotter if Christ is behind the wall in the vessel of oil. What's going to happen in the
next five years? What about career? The only door open to pursue
your career goals means you've got to cut yourself off from
any viable church situation. Are you ready for the sake of
your soul and the sake of having a climate to seek a godly partner
to say no? And if necessary, take the bottom
rung in the career goals to seek first the kingdom of God. How
about it, young people? You've got some real big ones
to make in the next few years. And they're going to prove, they're
going to prove whether the love that we hopefully see as the
fruit of a work of God's grace was merely a love that was the
combination of good parental influence, good Sunday school
teachers, preaching, teaching, and all the rest. But it wasn't
supernaturally rooted in the heart by the Holy Ghost! The
chilling blast and the ladles of the devil's water. are going
to extinguish it. The many, it says, the love of
the many, that means out of twenty young people, unless God makes
an exception, maybe we'll have three or four that'll be worth
anything ten years from now. And I tell you, that makes me
want to weep. I didn't write it, kids! Jesus
said it! The love of the many shall wax
cold. Why? Because it wasn't the real
thing. And you've got some biggies in
front of you. They're going to test whether
you've got the root of the matter in you. Whether your present
professed love is rooted in a supernatural work of God's grace brought in
you by the Holy Ghost. And as we come to the table,
isn't this the way we confess that our professed sight of the
beauty of Christ initially, our professed acceptance of the yoke
of Christ initially, our professed submission to the righteousness
of God in Christ initially, was real? For if we at once truly
believed The evidence is we continue to believe and that's why Jesus
said in John 6, he that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood
abideth in me. And the eating of his flesh and
drinking his blood is not the bread on the communion table
and the juice and the fruit of the vine in the cup, but he's
speaking of continually feeding upon him this crucified person. For faith in Christ is not the
act of a moment, but the acquisition of a disposition that grows and
develops as we grow in no more and more of the extent and the
depth and the magnitude of our sin. So we are more and more
driven into Christ. To feed upon Him is our only
hope of life and salvation. To drink of His blood by faith
as the only ground by which our sins can be justly pardoned. Dear people, this is how love
to Christ in an age of abounding lawlessness is maintained. First of all, it must be properly
rooted. Our love to Christ must be rooted
in the powerful application of his saving grace in us. Is that
what God has done for you? You say, I'm not sure. My friend,
if you're not, don't give God any rest until you know. Or you may say, if that's what
it means to truly believe, then surely there's been no work in
me. My friend, God normally doesn't
bring these things to our awareness before the day of judgment just
to be a saver of death unto death. Bless God that He's shown you
that that little tipping of the hat to Jesus is as far removed
from true saving faith as heaven is from hell. And say, Oh God,
have mercy upon me. I've taken my sins so lightly. I've resisted and balked at the
yoke of your Son, and I've seen nothing of beauty in Him. Oh
God, by the Spirit, show me the loveliness of Christ, the trustworthiness
of Christ. the graciousness and the gentleness
of Christ that I may comply with his invitation, come unto me,
take my yoke upon you. May God grant that as we come
to this table, our coming may not be the hypocritical act of
those whose professed love will eventually be extinguished because
it is not rooted in a true work of grace in the that may our
coming be but another expression and outworking of that love which
is the fruit of that faith, that faith that has brought within
its corpus a sight of Christ that we count Him worthy of our
unrivaled, undiminished love and affection. We love His yoke. We want no other hiding but His
cross. Let us pray. Our Father, we thank You for
Your Holy Word, which addresses the most vital issues of life,
of time, and of eternity. And we pray that as we have meditated
upon Your Word together, You will indeed shine upon the face
of Your beloved Son, And oh, that something of his beauty
may be seen by many who hitherto have simply passed him by as
unworthy of consideration. They've regarded the smiles of
their peers and the acceptance of their friends of greater worth
than the companionship of Christ. Oh God, work that work that will
make Christ exceedingly precious, the only object of trust and
the object of their undivided, supreme loyalty and love, and
one that will cause them to embrace his yoke with joy. Continue with
us as we come to the table. May the Spirit attend our eating
and our drinking in obedience to the Lord Jesus as we remember
him who loved us and gave himself for us. We ask in his name. Amen.