S. WHAT SHALL I DO TO INHERIT ETERNAL LIFE? PART 2

WHAT SHALL I DO TO INHERIT ETERNAL LIFE? PART 2 SCRIPTURES: Acts 16:29-31; Romans 10:1-10; John 3:14-18, John 3:36; Luke 11:37-52.

It has been said that our Savior in the Sermon on the Mount and in the conversation with the lawyer recorded in Luke 10:25-37, discussed this morning, taught one way of life, but that Paul at a later day taught a contrary way of life; and it has become a fashionable thing with those who make such a statement, to contrast our Lord’s theology with what they are pleased to call Pauline theology. Of course, if it can be established, that Paul’s theology is at variance with our Lord’s teaching on the same subject, the apostle’s doctrine must fall and with it the inspiration of all the books containing it. Paul himself claimed that he received his gospel direct from the Lord.

Bearing on this statement and in refutation of it, I now cite three passages of scripture, the first two embodying Paul’s conception of the plan of salvation, and one containing our Savior’s epitome of the gospel-way of life preached by himself. In Acts 16:1-40 we have this question and answer, which is the true question and answer with reference to eternal life: "Then he called for a light and sprang in and came trembling and fell down before Paul and Silas and brought them out and said, ’Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’ And they said, ’Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved and thy house.’" The second scripture is from Romans 10:1-21 : "Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved, for I bear them record that they have a zeal of God but not according to knowledge; for they being ignorant of God’s righteousness and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth. For Moses describeth the righteousness which is of the law, that the man which doeth those things shall live by them. But the righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise: Say not in thine heart, who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above:) or, who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring Christ up again from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart; that is, the word faith which we preach; that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation." This is the Pauline theology. Now let-us hear the Savior. I read from the third chapter of John; "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life." Our question this morning was, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." "For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved." "He that believeth on Him is not condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not on the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him." In the discussion of the subject this morning under the question, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life," I found why it was necessary for the Savior to answer the question in that instance as He did; that He answered it in that way in order to suit the standpoint of the man who propounded the question, and with a view to bring about a conviction of sin in that man’s heart, and in order to extort from that man’s own lips the virtual confession that in attempting to justify himself he had lowered the requirement of God’s law concerning "Who is my neighbor?" The discussion this morning closed at this point: "Howbeit, give for alms those things which are within and behold, all things are clean unto you." This presents the subject in another phase and under the question, "How shall we be clean and how shall we keep clean?" The Pharisee said that the way to be clean and to keep clean was by external ablution, and the Savior’s plan was by internal ablution. The proposition embodying the plan of salvation, speaking from the standpoint of cleanness then, is this: The way by which a man shall become clean and remain clean in the sight of God, is by internal, spiritual cleansing, cleansing by the power of the Holy Spirit. In support of this proposition as bearing upon the true way of life, you have but to consider the following things: First, there is only one thing in the world that does defile, and that is sin; whatever transgresses the law, that is sin and that defiles the man. Second, all sin is without the body, to put it in somewhat plainer language, all sin must be spiritual. The body can not sin. It is without the body. There must be the action of the mind and of the will and of the judgment, the powers within. The outer man can not commit a sin. It is the inner man only that can commit a sin. Third, and therefore the law of God constantly requires truth in the inward parts, in the inner man. These three thoughts alone establish the position in the Savior’s statement, that if you give for alms the things that are within, all things shall be clean unto you. Leaving out the figure of alms-giving employed, the substance of the thought He designed to teach, as the context shows, was this: You are very much concerned, if you go out into the market place, lest by outward touch with some publican you contact defilement. You are concerned if you go to eat, lest certain kinds of meat shall defile you. You have concern about everything you touch and everything that you eat. You wash your hands lest you should be defiled by dirt going into your mouth. Contrary to all of that is the doctrine of God that if you are clean inside, if you give alms of the things that are within, that is, repentance, which is internal, and faith, which is internal, and you receive regeneration, which is internal, then everything is clean to you, i.e., nothing external can defile one internally clean. That is what it means.

We come now to consider then what the true question is if a man wants to be saved, and that question and its answer I have read to you; that if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ you have and shall have and forever have eternal life; that you now have eternal life so far as justification is concerned; that you shall have eternal life so far as the purification of your spirit is concerned when sanctification is complete; that you shall have eternal life when your body is raised from the dead, a spiritual body that can die no more, that you shall have moral, spiritual life when you are made conformable to the image of the Lord Jesus Christ in your sanctified nature and powers, so that you, in heaven, can and will perfectly obey God, which salvation comes, some of it instantaneously, as justification, and all of it ultimately, through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.

I now read but do not discuss, for I have other things to present, the links of this chain of salvation by grace, through faith. Listen at it. I read from Romans 8:1-39, beginning with the twenty-ninth verse: "For whom He did foreknow," that is the first, the foreknowledge of God, "He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son." That is the second link of the chain. "Moreover, whom He did predestinate them He also called." That is the third link. "Whom He called them He also justified." That is the next link. "Whom He justified them He also glorified." And so the chain is complete. The object in reading you these connected links in the plan of a salvation which is purely by grace and not of works, is to show that from its conception before the foundation of the world to the consummation at the end of the world, it is all of God.

Now I read but do not discuss, the four pillars upon which such a salvation abides without any shaking. Here they are:

First, "It is Christ that died." There is the expiation of the sins which we commit, the death of Christ. As long as virtue in that cleansing blood remains, as long as that propitiation is acceptable unto God as a sufficient atonement for sin, that pillar upholds the superstructure - salvation. The second, "Yea, rather that is risen again;" the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, for if He be not risen our faith is vain. I say that Christ, bursting the cerements of death and emerging from the grave, and thus being demonstrated the Son of God with power, is the second pillar upon which our salvation rests. The third is this: "Who is even at the right hand of God." By virtue of what He has done, and as a consequence of His resurrection, He is placed at the right hand of the Majesty on high, enthroned and invested with the sovereignty of the entire universe. All power in heaven and on earth is in His hands. And the, fourth is this: "Who also maketh intercession for us." There is perpetuity of His priesthood, that King who is Priest upon His throne.

Now with these links in the chain and these four pillars upon which salvation rests, let us look, but not tarry in looking, simply look at the security of the salvation, and here let us read again: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." My only remark on that is this, that when the momentous question is propounded to me, as to how I shall inherit eternal life, and when, my soul seeks a solution of that question, the conclusion which I reach in order to comfort my soul in all of life’s vicissitudes and emergencies must depend upon the character of the foundation, and if it be an unshakable foundation, then I can rest; I am at the end of my investigation. I have reached peace. I do not disturb my mind any more on the thought that I shall be lost.

I want to look back and see how each link in the chain has been fused and welded together, in the secret chambers of eternity by the divine Architect himself, whose hand forges and gives eternal strength to each part of the chain. I want to see that. I do not want to feel that unless I myself look out here and look out yonder, and keep this little point secure and that little point secure, that after all I am going to be lost. I do not want to feel that I am under obligation to go into the garden with a microscope and ascertain the smallest herb there and tithe that, or else have the feeling in my heart that by overlooking some infinitesimal portion of duty that my soul will be lost.

We come now to what I want to discuss tonight. I promised to show you the awful consequences that flow from an attempt to seek life in any other way, and the demoralizing character of a doctrine which avows that a man can keep the law of God perfectly either way before or after his regeneration at any time prior to glorification. No man who ever seeks to enter heaven on the score of justifying himself by his own righteousness, and no man, who after he has been regenerated and forgiven of all past sin can from that time on expect to perfectly keep the law of God, without falling into grievous and hurtful errors. The whole theory or any part of the theory, is based upon three false conceptions, the first of which is, as indicated this morning, that the law of God is not a fixed and unchangeable and universal standard, but that it is a sliding scale of requirement that must be lowered to suit different conditions in different places and different grades of obedience ¾ that it may be one thing in one place and quite another thing in another place. This conception of law, when it is followed to its logical consequence, is after all, a simple denial of law at all. It logically says there is no such thing as law outside of special circumstances. It is equivalent to the position of the infidel that law is only custom. The second false conception is in regard to sin. The modern holiness man, the perfectionist, has in his mind, a very limited view of sin. Take what Mr. Wesley writes on the subject, that sin is only a voluntary act of disobedience; that a man can not unconsciously sin, unintentionally sin. Here must you lower the transgression in order to suit the degree of the knowledge of the subject of the law, and all you have to do to make him entirely innocent of any disobedience to any moral law of God by such process, is simply to make his ignorance supreme. If his ignorance be supreme, his innocence is perfect. But God’s Word teaches that it is the dark places of the earth that are the habitations of cruelty and that the people perish for lack of knowledge. That is the very charge brought here against the Pharisees, that they have taken away the key of knowledge; and every principle that is inculcated in the New Testament is predicated upon the fact that knowledge must underlie faith, and that not to know is to die, and to die is to be lost. This false conception of sin, which confines it wholly to voluntary transgression, also loses sight of what are called states or dispositions; a man may be naturally as averse from God as possible; the ruling bent or disposition of his mind and heart may be whatever you desire to state it; that state of mind and that disposition of heart is not sin according to this theory; there must be a certain act and that act willed, before any sin may be committed. It is equivalent to saying that the moral law of God does not reign over the heathen world. It logically denies that the law of God is written in the human heart. In the next place, it is based upon a false conception of the human will. It assumes that the will of the unconverted man, and the will of the regenerate, the imperfect man, is at all times able to choose the right thing, and denies that that will is enslaved and corrupted.

Now these three misconceptions-the misconception of the law, the misconception of sin, the misconception as to the power of the human will, belong to this system as a whole, or to any of its parts. What else? It is directly contrary to the teachings of the Scriptures. There are passages in the Word of God that speak without any sort of equivocation and leave no just ground for caviling, that there is not upon this earth a just man that liveth and sinneth not that if we say we have no sin we make God to be a liar and the truth is not in us.

Then it is contrary to human experience. I mean the experience of the race as well as of the individual. In all hours when the moral atmosphere is clear enough for us to get a clear view of things, and the spirit of proper insight and candor is on us, we know we are sinners. The rebukes of conscience teach us so. The apprehension of some sudden evil proclaims it. The dread of going into the dark that may be peopled by some indefinable phantoms is a demonstration of it, and all human experience falls into line with the teaching of God’s Word. But I come now to the capital point and the closing point, and that is that the seeking of eternal life in the way that this lawyer was seeking it or the profession of sinless perfection in life after regeneration, for it is all based upon the common ground, makes hyprocrites, Pharisees. It is the Pharisee question with which we are dealing in this whole discussion. I say that the doctrine in any of its parts, or as a whole, not accidently but inevitably and irresistibly, brings about a product, and that product is Pharisaism.

Now in order to see whether such a result is disastrous or not, let us outline a

Pharisee as he is presented here in this context. What is it? If a man lay stress on the seeming more than the real, if a man attends more to external than to internal cleanness, what do you call him? What word is the first stroke of the outline? The one word, hypocrisy ¾ hypocrite. A child knows it. No mind removed a hair’s breadth from imbecility, or idiocy, but what can somewhat recognize hypocrisy and hypocrites. You seem to be, rather than you are. You are whited sepulchres, beautiful without but inwardly full of rottenness and dead men’s bones.

What is the next word employed in this outline? "Inwardly full of extortion," is a characteristic, but what one word expressed it? Covetous! I venture to say that tie history of this world has produced no greater examples of greater and downright and outright idolatry in the shape of covetousness, than has been found in the Pharisee, whether of ancient or of modern times. A man by keeping clean outside, being externally obedient to God’s law, may reach out a stealthy hand and snatch the heritage from the orphan and the widow, extort and extort, pile up and pile up, while a world perishes, until the heart becomes as hard as the nether millstone, granite, cold, impenetrable granite, that never permits a tear of mercy to fall, nor extends a helping hand to the suffering. The stingiest man that this world has ever known is the man of this very kind.

What else? "Full of extortion and wickedness." Cruel, is the term I use. Cruel! A Pharisee is cruel. How else could he take a widow’s house by fraud? How else could he rob her and devour the orphan? Cruel? Oh, how pitiless! How unmerciful! Our parable illustrates: Yonder lies the man whom robbers met and stripped and beat and left half dead, and here comes this man whose righteousness is external and cruelly and coldly he walks around him the other way.

What is the next stroke of the outline? Scrupulosity about little things while neglectful of greater things. You never saw one of them in your life that did not do it. I never saw a man yet who was seeking to justify himself in the sight of God on his own record, that did not magnify some little thing into a mountain and minify some mountain into a molehill. The form, more than the power of Godliness, the shell, the shell, even if it shall so harden as to prevent expansion and thereby bring death to the life in the shell. The shell on the beach never sings until it is empty and dry.

Why, you see a touch of it going on in the papers now, where it counts for nothing that the commandment of God, "Go and carry the gospel to every creature," is neglected. It counts for nothing that the ear be closed to the pleading cries for help that come from destitute places. It counts for nothing that the cold waves of infidelity are inundating the land. The great thing is to be parliamentary and to preserve church sovereignty; to be able to say at the judgment, "O Lord God, I hindered when need held out her emaciated hand and gasped with swollen tongue, swollen with thirst; I helped not because the method was unconstitutional. The world was lost but I preserved the form of church sovereignty!" It is just as downright Pharisaism and hypocrisy as that which occurs here in the text. And you ask what is the moral effect of such a teaching on the world? Let us notice this character yet more. Spiritual pride! They loved the chief places in the synagogues and the salutations in the market places. There never was one yet who attempted to justify himself before God upon his own record that was not eaten through and through with the cancer of spiritual pride; not one. You may take him in the form of an infidel and it is there. You may take him in the form of one who claims to be religious after that fashion, and it is there. You may take him after he claims to be religiously perfect and it is there, a spiritual pride, and towers up to the very heaven and that will not say, "I am a sinner." "Through pride the angels fell." Notice the next point. They are always cheap-glory people. What does the record say? "Ye build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers slew." Now that is a fine point. I want you to see it for it touches the whole question. You remember it is said, "Seven cities claimed a Homer dead, In which the living Homer begged for bread."

What is the point of the sarcasm? It would cost something to be kind to the blind old bard of Scio’s rocky isle while he was alive. It did not cost a cent to shelter under his glory and claim him as a fellow-citizen after he is gone.

You remember how the mother of Robert Burns, with aching heart and quivering lips stood and looked at the cold towering monument erected over her son, and remembering his poverty and his want and his need in his lifetime, said with a pathos that is indescribable,, "Ah, Robbie, you asked them for bread and they gave you a stone." Oh, it is cheap to raise a monument to a dead hero, far cheaper than while he is living and the issues of the hour are on him and he, is facing them, to stand by him. "Ye build the tombs of the prophets."

Yonder in England, what is that crowd gathering? You can scarcely look to its outskirts. Who are they? They are the titled ones of Great Britain. There are dukes and marquises and knights, and there are long-robed ecclesiastical dignitaries. What ought them together? They are going to erect a monument to John Bunyan and bask in the cheap glory of admiring him, gone. When he lived they put him in jail. They said he should not preach. Now that is Pharisaism again, and all on the same line.

I want to show you the hideousness of the character when it is drawn out fully. There are men today who will get up before an audience and with a declamation that is amazing in its elocutionary power and rhetorical force, speak concerning William Carey and Adoniram Judson, but when you go to them and say, "Do thou likewise," they close their purse strings, because it is cheaper to glorify a dead missionary than to help a live one.

What else? Pharisees are heaven-shunners. Jesus says, "You do not go in yourselves." Oh, ye men that are seeking eternal life on, your own merits, you heaven-shunners, you do not get in-no, never. You do not enter the kingdom of God here in the practical form in which it comes to your door. You do not enter its spirit of pity and mercy and love. How can you expect to enter it in its glory phase up yonder?

Now comes the very climax of it, as to what is the moral effect of Pharisaism. If that way of seeking eternal life through a man’s own personal justification is based upon three false conceptions, to wit: of law, of sin and of the human will; if it be contrary to express declarations of the Scripture; if it run athwart universal human experience, and if it makes Pharisees such as have been described, now what is the moral effect on other people? That is the part that I want to speak to you of in the climax.

First, "Ye are tombs which appear not, and men walk over them and know it not." If a man under the Levitical law touched death, it defiled him. Therefore, when anybody died the dead body had to be put in an isolated place, a sepulchre, and a mark put upon it, "This is the realm of death. Whoever touches death is defiled."

Hence there could not be a more hurtful means of disseminating defilement than to have a tomb that did not show, and men walking over it and did not know it; coming in touch with it, because there was nothing to tell that it was there.

What is the principle involved here? If some workmen under a city contract go to digging up the streets and digging down to the sewer, and when night comes are usable to close the pit they have digged, and the stranger comes along, as the has a right on the public highway, and falls into the pit that does not appear, no piece of timber put across, no warning red light to say, "Don’t come here, here is danger," nothing of that kind-it is a criminal offense. It is a criminal offense to leave near a road an old well that is uncovered, lest unthoughtedly, not knowing it, a man should fall into it.

Now, the Pharisee is a tomb which does not appear, a death trap that has no mark to designate it, and every day, and every hour of every day, thoughtless thousands are coming along and falling into that trap where no sign, has been put, "He who comes here dies." That is the character of Pharisaism. That is the character of it even if an infidel speaks it, who superciliously says, "You church people are saved by somebody else. I stand on my own record." And the little boy does not see the death that is there, and he walks into it without knowing it. Just as far as that influence goes it is death, and it indicated no warning.

What else? A Pharisee is an oppressor of men. "You put heavy burdens on men and you do not touch them with your little finger." There never yet has been placed on human conscience such a burden as the law and the traditional requirements by which a man shall be justified along that line. Why, you can just think of it and it will run you crazy as to its details. You are all the time apprehensive that you have forgotten something. The mind is on a stretch, a strain, lest perchance some little formality, some little external ceremony, has been omitted.

Look at the land where salvation by such forms is the dominant theology. Burdens! It comes to the laborer and stops not at one day in seven as a holy day, as God requires, but plucks nearly every day in the week from the privilege of honest toil and puts it in the calendar as a holiday. Burdens! It puts a burden on birth, on the cradle, on the barefooted boy, on the stripling going to school, on the young man when he marries, and the grave of his baby, when it dies; a burden that mortgages life after death and says, "You must pay me this and that, or that soul can never get out of purgatory." Burdens! Oh, who can live under them?

Behold a picture: An honest man, honestly striving after righteousness, striving to attain unto it, reaching up, after self-justification ¾ went to the city of Rome and thought to find a high degree of righteousness if he would only come to that famous marble stairway, and on each step, crawling up, stop and on naked knees recite a prayer, and go up another step and kneel down, and recite another strain of supplication, and half way up that man (Martin Luther) received a flash of light. The Word of God came down to him. What word? "The just shall live by faith." By faith, the salvation that we are talking about tonight, and he leaped to his feet. The whole world was bright to him. Oh, that made salvation attainable and precious, and he became. the great apostle of salvation by grace through faith.

Let us look again. "Persecutors." "I sent the prophets to you and you persecuted them. I sent others and you killed them." Now I want to ask a question, and I do not care whether you have read just a hundred pages of history or a million pages. I want to ask you this question! (If you have read any history, you can answer it.)

Judging from the statements that are recorded upon the pages of history, what power has persecuted men most? It is the Pharisaical power. That power built the dungeons. That power invented the rack and the thumb-screw. That power will say, "Outwardly conform, Never mind about what you think. Never mind about your soul’s individual sense of responsibility to God in secret. Just simply submit to be baptized and conform on the outside." And the fires of persecution have glowed and martyrs have died on account of Pharisaism all along down the ages.

What else? "Nation destroyers." On this generation shall come all the blood that was shed from righteous Abel down to Zachariah, that was slain between the porch and the altar. I have looked at that many a time and I could understand how upon the Jews, considering the nation as an individual that had its birth and youth and maturity and old age as a nation I could understand how, the sins committed in the early days of the nation would have to be atoned for somewhere, and how they would come on the last generation, but this goes back to Abel. That is the part of it that puzzled me. Abel was before the Jews. How then does it leap over that long period and get back to Abel? I will tell you. It is the responsibility of an idea. What were the two ideas that crossed swords at Abel’s altar? The idea of self-righteousness as embodied in Cain and the idea of salvation by faith through the blood of the lamb in Abel. And there the believer in one way of getting to heaven persecuted the believer in the other way, and there self-righteousness struck its first murderous blow that has been perpetuated from that day until now.

Now the last point is the effect upon other people. It bars heaven. "You will not go in yourself and others that would go in, you hinder." Oh, how many times, in some great meeting where Jesus has been lifted up as the only hope of the world, somebody in the audience deep down in his heart has felt, "I am a sinner; I am a lost sinner," near the kingdom of God, close up to the line; but when he steps out of the house there comes a Pharisee and takes away the key of knowledge and hinders him from going in; comes with his scorn of salvation by Christ and plucks that man from the very threshold of eternal life and hurls him to the deepest depths of eternal death. Is it any light matter then that this view should be propagated among our children; anything which ministers to hypocrisy, to covetousness, to cruelty, to extortion; anything which ministers to oppression and not to helpfulness; anything which causes one to shun heaven; anything which makes a man an unmarked source of defilement, a hidden source of death, and that, too, right in the path where children walk, that right on the highway where men must go, there is death and no sign to tell that death is there, and then a destruction, that saps the foundation of the nation, that masses a great flood of future woe and holds it in reservation until a generation comes on whose unsheltered head it shall burst in one awful, overwhelming deluge? The sin, the awful sin of self-righteousness, whether held by the men outside of the church or in it, is the sin of this world. And that is why Saul was the chief of sinners. He was the embodiment of self-righteousness. He hated Jesus. He persecuted that way unto the death and it made him the chief of sinners. So I have presented this subject to you, and I think there will be no harm in my telling you about an impression made on my mind this morning. Just at the close of the sermon, when my own soul, with every finger of it, was touching salvation by grace, salvation by Christ, I sat down there. The choir sang that old-time hymn with that old-time tune, that I heard when I was a little child, and it melted me down. I never thought about its being any fine display of singing. I didn’t think of the choir, but their song made me think of Jesus and heaven and precious grace. I would to God we had more of those songs that touch the soul.

Away back yonder some of you sitting here used to be in meetings, where ministers preached the gospel and not philosophy. They held, up Jesus as the only way of life for sinners, lost sinners, and somehow, old-fashioned as they may have been, homespun backwoodsmen, there was something in the power of those services to touch the heart, to break down the barriers of fictitious distinctions between classes, and bring all together as brothers and sisters, until tears flowed down their faces and they would take each other by the hand and bless God for the power of grace. And that old-time religion is good enough for me. I do not ever want any other. I would not give a snap of my finger for another kind. I have tried this right in the presence of death and it is very sweet.

O Waco church, when I came here this morning, while I was sorry for you on account of your having as worthless a pastor as you have, I rejoiced that I had such a church. But I do want to see you have one more old-time meeting, a meeting when salvation will come from God, grace, all of it grace, and men under the power of it shall feel and acknowledge that they are lost sinners. I want to see that come. I hunger for it. I thirst for it. My soul stretches out its hands in supplication to God that one more time before I pass away I may see this house full of the glory of God, and I know that it won’t fill that way with anything but that old-time religion and preaching. So I have celebrated this anniversary.

Fifty-three years old today, and I have been very happy all day long, and I do testify here that if I never see another birthday, that the thing that has made me happy today is my personal and conscious touch with the power of the Christian religion. That is what it is. As Brother Cole, my old friend said, "I would not give fifteen minutes of its joys for the world."

Sinner, what shall you do to inherit eternal life? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall have eternal life. God help you to hold out the hand of faith and receive the gift of God, which is eternal life.