SEND THE LIGHT 9

The Total Ruin and Self-Righteous Delusion of all Mankind

Right now, you are a child of the devil until JESUS Himself redeems your Soul and makes you a child of the Living God by His POWER (See John 1:12; John 8:44). Every man is born like a wild ass's colt; the very best-educated man who only has human learning, and knows not God, has reached no further than the highest level of all carnal wisdom which is spelled out in four simple letters: "FOOL." Evolution (monkey mythology) was dreamed up to help the Christ-rejecting atheist sleep a little better at night. Every man is a FOOL until God gives him Understanding, for when the fool is given a sense of his own stupidity by the Holy Spirit, he is then getting very close to the DOOR that leads to all Wisdom, Who is Christ Jesus.

The natural man is unable to believe in Christ, because he has a very high opinion of himself. He has never done anything amiss—at least, not that much—and he thinks he has a very good heart at the bottom; and if there is anything he's done wrong, he means to mend himself up, and set things right in his own way. The natural man has no doubt that he'll do as well as most people at the coming Judgment; he thinks he's better than most folks he knows. He plans to do his best, and he thinks God Almighty will be merciful, and by some means, he will impress The Judge of All the Earth at the last day and escape the Lake of Fire.

Your mind must be purged from this deadly nonsense, or you will never be saved! Your self-satisfaction is all based upon falsehood and self-delusion. Your heart is not as good as you think it is, and your conduct is not as commendable as you suppose. You have not done your best. Never trust in your heart or gut, for you are deceitful above all things and desperately wicked in God's sight. If you closely examine your past and current life, your conscience will find out your sins, and show you how many times you did not do your best; just give up, sinner, you'll never have the strength or resolve to obtain sinless Perfection or conquer your sins.

As long as you think you're strong and good, you'll never be saved from hell fire. As long as you think your salvation can be affected by any of your own efforts, or merits, or anything else that can come out of you, you are on the broad way that leadeth to Destruction. To rely upon Christ in part is deadly and deceitful; your faith must be altogether unmixed. If you depend in part upon the Righteousness of Christ, and partly upon what may be conveyed to your Soul by a priest, or in part upon sacraments, or in part upon your own repentance, or in part upon ANYTHING besides Christ Jesus Himself, you are lost forever. Jesus will be your whole Savior, or He will be no Savior for you at all.

The Law's Conviction of the Sinner
Before the Holy Spirit truly visits you, your conscience is dead and feels no inward dread; you are alive without the Law and feel just dandy, and think your sins are nothing at all. Your hopes of heaven are firm and bright, but when the Commandment comes with His convincing power and light, that's when you find out in reality just how vile you are inside, through and through. Your guilt and heavy load begins to appear; you clearly see just how Perfect, Holy, Just, and Pure God's Eternal LAW truly is. Your soul begins to feel the heavy load of your sins; your sins are revived and stirred up like a hornet's nest within you. Your Sins have provoked the wrath and vengeance of the great and terrible God, and all your self-hope and vain self-righteousness must be withered, cut down at the root, and taken away by the LAW. Be Wise: Cry out to God now, for only He has the Power to save through HIS PRECIOUS BLOOD, only JESUS can break the iron yoke of your sins and death, and redeem your guilty Soul from the power of darkness and Satan.

The perfect LAW must shut you up to hopelessness apart from Jesus; the LAW must arrest your Soul, put you into an iron cage and lock you up, and offer you no escape, but by Simple Direct Faith in Jesus Himself; and then you'll begin to cry: Lord Jesus, please save me by your Grace and Blood, for I perceive and realize now, that I cannot be saved by my own dead works.

Every sinner, if he could, would kill God, for he says in his heart, "No God". The sinner wishes there was no God, and he would rejoice indeed if he could learn for certain that there was no God in the universe to give account to for his sins. In fact, that is the terror of his thought life—that there is a God, the Just God, Who will bring him into Judgment with every secret thing, and sentence him to eternal death in the Lake of Fire. The atheist's secret wish is that there was no Christ, and no God, and no HOLY Bible, for then he could live just as he pleases, love his sins, with no worries at all about Eternity.

But you are shut up to come to God as a lost sinner: you cannot help it, you're lost, have no hope, and are without God in this present evil world. The intent and design of GOD'S LAW is to shut the sinner up in order, that he may be convinced and persuaded to Receive Christ's Salvation on free Grace terms through simple direct Faith in GOD'S BLOOD. You can never catch a fish in a net while there is one hole in the net through which the fish can escape, but when all the net's meshes are so small that the fish cannot escape, then the fisherman will take the fish home with him. When you are a guilty sinner, and shut up to be saved by grace, then you are surrounded and caught in Christ's Net, and JESUS will lift you out of the dark waters of Sin, and the Great Fisher of Men will save you out of all your distresses and troubles.

The Substitutionary Sacrifice and the Call to Believe
Here is THE GOSPEL in a Nutshell: You have broken God's Law all through your life, and you're justly condemned in God's sight on account of it. But God, in His infinite Mercy desires to save sinners like you. God the Father gave His Son JESUS to stand in the place of sinners and be punished for human sins. Jesus became the Substitute/Surety, and suffered in your place, and for your sins, He PAID the debt of punishment and vengeance due to God in Full upon THE CROSS of Calvary. And now by JESUS, All that Believe are Justified from all things, and their Soul is spared before the bar of God's divine justice. Your sins can only be pardoned and put away forever by childlike Faith in the sinless Sacrifice of the Lamb of God (John 1:29).

What think ye of Christ Jesus, The Messiah, The Anointed One of God? Do you think His errand of Grace to earth was necessary for your Soul? Was there a need for such a Person to come down to earth to seek and save the lost? Was the Savior necessary in your case? Jesus came to save men and women from their sins. Have you any sins that need putting away from God's Sight? Have you any sins which you cannot escape from by yourself, for which you cannot mak Atonement for yourself? Have you ever felt Guilty before God for sinning against the Law of God? Do you feel your guilt even now? Satan and your self-conceit blind you from seeing the great Truth of Christ's ability to save your Soul freely by His Bleeding Love.

If you say you have no sins, your thought of Christ is that He was a needless messenger from heaven as far as your Soul's case is concerned. Jesus came not to call the righteous, but sinners to Repentance. Why did JESUS suffer so, and Finish such a Work as He did on The Cross? Have you ever felt your Sins in your very mind and soul? Do you confess you are Guilty before God?

Do you believe that God sent Christ Jesus into the world to save sinners like you? Do you accept the Living Person of Christ Jesus whom God has sent to save guilty sinners? Are you willing to be saved by JESUS alone? Are you willing to be saved on JESUS' terms—that is, do you yield your sinful Soul up to Him, that He shall be your complete Savior, and He shall have all the glory of your Salvation, and that you shall not be saved by any merit of your own, but be pardoned completely through His Blood and Righteousness? Do you agree to those simple Gospel Terms? Does your soul say "Yes!" to that before the Living God?

If so, your thoughts of Christ are right; but if not, and you reject and slight JESUS, then spurn His atoning Sacrifice of Himself on THE CROSS, and say, "I see no need for all this bloody stuff to get me to heaven," if you think that GOD'S BLOOD is not needed or is insufficient to put away your sins, and you do not trust in JESUS alone, then you have made God a liar by not believing His testimony concerning His Son (1 John 5:10).

I hope your thoughts of Christ are these: "I am a sinner deserving eternal punishment from God for all my sins. I confess and believe in my heart that God has punished my sins in Jesus Christ on THE CROSS, and I trust my Soul to Christ Jesus, and His atoning Sacrifice, wholly and alone. I give my Soul and Sins up to Christ Jesus, I receive JESUS into my heart Now, I ask Him to save me freely, that He may rule me, that He may make me like Him, even as He is holy. If JESUS will have me, I have no opposition to Him; I completely yield my Soul to His divine Way, and want to be saved on the terms of the wonderful Savior."

The Great Substitution and Rejection of Works
The great Truth, the greatest of all Truths, is this: that God, seeing guilty men and women to be lost by reason of their sins, hath taken their Sins, and laid them upon His only begotten Son, making JESUS to be Sin for us, even Him who knew no sin; and by this transference of sins to Christ, whosoever believeth in Christ Jesus is made just and righteous and accepted by God freely—and made to be the Righteousness of God in Christ. Christ was made to be Sin, so that sinners might be made the Righteous, for JESUS' SAKE. This is the Truth of the Substitution of our Lord Jesus Christ on the behalf of guilty men.

If you desire to be saved by your own works, remember, just one sin that you commit in thought, word, or deed will spoil all of your make-believe righteousness; and just one speck of your sin will spoil that PERFECT righteousness which God requires at your hands. You cannot please God in the flesh. If you want to be saved by your own works, you must be holier than the angels; ye must be as pure and immaculate as Jesus Christ Himself to get past God at the Judgment, for the Law requires absolute sinless Perfection from you, and nothing short of PERFECTION; and God, with His unflinching vengeance, will damn any sinner who cannot bring Him a perfect obedience. When you come before His throne, and you try to plead that you have a perfect righteousness, God will say to you, "Sinner, you did not fulfill the demands of My Law as My Perfect Son did when He came to earth to save you; but you slighted My Son; Depart from Me, ye cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels, I never knew you! Bind him hand and foot, take him away, and cast him into outer darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth!"

The carnal mind has a vain notion that Christ Jesus came into the world to save respectable people, who, if they have done any wrong, have repented of it, and have made things right. According to the carnal mind, Jesus came to save people who do their very best by attending worship services on the right day of the week, taking the sacraments, giving to the poor, paying their way, and saying their prayers. The natural man does all he can to get right and keep right, and surely he will be saved in the end, so he says. The carnal mind's theory of salvation is very mixed, but it comes down to this: that the gospel is for good people. The religionist cannot quite do without Jesus Christ—JESUS comes in somewhere or another—but their religion is a kind of a mingle-mangle patch job: partly they save themselves, and partly Christ saves them, and between the two, they wind up not saved at all. Their vain notion is that, though they cannot do quite as much as they ought, Jesus comes in as an excellent help at the end, and turns the scale in their favor. This is the vain notion of the bulk of self-righteous mankind, and in many places of will worship, you may hear something very like that every Sunday.

The LAW OF GOD must bring you to lie down upon Christ, to Rest fully upon Christ, wholly and completely. Sinners want to be propped up with a little bit of their self-righteousness, they cannot be persuaded to lie down upon Christ; they want to help JESUS out a little, and prop themselves up with their own doings, and put a little dependence on themselves: but this will never do. You must come to Christ and lie down flat and square on HIM, until you are resting on the Lord Jesus Christ in all respects, under all circumstances, for Everything. For other Foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is JESUS CHRIST; be very sure that you rest your Soul wholly upon JESUS.

Christ did not come to save sinners who meet Him half way with their prayers and tears and repenting and doings. Eternal Salvation is NOT half from man and half from Christ. Jesus came to save sinners, and begin and finish His work in them when they are in their guiltiness, nakedness, filthiness, and spiritual death.

This is no religious dream—that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners—there is no mistake about that Eternal Fact. That God has set forth His Son to be a Propitiation for sin—there is no imagination or superstition about that Eternal Truth. The Gospel still stands in black and white in the HOLY Scriptures of Truth. There stand the Words: "He that believeth in Him is not condemned." I believe in JESUS, therefore I am not condemned, for God says I'm not. :) Come what may, my Faith remains unshaken on The ROCK OF MY SALVATION, CHRIST JESUS, The ROCK of My Strength, and my REFUGE.

The Power of Christ's Finished ATONEMENT
The Way to LIFE lies in the opposite direction of the carnal mind. You must look straight away from yourself to the Lord Jesus Christ Himself; you must rely upon what He has already FINISHED, and not upon what you have done, or can do, or will do; You must have no trust in what you can work into yourself or out of yourself, but only to what JESUS can work in you.

You must throw the whole weight of your Soul upon JESUS, and cling to Him alone, for no one else can rescue your Soul from eternal destruction. Beware of mixing your self-confidence with your faith, for all that self-righteousness must be done away with, every thread of your filthy rags must be forsaken and thrown on the dunghill where it belongs. Never think you can help Christ. A match cannot help the Sun warm the earth each day. Loathe, abhor, and detest everything that makes you put confidence in yourself, or in a priest, or in sacraments, or in creeds, or in anything whatsoever, except Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh, The Lamb of God which taketh the sin of the world.

Here's The GOSPEL as clear as the Sun at noon time—the full statement of Gospel Truth is still found in the HOLY BIBLE—that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, and that whosoever believeth in the Lord Jesus Christ hath everlasting life. This is God's testimony concerning His dear Son who died for sinners. All you have to do in order to be saved as the result of Christ's Atoning Sacrifice is simply to believe the testimony of God concerning THE ATONEMENT, and rest upon JESUS completely.

Christ only saves sinners who trust completely in *HIM*; I trust only HIM, therefore my Soul is saved now and Forever. Jesus Christ suffered for my sins; I believe in Him, and my sins are remitted, forgiven, put away, blotted out. This is the summary of the Great Transaction which occurs when the Sinner looks to The Lamb of God at THE CROSS.

Salvation from Sin and eternal death in the Lake of Fire has nothing to do with religious ceremonies. Personally and Heartily Believe on JESUS Himself, and Live Forever; this is the simple Gospel message. You must believe the Gospel, and personally act upon the Truth of the Gospel, and you are redeemed—saved the moment you Receive Christ Himself into thine own heart, and believe the witness of God concerning His Son Jesus Christ.