Alright, turn to Hebrews chapter
2. I want to speak on so great salvation. Often when these scriptures first
come to my mind as I'm thinking on what to preach on, of course
I'm thinking in King James because that's what I was raised in,
and it uses the phrase so great salvation where our translation
puts such a great salvation, so that's why the title says
so great salvation. But the phrases mean the same
thing. Let's begin reading in verse 1 of chapter 2. We must pay more careful attention,
therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. For if the message spoken by
angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received
its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore Such a
great salvation. Now, the entire book of Hebrews
was written as a warning not to depart the gospel of God's
grace in Christ and an encouragement to remain true to it. They say,
well, that's kind of the same thing. You're right. It's just
one kind of carries a negative connotation while the other positive.
It's got warnings in it and warnings that should shake us to our core. He says things like, our God
is a consuming fire. Now why does he say that? So
that we'll not trifle with him and his gospel. Don't forget
who it is we're talking about when we speak of God. One of
the reasons for such a superficial version of Christianity dominating
the American landscape right now is that there is such a superficial
understanding of God. They have a God who is easy to
please, A God who doesn't demand much, who is not strict in insisting
that whatever He demands be rendered to Him. They don't believe that
He'll really judge. They don't think that He'll actually
punish. They believe that He is pretty
much like a doting grandfather who cannot imagine bringing any
grief to his grandchildren. I suppose that the finest or
the most accurate representation of God, as many Americans perceive
Him, is Santa Claus. Because they go to Him, like
children go to Santa Claus, they got their long list of things
they want and they go ask Him for it. And hope when they wake
up the next morning it'll be there. And they believe that
he's got a list and he's checking it twice, going to find out who's
naughty and nice. And if you're naughty, you don't
get what you want. If you're nice, you get what
you ask for. Now, that is not what the God
of Scriptures is like. Not at all. Nobody that ever
had dealings with Him personally, person to person, ever spoke
of God in those terms. They spoke of God as absolutely
sovereign. They spoke of God as absolutely
unstoppable. They spoke of God as holy beyond
our imagination. And those who came face to face
with Him were struck with terror, even those who believed on Him.
Remember Isaiah? In Isaiah chapter 6, he says,
In the year the king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord high and lifted
up and seated upon a throne. And it speaks of the seraphim
that were around him, and they cried, holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah
God Almighty, the whole earth is full of His glory. And Isaiah's
response to all that was nothing like what you hear commonly when
people say, I met with God. Isaiah said, I fell in... I mean,
he said, I said, woe is me, I'm a man of unclean lips, and I
dwell among a people of unclean lips. He said, surely. I am ruined,
for I have seen the King." And John the Baptist, that beloved
disciple who was reclined there at the Last Supper, was reclining
next to our Lord, was the closest to him, it seems like an intimate
friendship. Yet when he saw the Lord as he
is now, there in the book of Revelation, he said, I saw him
and I fell at his feet like a dead man. Weak gods produce weak gospels. But we have warnings and we have
exhortations and encouragements to remain faithful. We have,
on the one hand, warnings to scare us, as it were, to stain
on the straight and narrow. And I mean that as the Lord used
the phrase straight and narrow, which means the way of Christ
and Him crucified. It's not talking about living
a moral life there. The straight and narrow way is Jesus Christ. And we can say, well, God's people
are called to Him by His goodness. Sometimes God's people are just
scared to death to leave the way. Have you ever had that in
your life as a believer? You're kind of, in your mind,
wandering around. In your life, you're kind of
wandering around. You haven't paid a whole lot of attention
to the things of God. You got wrapped up in the things
of the world. And then all at once, God revealed Himself again. He showed you what He is like
in the essence of His being. And you were terrified and ran
back to Christ. And then there is the other side.
When we see the glories of our Lord Jesus Christ, and when we're
told about His grace and mercy, our heart responds in loving
gratitude. When Christ is preached as He
is, those who have been given eyes to see, love what they see. And they are bound to Him that
way. Now at the time that this book
was written, The temptation to depart was motivated by a desire
to avoid persecution. You notice the book of Hebrews?
It was written to Jews. Jews that claim they believe
the gospel. They claim to believe that Jesus
is the Messiah that they've been waiting for. However, they started
to suffer for it from their Jewish brethren. And so it was pretty
easy to stop the persecution. All you had to do is go back
to temple. All you had to do is start offering sacrifices. All you had to do was acknowledge
that those that didn't believe that Jesus is Messiah were also
square with God, because after all, they were going to the temple,
offering the sacrifices, fulfilling their duties under the law. That's
all they had to do. You will find that people don't
mind you adding Jesus to what they have. What the world will not tolerate
is the Lord Jesus shoving everything else out of the way. There is a series of statements
that came out of the Reformation called the five solas. And sola
in Latin means alone. We get our English word sola
when you're singing alone from it. But it means things like
the scriptures alone, for the glory of God alone, things like
that. One of them is Christ alone. Now the world is not offended
by Christ. The world is offended by Christ
alone. See, in the book of Galatians,
what was the fight over? It was not over whether Christ
was Messiah. It was not a fight over whether
one should believe in Christ. The controversy was over this,
is Christ in and of himself enough? And there were some who were
saying, no, you've got to add to what Christ has done. You've
got to add your own personal token obedience to the law. And Paul says, if you add to
Christ, Christ means nothing to you and is of no use to you. And that's what these people
were suffering for. They declared that. The Jews said nothing doing.
The Jews, just like Saul of Tarsus, and this was his attitude towards
things when he was persecuting the church, he could not tolerate
Christ alone because if it's Christ alone, that meant that
all that Paul had done up to that point was utterly useless
and worthless. And the natural man will not
accept that testimony about what he is. Useless and worthless. Of course, Paul came to accept
that testimony, and here's a simple reason why. He saw Christ. You
know, self-righteousness melts in the presence of true righteousness.
Self-glory fades away in the presence of true glory. For some reason or another, when
men come face to face with the law, they look at it and say,
hey, I didn't do so bad. Yeah, I broke that one a few
times and that one over there. Yeah, a couple of times I cussed.
I got mad and all that, you know. People look at Christ. If God
gives them a sight of the glory of Christ, that puts an end to
self-justification. That's what happened to Paul. The argument, though, in the
book of Hebrews will hold for anything that might tempt us
away from Christ. And his method is to compare. Whoever the writer of this book
was, he just kept making comparisons between Christ and his gospel
and Moses and the law. And his argument was this way,
how could you ever leave something so glorious as Christ and the
Gospel, and go back to that which the book of Galatians calls weak
and beggarly things. Look up that word beggarly. Its
root meaning is to cringe or crouch. And you know that's what legalistic
religion makes people do. Cringe and crouch. in the presence
of God. We become like that Gollum character
in Lord of the Rings, a pitiful, wretched thing, so eaten up with
selfishness. And we come before God as a slave,
as a miserable wretch, and we cringe before Him. And we say things, we flatter
Him, hoping if we flatter him enough, he'll give us what we
want. And that's what it was under
the law, men trying to gain God's blessing by their cringing, crouching
obedience. And in comparison to Christ,
friends, what is not weak and miserable? I ask you to consider,
is there something distracting you from Christ right now? And I don't mean right this moment.
Of course, it could be this moment. I'm talking about in the present
point in your life. Do you find that there are things
which are attracting your attention with such a force that you are
not giving due attention to the things of Christ? What's more?
Are there things which are attracting your attention to the point you're
thinking, if Christ gets in the way of this, I'm going to take
this and leave Christ behind. Let me ask you, what is there
in this world that could compare with the Lord Jesus Christ? Paul
said of all that he had before, which was a good reputation,
a good standing, a good job, because those Pharisees became
rather wealthy. He had all these things. He said,
but all those things which I once counted to be an asset to me,
I have now put in the liability column. That which I considered
gold and treasure, I have now considered to be nothing but
garbage to be hauled out to the curb. And why? For the excellency
of knowing Christ. Paul considered Christ to be
of such a glorious Personage, I don't know how else to explain
it. So great a person that merely
knowing him was vastly superior to anything else to be found
in this world. Now this morning I just want
to look at this phrase, such a great salvation. What's so
great about it? Because when we see what a great
salvation God has accomplished for us in Christ, it will help
us when we are confronted by any temptation to give it up
in favor of something else. First, this great salvation It
is such a great salvation because it's accomplished by a great
Savior. Now, going back to Hebrews chapter
1, let's look at what the Bible says about the Lord Jesus. Verse 5, to which of the angels
did God ever say, you are my son. Today, I've become your
father. Or again, I will be his father
and he will be my son. And again, when God brings His
firstborn into the world, He says, let all God's angels worship
Him. The first thing we find out about
this great salvation is what a great Savior it has, and His
greatness is first laid out this way. He is God. The Bible does not set forth
a merely human Savior, nor does it set forth one who is human
and then a little bit more or somewhat more because he's also
some kind of spiritual being that existed before the world
began. But he's not really the one and
only God. The Bible sets forth the Lord
Jesus Christ as God. It sets him forth clearly to
anybody who cares to see it. Some say he is a God, but not
the God, but they're twisting scriptures to say so. He said
that God was his Father, and the Jews sought to kill him.
And he said, for which of my works are you going to stone
me? And they said, not for any work
that you've done, but because you said God was your Father,
making yourself equal with God. They understood what he was saying.
How come the people of this day and age don't understand what
Christ is saying? Those Jews who were darkened in their hearts
and would not have Him, they still understood the meanings
of His words when He said, I am the Son of God. When He called
on God as a Father in a way actually superior to the way we call on
Him as Father. He was born of a virgin, not
in order that Mary be exalted because of her supposed moral
purity. That's not what her virginity
was about. Her virginity at that point was
about proving that Jesus Christ had no earthly father. Joseph was not his father. The
world supposed he was, but he wasn't. She was with child by the power
of the Holy Spirit. God, the Holy Spirit, overshadowed
her. And somebody said, well, how
can God Make a woman pregnant. Well, think of this, he made
the woman. I think he can make her pregnant if he wants. I mean,
you know, this is not a problem for God. This seems great to
us. It's nothing to God. God could
make the sun rise in the West if he wanted to. All he has to
do is say it and that's the way it is. But our Lord Jesus Christ,
conceived in the womb of Mary, was nothing less than the actual
Son of God, making Him to be God. And we
look in verse 8 here of chapter 1, it says, but about the Son,
God says, your throne, O God, is forever, will last forever
and ever, and righteousness will be the scepter of your kingdom.
Now, if we want to determine whether or not Jesus Christ is
God, who's the best person to ask about that? How about God? God says, I am God and God alone. I'll not share my glory with
another. There is no God beside me. Okay, God, that man there,
down there, Born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, and now he's
going around preaching. Who is that? Well, that's me.
How can that be? You wouldn't understand. Just
accept it. It's so. It's a mystery, but
it's so. God said concerning the Lord
Jesus Christ, Your throne, O God, is forever. Now, if God says
it, doesn't that settle it? If God is willing to identify
the Lord Jesus Christ as God, then Jesus Christ must be God. If He's not, one of two things
is true. The Scriptures are not an accurate
representation of what God has said. Or, God lied about it. Well, we know God can't lie.
If he says a thing is so, it is so simply because he said
it. His word is the definition of
our reality. It's not as though God learns
things and then honestly communicates that information. Things are
the way they are because God says that's the way they are.
And so if God says something that's true, and we believe the
Scriptures to be the accurate representation of all that we
need to know regarding God and His way, and He said that Jesus
is God. Our Lord Jesus Christ even said
it, He said it to the Pharisees, and they understood what He meant
by it. He said, unless you believe that I am, you will die in your
sins. He said, Abraham, Abraham rejoiced
to see my day, and he did see it. And they said, wait a minute,
you're not even 50 years old yet. Abraham, that was 1500 or
so years ago. How did Abraham see you? And
our Lord looked at them, and He said something that only the
living God could say. Before Abraham was, I am. They knew exactly what He meant
by that statement. Moses said to that one who spoke
to him from the burning bush, well, whom am I going to say
sent me? I'm going to go there and say to Pharaoh to let the
people go, and I'm going to tell the Israelites, you need to follow
me out of Egypt to a land that God's going to show us, you know,
I mean, that God promised us. Whom am I going to say sent me?
And out of that burning bush, he says, you tell them I am sent
you. And then many, many years later,
Without a burning bush, the same person said, before Abraham was,
I am. I am. It's a great salvation if the
Savior is none other than the I am. All right, he's God. He's the
Son of God. He's worshiped by angels. God
said, let all the angels worship Him. You know, once John tried
to worship an angel there in the book of Revelation, and the
angel said, don't you do that. You worship God alone. If there's
anything in all the Scriptures that we know of a certainty,
worship is for no one but God. So if God calls on any of His
creatures to worship someone, That someone is God, and God
says, let all the angels of God worship Him. Secondly, great salvation because
He's a great Savior, great salvation because He's a great Savior and
God, and then it says He's King. Verse 8 again, your throne, O
God, will last forever and ever. Have you ever noticed the throne? is never far from a mention of
the Savior. The Bible knows nothing about
a Savior that is not the Lord. In fact, in the first full-blown
declaration of the gospel, given in Acts chapter 2, here's the
summation. After Peter had referenced a
great deal of Old Testament scriptures, He says, now be it known unto
you that this same Jesus, whom you crucified, God has made to
be Lord in Christ. The first thing Peter says about
the Lord Jesus Christ is that He's Lord. Kind of makes you
think it's an important point. He is the Lord, and I like that.
I don't want to be saved by a peasant. I know that in this world he
was a peasant, but I don't care what he was in this world. I
mean, that's kind of irrelevant. What he is in the sight of God
is what's important. He's the king. He comes with
full authority, and his word is law. He is the king, and as
the king, when he speaks, It is as he speaks. But he's not
just any king. It says, righteousness will be
the scepter of your kingdom. Our salvation is great because
the one who worked it is God. He's the king and he's the righteous
king. One of the most miserable things
that can happen to anyone in this world is to come under the
kingship or lordship of an unrighteous person. You say, well, there
isn't any other kind in this world. That's true. But even
in human standards, if the king or the dictator or whatever,
the monarch of an area is an unrighteous man, it becomes a
horrible place to live. But our salvation was worked
out, accomplished by someone who loves righteousness and hates
wickedness. And therefore, he always deals
righteously. And therefore, if God has accepted him in my
behalf. I can be assured through his
righteousness I am accepted." Spurgeon said, I have no use
for an unjust, that is an unrighteous salvation. I will be judged by
a righteous God. There I come before him in the
hope of an unrighteous, unjust salvation. Whatever else may
be said of God, whatever He does is righteous and just. And seeing
that it is He who has worked salvation, it is a righteous
salvation. He has worked it, He has set
it before us and says, come to me by this way and you will be
accepted. And on the authority of His kingly and righteous Word,
I may come in the full confidence that God will accept me. He is the creator. It says here in verse 10, in
the beginning, O Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth
and the heavens are the work of your hands. They say, what
does him being creator have to do with our salvation? Well, it's pretty simple. How
did God create the heavens and the earth? The book of Psalms
says, He spoke and it was. He commanded and it stood firm. Way back in Genesis chapter 1,
in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and
the earth was formless and empty and the Holy Spirit was hovering
over the face of the deep and God said, let there be light. And there was light. No arguing. No trying to coax
light into existence. He spoke and it happened. And
brethren, knowing what we are. Knowing our innate rebelliousness
against God, knowing the darkness of our inborn nature. Is it not great to know that
our salvation comes by the one who speaks and whatever he speaks
is how it is? Who can look into our dark hearts
and say, let there be light and there will be light. I do all I can to preach the
light, but I can't shine the light, I can't make it appear
in you. But I do pray that God will take
the preaching and make some good use of it, and that He would
come to each one of us and say to us in our hearts, let there
be light, because if He does, thank God there will be light. A lot of preachers, I feel sorry
for them. They're trying to preach with all their power and might,
thinking that if they can do it in just the right way, they
can convince somebody to believe. I can't. I was going to say I
gave up on that long ago, but I'm flesh enough that it just
keeps cropping up. That if I just do it this way
and that way, no. Me seeing, let there be light.
If I stood here, and all these lights were off, If I stood up
here and I said, let there be light, these lights would not
come on. It takes something else, doesn't it? Much less can I stand
up here and say to you, let there be spiritual light, and there
actually would be spiritual light. Only God can do it, and He does. That's why Him being the Creator
is important. He creates what does not exist.
All other religions call on me to create something, call on
me to create light, create righteousness, create a new man, become a new
person. Only in the gospel do we find
that God is the one who creates the light. God is the one who
creates the righteousness by which we're justified. Only God
is the one who creates the new man, who is created to be like
God in true righteousness and holiness. So it's good to know our Savior
is the Creator. He's eternal. It says in verse
11, they will perish, but you remain. They will all wear out
like a garment. You will roll them up like a
robe, like a garment. They will be changed, but you
remain the same, and your years will never end. We have a Savior
who is unchanging. Later on in the book of Hebrews,
it says Jesus Christ, the same, yesterday, today, and forever. I like the imagery here. Our
Lord spoke this universe into existence, but compared to him,
well, they're nothing. He says they'll wear out like
a garment. You say, well, scientists say
that ain't going to happen for billions of years. Okay. Doesn't matter
what the number is, it's still going to happen. Most scientists believe that
this universe started by a big bang. And many of them believe
it's going to end in a big crunch. But here's the point, however
it's going to end, it's going to end. Whenever it's going to
end, it's going to end. It decays. We see it in the individual
or we see it here on earth. We see it in our lives. We see
it in our own bodies. Everything put together falls
apart. It runs down. It's corruptible.
That's the nature of this reality. But God never changes. So much greater is God than His
creation. It says that the creation is
to Him. He's just going to roll it up like a robe. You get to
the end of the day. In those days, they didn't have
special clothes for every occasion. Pretty much people had one out,
you know, robe they wore. And when they went to bed, they
took that off and they rolled it up, set it aside, and then
the next morning they'd get out and put it on again. And compared
to God, the universe is nothing more than simply something you
roll up at the end of the day. And when the end of the day of
this universe comes, God's going to roll it up like just so much
of a robe. In fact, you're going to look
at it and say, this thing's worn out. But He lasts forever. His days will
never end. And that's the Lord Jesus Christ. I keep talking about being old.
I realize I'm not old by the standards of many, but I'm old
enough to know what years do to you and they wear you out. And I can recall in the years
when I was like half this age, how much easier it was to be
optimistic about the future. And that's simply because statistically
speaking, I had a lot more future ahead of me. I'm running out
of future. And we see our bodies begin to
break down, and we lose more and more of any fleshly strength,
and we wonder, is there anything to this? Well, brethren, if it
depends on us, there's nothing to it. But it depends upon Him
who remains the same, who has never changed, whose years will
never end. And until He dies, I can't. Until He wears out, I can't. And He won't, so I won't. Well, a few other things to mention. This Gospel was brought to us
by the Lord Jesus. Look at chapter 2, verse 3. How
shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation, the salvation
which was first announced by the Lord? One of the things I
like about the gospel that you and I believe is very simply
this, it's delivered by words. It is not a mystical gospel that
you have to be able to enter into some kind of transcendent
state of mind to understand. It's not an incredibly intricate,
complicated gospel. that requires quite an intellect
and a good deal of education to understand. The Lord Jesus
came and with simple words he announced God's gospel. I think you can pretty well write
this down as a steadfast principle. If it's difficult to understand,
it didn't come from God. Men devise things that are tricky
and devious. And you read them and you really
have to work to understand what they mean. God used simple words
like come, call, believe. Words we understand. He set before
us His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and did not require that we have
a full understanding of Him. Who can have a full understanding
of God in human flesh? Nobody. What He required us to
do was to look to Him. Well, that's not hard. I realize that spiritually speaking
it's impossible, but you know what I mean. It's not complex. It's not things like, well, yeah,
you look to Christ, but then you also got to drink the wine
and eat this little wafer here, and then we're going to sprinkle
you or dunk you or something like... All these kind of things, and
then you need to start coming to church, and you learn this
and you memorize that. That's not the gospel. The gospel
begins and ends with the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And
our call, or that which we are called upon to do, is simply
look to Him. He announced it. He's God's prophet. In the first
part of chapter 1, it says, God spoke in times past, various
times, various ways, but now He has spoken to us in His Son.
There's a finality to that, isn't there? Jesus Christ spoke, and
there's nothing more to say. He is the full revelation of
God. And this message was first spoken
by the Lord, then spoken by the apostles, but more importantly,
spoken by these men, but God testified to it by signs, wonders,
and various miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit, distributed
according to His will. And so Jesus Christ comes and
he declares it, then he sends his apostles and the other preachers
out to declare it, and as he sends them out, he doesn't just
send them out with a word because, well, why should they believe
Peter? They don't even know who he is when he goes up to Cornelius'
house or anything like that. God gave to them the ability
to do things that no man can naturally do, and it verified
the message that they were preaching. And then, this salvation is great
because it was accomplished by Jesus Christ's identification
with us. It says here, in verse 17 of chapter 2, for
this reason, He, that is Christ, had to be made like His brothers
in every way. The only thing that Christ never
experienced, that we experience, is having a sinful nature. He was tried in every point,
just like us, says the Scriptures, yet without sin. He never thought
sin, never felt sin, never desired sin, never did sin. But in every
aspect of the essence of what it means to be human, He participated
in that. And He knew what it was to get
thirsty, to get hungry, to get weak. He knew what it was to
be surprised. He knew what it was to be in
pain. He knew what it was to suffer
loss, to be betrayed, to be hated by those who should have received
him with open arms. And he knew what it was. And
something that we'll never know. He knew what it was to be abandoned
by God. My God, my God, why hast Thou
forsaken me?" He suffered death, identified
with us in our human nature, identified with us in the suffering
of death. He bore our sins in His body
on the tree. He bore them in our place, and
in a very real sense, He bore them as us. And then the salvation is glorious
because of what it does to us. Verse 10, chapter 2. In bringing
many sons to glory. Two things, two wondrous things
are mentioned in that little phrase. It's not even a complete
sentence, just a phrase. Sons. We don't just get a higher
status of slavery. We become sons. In nearly every household where
slavery was practiced, not only in this country, but anywhere,
there were levels of slaves. You had those slaves which did
all the dirty, nasty work. And then you had those slaves
who, as human beings, they had more talents and abilities, so
they were made stewards foreman, essentially, managers. The thing
is, whether you were the slave sent out to dig a ditch, or the
slave who was sitting in the house and filled out paperwork
and stuff like that, managing the household, you were still
a slave. The gospel did not take us from
being a ditch-digging slave to somehow being a management slave.
It took us from being slaves and made us sons, and then notice
this, bringing many sons to glory. He's not speaking of glory as
a synonym for heaven. He's talking about us being made
like the Lord Jesus Christ. This salvation, this great salvation,
which we should never even for a moment think to give up, is
nothing less than being stripped of everything that makes us miserable
wretches. and then made in the very likeness
of the Lord Jesus Christ. And then lastly, it's called
such a great salvation because of its present benefits. Not
everything, not every blessing is in buy and buy in a sweet
buy and buy out yonder somewhere. We participate or experience
a lot of them now. 17, for this reason he had to be
made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become
a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and
that he might make atonement for the sins of the people, because
he himself suffered when he was tempted. He is able to help those
who are tempted. Tried. Tested. We all have our difficulties
in this life. Some of them are difficulties
of circumstance. Some of them are just difficulties
of the kind of people we are. Some of them are the results
of the foolish and sinful things we do. We suffer the temptation
to sin, and then suffer the horrible guilt that comes when we fall
to it. Our Lord's been tempted by everything. But He was faithful. We were not, we have not been,
but He was. And therefore He is able to help
us. And then look over here at chapter
4, beginning with verse 15, we'll see it stated a little bit more
fully. For we do not have a high priest
who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one
who has been tempted in every way just as we are, yet was without
sin. Let us then approach the throne
of grace with confidence. so that we may receive mercy
and find grace to help us in our time of need. Now, if you
will, imagine a scene with me. You're in trouble. Spiritually
speaking, you feel broken down. And you approach God. And there you are in the outer
courts and you see this big door and it says, throne room. That's a scary thought, isn't
it? On the other side of that door
is God in the fullness of His being. The righteous, holy, and
just God. I don't think I would open that
door. But that's not the room we approach,
or that's not all of it. It's not just throne room, it's
throne of grace room. Not only that, we can't see the
sign on the door, because the door is already opened. Now we
might think that with that door open, that's a wondrous thing. I mean, what's an open door mean?
That's an invitation. And there's God, but not God
clothed in the majesty of His condemning justice, but God clothed
in the glory of His grace. And we might think, all right,
and we get down on our knees and we're sniveling, you know,
and we crouch and we cringe and we crawl into His presence. No. Let us come boldly. into the throne of grace. My
friend, what kind of salvation must it be that people like you
and me, in the acknowledgement of all our failures and sins,
march straight into the presence of God and say, Father, it's
me. I need help. And can do so with
the full expectation that the Father said, well, what is it
you need? And we tell him what we think we need, now more than
likely he's going to say, now that's not really what you need,
but I will give you what you need and more. You are my son. You are my child. I will not
let you fall. With such a salvation as that,
why would we be tempted by anything? Well, the answer is simply we're
still flesh. Thank God, the Spirit will always, ultimately, be successful
and victorious because God gives us the victory. He will not let
us fall. And when we feel ourselves falling,
let us, with strong step, walk into that throne of grace with
boldness and call upon our God, call upon our Savior. Help me,
Lord, I'm in trouble. And we can be assured he will
help.