I invite you to take your Bibles
this evening and turn with me to Acts chapter 16. Acts chapter 16, we have here the
account of how God saved this Philippian jailer and his whole
house. There has been and always will
be a controversy over how God saves sinners. I've never preached
in any church to any congregation anywhere where there was not
a controversy somewhere in that congregation. Whether it be visitors
coming in or people who've been there for a long time. A controversy
over how God saves sinners. Does He use means or no means? Or does He use means sometimes
and at other times no means? Does he use gospel preachers,
or are they just optional? Do men just read the Word of
God and come to a saving knowledge of Christ, or is this knowledge
divinely given by God? How does God save sinners? How
does it happen? How does that man who is out
here in the world, walking the course of this world, as Paul
tells us in Ephesians 2, walking after the prince of the power
of the air, living, lusting out his days after all the desires
of the flesh and of the mind, walking in the vanity of this
world, how does that man turn to God? How does God save sinners? That's my question. And that's
my subject tonight. This account of this Philippian
jailer is a wonderful example of exactly how God saved sinners. That's what happened to him.
He wasn't seeking God. He was going the way of this
world. Just going the way of the world. He wasn't the worst
man out there. He wasn't the best. He was just
somewhere in the middle doing his job, going about his business. He was the typical sinner in
this life. Just doing his job, raising his
family, doing what he could. I perceive the man was somewhat
of an honest man as far as this world goes. He was a reputable
man. He was a jailer. He took care
of this jail there in Philippi. But I see in this account of
this Philippian jailer a wonderful example. And there's four things. There's many things here. Right
off the bat, I can tell you this. God shook that place up. And
He shakes up the sinner. He shakes him up. And I see there
that all the doors were opened. When God saves sinners, He opens
the door. You can't open to God. He opens
the door. And I see that all their bonds
were loosed. Men are bound. Did you know that?
They're bound in that old nature. They're bound by canes of darkness.
They're bound by the prince of the power of the air. They're
under that influence of worldly principles, those fundamental
principles of the world, rudimentary principles he calls them in Colossians
2. But God intervenes, God intervenes. But let me give you four things
tonight that I see in God's salvation of this man and his house. And the first thing that I'd
like for you to see is the sovereign arrangement of the providence
of God. God intervened. He intervenes
in all. He took old Apostle Paul and
took him off the back of his horse and put his face down in
the mud and caused the light so bright to shine on him that
he couldn't see. But God intervened is the story
in his providence. Paul was on his way to get papers
from the Jews to go out and persecute Christians, and God said, enough
is enough. And he halted his progress, and
in the providence of God, he called that man to himself. And
that's what happens with sinners, and that's what happened with
this Philippian jailer. God intervened in this thing.
The Philippian jailer had nothing to do with the arrest of Paul
and Silas. And I know they put fear in his
heart when they came in and charged him because he was ready to take
his own life just on the prospect of these men being missing. He
had nothing to do with those things. And yet he'd heard what
these men preached. He knew that. Otherwise, he wouldn't
have asked them what must he do to be saved. An average man
doesn't know anything about salvation, just what he hears. Just what
he hears. I'll tell you this, if you're
here tonight and you believe that all the daily affairs of
your life are just circumstantial, you need to get better acquainted
with your Bible. He tells us all things, all things
work together for good to them that love God, to them who are
the called according to His purpose. He tells us over there that we
have received our inheritance. We have received our adoption. We have received this inheritance
of God being predestinated. What a word. Being predestinated
by Him who worketh how many things? All things after the counsel
of His own will. beginning back in Job chapter
38 and continues on all the way through chapter 41, the Lord
asked Job one question right after the other. You need to
read that sometime and read it all the way through. Just one
question after the other. had no part in his suffering
and no part in his friend's conversation, no part in the troubles that
was going on. He asked him about the wild ashes cold and about
snow and have you looked into the mysteries of the frost. And
he just, boy, just fired questions at him one right after another.
Because Job overstepped his bounds a little bit in defending himself
before his friends and was making himself out to be kind of a wise
man. And God said, now you gird up
your loins and I'll ask you like a man and you answer me. You
answer me. And God began to fire questions
at him, just one right after the other. I don't know, I've
never counted them. One of these days I'm going to
sit down and count all these questions. But I'll tell you
this, every last question he asked him had to do with his
wisdom and his power over everything in this world. That's what he
was trying to get Joseph to say. My wisdom and my power is over
everything. And if it's over everything,
surely it's over you. This one in whom we have obtained
an inheritance and given knowledge of the mystery of his will worketh
all things after the counsel of his own will." Isaiah said
he declared the end from the beginning. That's what God said
through his prophet. He said, you remember the former
things of old. For I am God and there is none
else. I declare the end from the beginning
and from ancient times the things that are not yet done saying
my counsel shall stand and I'll do all my pleasure. Brethren, every child of God
ought to know by his own experience of grace that God saves men on
purpose. On purpose. And the way he saves
them on purpose is first of all by arranging his providence for
them to him. for them to hear. He has to arrange
his property. That man over there in Africa
in the jungle with a bone in his nose out there in a hut with
no missionary is never going to be saved because he's never
going to hear unless God crosses his path with a missionary. You have to hear from God. How shall you call on Him on
whom you have not believed? And how shall you believe on
Him on whom you have not heard? And how are you going to hear
without a preacher? That's what the Holy Ghost asked. That wasn't
me asking that question. That was Him. That's what God
asked you. How are you going to hear without
a preacher? You're not. You're not. Those of you who are in this
place tonight are here by the sovereign will of God. And I
don't know what, there's a thousand other side things that you might
talk about while you're here. But I'll tell you why you're
here. I'll tell you the end of why you're here. It was the will
of God for you to be here. Was it by accident that Philip
went out to meet the Ethiopian Union? Or did God send him out
there? Now, God took that Ethiopian
eunuch, gave him an interest in the Word of God, gave him an appetite to know,
and that man drove all the way from wherever he lived, all the
way to Jerusalem to the feast, because somebody told him that
if he go to Jerusalem, this was their crowning time of the year. And he could go there and he
could look at those feasts and talk to those wise men and pharisees,
and he could find out how God saves sinners. And he went over
there and went through all that rigmarole and saw all them ceremonies
and went through that whole thing and came home as empty as it
was when he went in. And he was setting up that chariot,
still reading the book of Isaiah, wondering who in the world Isaiah
was talking about. And God sent Philip out there.
Philip had no idea who he was going to talk to. God just sent
him out there. And here he is out here in the
middle of nowhere, and he sees this guy up here reading Jewish
scrolls. Undoing these scrolls. And he
got up there close enough to see, and he could see what he
was reading. And he said, do you understand what you're reading?
He said, how can I except some man declare it to me? God sent
that man out there on purpose. And he saved that Ethiopian.
Was it by accident that our Lord went to the well at Samaria,
or did He say, I must need to go through Samaria? Huh? Was it by accident that He passed
through Jericho and made like He would go on? It didn't say
that He was going on, it said He made like He was going to
go on. And old Brian Bartimaeus began
to cry out. You see what I'm saying? God
saves men on purpose. And the way He does this is to
arrange His providence in a certain way to cross your path with His
preachers. And if it ever happens, that's
how it's going to happen. And if it's happened to you in
some other way, you don't have the salvation of God. I can show
you that in the Scripture. I can sit down and take my time
and walk you through the Scripture, and I can show you where the
Gospel is the seed of regeneration. And no man is going to be born
of God until he hears the Gospel preached. That's just so. And that's what the Holy Spirit
says. And then after he asked all those questions there in
Romans chapter 10, that's where that phrase is that we hear so
often, faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.
That's a summation of those four questions that the Holy Ghost
asked the sinners. So here's the first thing I know
about how God saves sinners. He arranges His providence for
them to hear and for His servants to preach. The second thing I
know about how God saves sinners is that God's servants open to
them the Scriptures. They open the Scriptures. They
don't stand up and give you opinions. I have people tell me that all
the time. That's your opinion. That's your interpretation. No,
that's the Word of God. That's the Word of God. When
the Holy Spirit said, how shall you hear without a preacher?
Does that sound like that needs a definition? Is there anybody
in here that don't understand what that says? Plain and simple,
isn't it? That's what ignorant men who,
trying to defend a refuge, have to say against the truth of the
Holy Scriptures. That's what men and women's acts
is, your opinion. Opinion or not, that's what the
Word of God says. That's what it says. In Acts
16, verse 32, this man said, What must I do to be saved? He
said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.
But he didn't stop there, did he? Look at this next verse,
verse 32. And then they spake unto him
the Word of the Lord. They didn't say, well, if you're
one of God's elect, He'll save you in His own time. That's not
what they told that man. He wanted to know how he could
be saved. And they said, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. But
he didn't know who the Lord Jesus Christ was. This was a Gentile
jailer. All he heard is all this rigmarole
going back and forth, and I guarantee you, at Pentecost, all the Jews
from all the countries round about were gathering there. They
were in that crowd who cried, crucify Him, crucify Him. They
were in that crowd and sat on the hill and watched Him suffer
and bleed and die on the cross. And some of them were in that
crowd of 3,000 that was saved at Pentecost. And then when all
the feast days were over and they all went back to their own
lands, do you think they didn't talk in those cities about what
was going on? Do you think that in the Roman
Kingdom, anywhere in that known part of the world, that all of
this controversy, you think Obama's health care is an issue in our
day. This was an issue. And everybody
knew about it. Everybody had heard the rumblings
and all that was going on about the Lord Jesus Christ. And this
jailer had heard, but he didn't know who he was. He didn't know
who he was. And he knew that these men were
preaching the salvation that claimed to save men, that God
actually saved men. And he said, what must I do to
be saved? And they said, well, believe
on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. And then
they told him who He was. They preached to him the Word
of the Lord. Now, the Word of God is the foundation
of faith. I don't believe in a literal
creation because... I don't believe in a literal
creation because I can prove it. I believe in a literal creation
because God said that's how it was done. I'm not even going
to engage myself in the foolishness of trying. He said those things
which do appear were made from things which weren't, which things
was not. He tells you that over in Hebrews
chapter 11. Through faith we understand that
the worlds were framed by the Word of God. That's how we understand
it. And everything that faith perceives has for its basis the
Word of God. I rarely ever make a point in
my messages and in my preaching without quoting or have you turn
with me to some Scripture of the Bible to prove that point
to you. I'll either tell you where it
is so you can jot it down in your notes or I'll have you turn
with me to that Scripture. Because what I say may just be
my opinion. It may just be my interpretation.
But if I take you over to where it says that in the Word of God,
and you reject it, and you throw it on the ground, and you cast
it aside, then you've made God a liar. Not me. You've made God
a liar. Listen to Paul's prayer for the
church at Rome in Romans chapter 16, beginning with verse 25.
He said, Now to him that is of power to establish you according
to my gospel. And that's what he'd written
to them about in his first 16, 15 chapters. and the preaching of Jesus Christ
according to the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret
since the world began, but now is made manifest and by the Scriptures
of the prophets," the Old Testament Scriptures, according to the
commandment of the everlasting God made known to all nations
for the obedience of faith. So first of all, God arranges
His providence concerning both you and God's messengers. And
then secondly, this messenger calls your attention to the Word
of God. And then the third thing I know
about how God saves sinners is that His messengers preach and
teach the gospel of Christ as the message of Holy Scripture.
Now, I'm going to tell you something. If you go into this book, you
can write books on depravity. You can write books on depravity.
I told somebody the other day, I said, I read, sometimes I'll
read an article, and all it's about is depravity, depravity,
depravity. And to me, I went through this
thing with my wife and cancer. To me, that's like going over
there to the oncologist and going in there and he said, well, you've
got cancer. I guarantee you, you've got cancer. You're going
to die of cancer. You've got cancer. And then walks
away. I know I've got cancer. And I
know I could very well die from cancer. Talk to me about the
cure. You see the difference? In your
writing and in your preaching and in your witnessing. Don't
just tell them all about the disease and leave them in the
disease. Give them some hope. Tell them about Christ. Tell
them in who is alive. Tell them about Him. Yes, tell
them about their depravity. Yes. They must see these things
in the light of their depravity. But don't just tell them depravity
and leave them alone. Tell them about Christ. Tell
them about Him. And that's what these men did.
They said, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and then they began
to preach the Gospel to them from the Scripture. They began
to take those Old Testament prophecies. See this old tabernacle over
there? That tabernacle is Christ. The Word was made flesh and tabernacled
among us. Tell them what that tabernacle
is. Tell them about that mercy seat. This is Christ. Tell them
about that blood sacrifice. This is Christ. To Him give all
the prophets witness. That's what the preaching of
the early church was in the book of Acts. And then look across
the page here in Acts 17. Right across the page from my
text here. When Paul and Silas were released from Philippi,
they came to Thessalonica, Acts 17.2. And Paul, as his manner
was, went in unto them three Sabbath days, reasoned with them
out of the Scriptures. Now listen. and alleging that Christ must
needs have suffered and risen again from the dead, and that
this Jesus whom I preach unto you is Christ. That's what they
did. They took this Bible and opened
it up and began to give, at least in their preaching, that revelation
of glory, that revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ. begin
to point them alleging that these things, this tabernacle and these
sacrifices and Jerusalem and all of these things, all of these
things were pictured pointing to Christ. Christ being come a high priest
of good things to come by a greater and more perfect tabernacle,
not of this building, that is, not of this flesh. And not according
to those old sacrifices, but by His own blood entered in once
to obtain eternal redemption for us. Tell them that. Tell
them that. Turn with me to I Corinthians
chapter 15. The gospel of Christ is the testimony
of God concerning His Son and how His elect are called and
justified and sanctified and given the gift of faith. And
if you have a faith that didn't come this way, which is not maintained
this way, which is not preserved this way, you don't have saving
faith. You don't have saving faith.
1 Corinthians 15-1. Now listen to this. This is just
so plain. I'm giving you as plain of Scripture
references as I know in the Bible. I want you to listen to this.
Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached
unto you, which also you have received, and wherein you stand. by which also you are saved if
you keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless you have believed
in vain. For I delivered unto you, first
of all, that which I also received, how that Christ died for our
sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that
He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures." Now let me
tell you something. I don't know anybody who don't
believe that Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, was buried
and rose from the dead on the third day. Some of the most heathenistic
people that I've ever met in my life will celebrate Christmas,
and they'll celebrate not only the birth of Jesus Christ, but
they'll celebrate his death on Easter. They'll get dressed up,
and that's the only time of year you ever see them in church.
But they'll get all dressed up and put their bonnets on and
their hats and their new suit, new clothes, and they'll come
in on Easter Sunday and they'll listen to a message and go home.
You see them, see you next Easter. Everybody believes that. Tell
me, who died? That's what I want to know. Why
did he die? Who is this man, Jesus Christ?
Why did He come? What did He do and where is He
now? Answer those four questions. Those questions, when you're
able to answer those four questions, you'll know the Gospel. It's a matter of historical and
biblical fact. He was seen, Paul said, in that
same Scripture there in 1 Corinthians 15. He was seen of above 500
brethren at one time. It's a historical fact that Jesus
Christ rose from the dead. He was here for better than a
month after His resurrection to verify that He rose from the
dead. He appeared to His disciples,
He appeared to His friends, He appeared to, He says here, to
over 500 brethren at one time. It's a matter of historical fact.
To deny this is to deny history. It's to deny the Word of God.
But what he's talking about here in 1 Corinthians 15 is not the
historical fact of his death and resurrection, but the reason
behind it. He's talking about the reason
behind it. Why he died. For whom did he
die? What was accomplished in his
death and resurrection? He died, he said, according to
the Scripture. What do the Scriptures tell us
about it? Well, they tell us it was particular. His death
was particular. He said, I'm the good shepherd.
I give my life for the sheep. For the sheep. It's a particular. The sin offering was offered
up by the high priest for Israel, wasn't it? Wasn't there any Hittites out
there watching that high priest, see if he'd come back out of
the holy place? That priest, when he came out and raised his
hands to bless the whole house of Israel, he wasn't blessing
those Philistines. And he wasn't blessing all those
Hykes, all those Hittites and Amorites and all the other Hykes.
He blessed Israel. Nobody else had a high priest.
Nobody else had a sin offering. Nobody else had an atonement.
Nobody else had a scapegoat. Our Lord said, I'm the good shepherd,
the good shepherd giveth his life to the sheep. His death
is particular. And the scriptures tell us his
death was satisfactory. It says God looked on the travail
of his soul and was satisfied. Satisfied. His death satisfied. What did it satisfy? It satisfied
the justice. It satisfied the wrath, the holy
wrath of God against sin. It satisfied. Try to get hold
of that. It satisfied. And if it didn't,
you still have that satisfaction to accomplish. You can't do it. It satisfied God. It pleased
the Lord to bruise Him. His death satisfies. And thirdly,
his death declares God's righteousness in the free justification of
sinners, which allows God to be both just and justifier. God
can't just excuse sins. His nature won't let Him. He's
God. He's God. And to justify the The sinner
or condemned the righteous is an abomination before God. There's
only one way this can be accomplished, and that's through the person
of the Lord Jesus Christ, our substitute. By one offering he
hath perfected forever them that are sanctified. And by his own
blood he entered in once into the holy place and obtained eternal
redemption for us. You beware of any man who gives
a testimony of his faith with a foundation contrary to the
Scriptures and the gospel of Christ. This is the stone, Peter
said, when he preached to those that high council of Israel and
those high priests and all that gathered out there, all those
Pharisees and wise men that he preached to there, he said, this
is the stone which was set in naught of you builders. This
is what preachers set aside. This is what preachers don't
talk about. This is what they throw down in the dirt. This
is what they just turn their back on altogether. This is the
gospel and the glory of God in Jesus Christ. And God made it the head of the
corner. Acts chapter 4 verse 12, Neither is there salvation
in any other, for there is none other name under heaven given
among men whereby we must be saved. Paul said, Other foundations
can no man lay than that which is laid. God arranges His providence so
that his people can hear, and he causes them to cross paths
with his preachers. And these men take the word of
God and patiently lay a foundation for what they preach. And their
preaching is concerning the person and work of Jesus Christ. Who
is this man? Why did he come? What did he
do? Where is your name? They preach the gospel of Christ,
showing to sinners why he must die. For whom He died, who sent
Him, and to what end? And then, fourthly, let me point
out to you this beautiful example. Let me point out to you the results
of this preaching. The Philippian jailer asked this
question, what must I do to be saved? Paul and Silas returned
this answer to him. They said, believe on the Lord
Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. And I think it would be
safe to say that everybody in the known world where the Jews
had settled knew something about this man as Jesus of Nazareth.
They were all present there in Jerusalem and they all knew these
things. But that jailer, because of the
events of the day, was willing to listen and to hear what these
men had to say. And that's the first thing God
does in the heart of a sinner is to make him willing to hear. He's willing. Now, I'm going
to tell you something. The average person is not willing
to hear this. You start talking to them and about two minutes
into the conversation, they switch channels. They go over to the
sports channel somewhere. They leave you to yourself. They don't want to hear. They
don't want to hear. God makes His people willing
to hear. They're willing to hear. And
then secondly, God made that sinner confident enough in his
messenger to invite him into his house. Did you ever notice? Did you ever even think about
that? This jailer didn't know these
guys from the man in the moon. All he'd heard was the controversy
over them, how evil they were, and what all kinds of trouble
they were stirring up. And here, God shakes that jail
with an earthquake, opens every door in it, everybody scatters
to the wind. Everybody but Paul and Silas.
And they were still there. And now this guy gets interested.
He wants to hear what these men have to say. And he invites them
into his home. He invites them into his home.
It's an act of God working in the center to persuade him to
hear a gospel preacher because everybody else in that community
has set him in a bad light. Oh, you go to Grace Church. How
many of you have heard that? About everybody in here, I bet. Paul and Silas were prisoners
at Philippi, but this man perceived them to be the servants of God. And then thirdly, he wanted his whole house to
hear these men. He wanted his whole house to
hear what these men had to say. I remember the very first time
I heard Henry Mahan preach. I had confidence in him, an unexplained
confidence in him as the messenger of God because one of the reasons
why was because he didn't skip all these issues that I've been
reading about in the Word of God. He dealt with them. You
know, I asked the elders of our church. I was reading my Bible
and I ran into this thing of predestination and I asked them
about it. Oh, you don't want to go there?
You don't want to go there? There are some things better
off not to know. Boy, they just wrote voodoo all
over that doctrine. I was scared to even read it
after they got done talking about it. God's preachers don't skip
over stuff like that. They tell you the sweet truth
about it. Election. Oh, don't go there. Don't go
there. The sovereignty of God. Now,
wait a minute. You can go overboard with this thing of sovereignty.
You can't? Well, where did everything come from? Huh? The Big Bang? Is that where it
comes from? Now, come on. And if God created, He must be
sovereign. If He can speak into nothing
and create a universe, I'd say he's sovereign. I'd say he's
sovereign enough to save yourself. He's sovereign. They'd skip over
these things. The depravity of man. The righteousness
of Christ. God's free and sovereign grace.
And the result of gospel preaching is the salvation of God's elect.
God saved that man, and He saved his whole house. Think of it. Not just him, but his whole house.
A man's house in that day included his servants. It included his
children. Lots of times there was cousins
and nephews and all this kind of stuff living in that house.
He invited those men in. If God could save him, it wasn't
going to be that much bigger a deal to save his whole house.
If this God can save. Somebody came in to visit, and
it was a rather large family. If I have memory serves me right,
there were six of them, a man, his wife, and their children.
And they came into our church and came for several weeks. They
came three or four weeks in a row. But I could tell by looking at
him, he just wasn't going to have it. And he was very polite. He sat and would listen, and
he'd shake my hand and talk about something that I'd said that
he did like, you know, and then he'd go on home. But one of the
very first questions he asked me when he came in here, he says,
what does your church offer for children? And God gave me the answer. I
turned to him and said, the same thing he does for the parents,
the Gospel. God didn't have something different
for this man's house. He had the same thing. He had
the Gospel. He came into his house. I don't know what the
youngest one saved was. I don't know anything about ages. But I do know this, some very
popular men who preached the gospel of God's grace were saved
at an early age. Spurgeon was. He was very young
when God saved him. And some of these other men were.
David Brainerd was a very young man before God called him into
the mission field. And you can go on and on and
on. Don Fortner was very young when
God converted him. I don't know what the youngest
member of his house was, but he saved every last one of them. Every last one of them. The gospel was not only
sufficient to save this old jailer, but it was sufficient to save
this whole house. Now let me give you this and
I'll quit. Upon believing what these men preached, believing
on the Lord Jesus Christ, this man insisted, he insisted to
be baptized that same hour and everybody else in his house.
He wasn't going to let those men leave his house until he
was buried and baptized. I don't know if there's a difference
in the way we preach the gospel or not in our day, but what I
see distresses me. Somehow men and women don't seem
concerned much over their baptism. They're just not concerned with
it at all. And I don't know what else to write this off to except
the way we preach and teach it. That Ethiopian eunuch, upon believing,
right then said, what does hinder me to be baptized? Huh? That's the very first thing that
hit him. Now, baptism must have been preached to him, or he wouldn't
have asked the question, would he? He wanted to be baptized. And he said, there is water.
What does hinder me from being baptized? And he said, do you
believe? He said, I believe. They took him down and baptized
him. And this man wanted baptized
that same hour. It was probably midnight when
Paul and Silas finished preaching to him. They wanted to be baptized
at midnight. You know what men tell me? I
don't think about it for a while. You won't think about it a while?
You don't know if you believe. I tell you, you don't want to
go to sleep until you know you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
Don't go to bed. Don't go to sleep. And if you
believe, be baptized. That's how you confess Him. We
confess our sins. They came down there and old
John buried them in baptism and it says, confessing their sins. That baptism confesses that we're
sinners. That's our confession before
this world. We're sinners. We got to be buried with Christ. Buried in the likeness of His
death and then risen in the likeness of His resurrection. That dealer and his whole house
in the same hour, they believed, wanted to be baptized. Three
thousand souls were brought into the church at Pentecost under
Peter's ministry of the gospel. And of them, it says, then they
that gladly received his word were baptized. Isn't that what
that says over there now? They were baptized. But men and
women in our day, they just ignored this ordinance of God as though
it meant nothing. Pastor Clay Curtis from New Jersey
wrote an article on baptism recently, and he had this to say about
it. It's a public confession of our sinnerhood. It's a confession
that the Spirit of God has convinced us of our sin. And then, secondly,
it's a public confession of our faith. There's no salvation in
baptism, but it confesses the salvation whereby God has saved
us. And then thirdly, it's a public
confession of our commitment to Christ. Old Barnard used to
say it was putting on the uniform. He said, boy, I love this country.
I'll tell you when you know if you love it or not when you put
that uniform on and go over there to a foreign land and you walk
out there in the midst of all these foreigners with a United
States military uniform on. It's putting on the uniform of
Christ. It's a confession of your commitment
to Christ. We're confessing that we've been
risen with Him to walk in newness of life. He that believeth. Isn't that what He said? Go out
here and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth
and is baptized shall be saved. Shall be saved. I know there
are some who could not obey this ordinance. There are some today.
That thief on the cross, for instance. But that's no excuse
for our disobedience. Maybe the Lord be pleased to
save somebody here tonight. Wouldn't that be something? Wouldn't
that be something? And wouldn't it be something
if He's pleased to save your whole house? That's my hope. I don't have any other hope for
my children. and for my grandchildren, and
for the people who live in my backyard. I've got no other hope
for them except this gospel. But I tell you, God saved me,
and if He could save me, He'd save anybody. He'd save anybody. Even my own children. Even yours. Even yours. Wouldn't it be something? I saw it. This is how God saves
sinners. And this is where He does it.
And there's no reason to believe that He won't. If we do what
God has instructed us to do, there's no reason for us to believe
that He won't save somebody else. This is how He calls out His
elect. This is how He saves sinners. And I think we just get so caught
up in this world and caught up in the affairs of this world
that we forget that. We forget that. And it's the
main reason we're here. It's the only reason I'm fine
for us being here. We're fellow laborers. What a privilege it is to be
fellow laborers with God in His kingdom. My soul. Not even the
angels are granted that privilege. But worthless worms that God
has saved and called for the glory of His name, He made fellow
laborers with Him. Oh, I tell you, when we learn
that, we'll get busy in the kingdom. We'll give, we'll come, we'll
support, we'll pray, we'll do all those things when we see
what it's really all about. That's how God saves sinners.
What's he going to do to save your cousin or second cousin
or your neighbor? He's going to intervene with
an act of his providence. He's going to shut his present
direction, cut it out, He's going to cause something to happen
in that man's life to turn him and give him an interest to hear.
And then he's going to bring him to hear. And if he's going
to hear, he's going to hear. And when he does, God's going
to save him. He's going to save him.