So that servant came, and shewed his lord these things. Then the master of the house being angry said to his servant, Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind. And the servant said, Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room. And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. For I say unto you, That none of those men which were bidden shall taste of my supper. And there went great multitudes with him: and he turned, and said unto them, If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.
God says, “He that hath no money, come.” You go to a restaurant for a meal, and you pay for it. You go to a hotel for a bed, and you pay for it. But the Lord says if you don’t have money, come to the Bloody Cross and look to the Bleeding Lamb of God. God invites anybody and everybody that is in NEED. To the one who is flat broke and down and out, come on; Jesus Christ will give you free whatever you need. Come without money and without price. (See Isaiah 55:1-7) Perhaps life has not been good to you. You can never get satisfied in this world. You’ve tried it all; and all has turned out bad, life has turned sour.
Many people try marriage, but love flees away. Oh, the bitterness and heartache when love is gone! Love may have fled from you, and now life isn’t worth living. Many get drunk or high to drown it all, to numb their heart-pain, they try to forget it all but they can’t. Some days, you may wish you were dead. You have nothing to live for. But remember – God’s Gospel Message is full of love and able to heal broken hearts. Unemployment, sickness, poverty, distress, divorce, home trouble, and heart trouble – all of these are God’s opportunity to save sinners. Most people only find the Savior after losing everything. But it’s better to lose everything here on earth, than to lose your own soul and go to Hell without God. You may be dissatisfied, you may have lost your friends, family, money, or health, but the Lord Jesus Christ is still calling to you, “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” If you are tired of eating out of the world’s garbage can, and drinking this world’s ditch-water, the Bleeding Savior is waiting at the Cross to save you from eternal death.
You may be dissatisfied today, deceived, or disillusioned; well, I have good news for you. You can have peace of heart and the forgiveness of sins freely, you can have the bread life that will satisfy you soul’s longing. Just come on to Jesus and trust Him with your soul. Get on your knees right now and tell God all about it; tell Him you want forgiveness and peace through the blood of His precious Son. Sin never satisfies, but the Lord Jesus always does.
If your soul is hungry and restless, God has a remedy for those who have tried the world and found their soul still wanting, God has a message for those who have drunk from the sweet cup of sinful pleasure and found bitter dregs at the bottom. For those who have tried Satan’s way and found the way of the transgressor to be hard and thorny, come on to Calvary’s Cross and get what your soul needs. You can’t buy or earn eternal life and the forgiveness of sin – it is the free gift of God, and nothing is freer than a gift. All you who are nobodies, nothings, and sinful failures may come to the Cross now for free forgiveness.
God has been seeking you for a long time, now it is time for you to seek Him. One of the main sins that sends people to Hell is that they won’t hear. You sin against God and your own soul when you fail to listen to God’s Gospel Message. You will go to Hell unless you turn your ear and heart toward God. God is calling, and pleading for you to turn and find Him while you can. Most Americans today are Gospel-hardened. They have heard they Message of the Cross so long that it doesn’t move them at all anymore. Listen, you had better listen closely. If you don’t want to burn in torment and be forever away from God, take heed right now to the Gospel. I beg you, turn your ear toward God. God’s still, small voice is calling to you now. If you fail to hear Him, then your ear isn’t turned toward God. A wicked heart will not hear God. Dull ears always turn away from the truth.
The Lord Jesus Christ is calling you today, so listen closely. Oh sinner, listen diligently. Souls are lost forever who will not listen to God. Seek ye the Lord while He may be found. Those who seek God find Him. Don’t blame God if you go to Hell. It is not God’s move, it’s not God’s turn. He hasn’t wronged you. You’ve went against Him, ignored Him, and went headlong into sin intentionally. You wouldn’t listen when He called to you. It is your move now. Seek God, and you will find Him. If you don’t seek God, you will go to that place of torment called Hell and be there forever and ever.
God will give you a FREE PARDON if you will forsake YOUR WAY. God has some terms we don’t like to meet. God says, “Let the wicked forsake HIS WAY.” You have gone your own way, and it is has been filled with misery and destruction. (Romans 3:16)You are wicked enough to go to Hell. You have broken God’s law – one sin is all it takes to be a sinner. You may be an educated sinner, a religious sinner, a well-dressed sinner, but you are still a wicked sinner in the sight of God. You may be moral in your own eyes, but you are still wicked in God’s holy eyes. You are rotten with sin, and you’re self-condemned. Your own way is taking you farther and farther away from God. (See Proverbs 16:25; Isaiah 53:6)
YOUR WAY has always brought you trouble. Sin always complicates life. It has brought you a guilty conscience, remorse, guilt, and a wasted life. Your way will result in ruin on down the road. YOUR WAY leads to Hell – it is the broad way. To be saved, you must turn your back on your own way and turn your ear and heart toward the Cross and look only to the Bleeding Savior. No one can be saved from sin without a heart-turning to God. (See Luke 13:3; II Peter 3:9; Acts 17:30)
To repent means to turn from unbelief to faith in Christ alone. Faith is to take God at His word and trust Him to save your soul. Bible faith is to trust Christ alone right now. True repentance is a gift, it comes from God, not yourself. Repentance means to quit your way, abandon your self-righteousness, and forsake your foolishness. Repenting is to stop trusting in your way, and trust God’s way. God’s way is the Lord Jesus Christ. You must forsake your own thoughts. Your thoughts are backward, wrong, and sinful. You think, “Well, I haven’t done anything that bad, or, I’m a pretty good person, or, I’m a church member, or, I live up to my obligations, or, I take good care of my family, or, I don’t do harm to anybody and I try to treat my neighbor right, or, I have stopped my bad habits of the past, or, I do the best I know how to do, or, I try to live up to the Golden Rule, or, I have been baptized.” These are all thoughts from a carnal mind in rebellion against the Gospel of Christ.
Just give up your way, your own thoughts about salvation. None of these vain imaginations will get you saved. You will not be saved your way. If you are saved from your sin, you will have to be saved God’s way. Turn your back on your way and take God’s way – the Bleeding Substitute. If you seek God, that is, turn your ear toward God, forsake your own way, take God at His word concerning His Son, cry out to God, lay down your love for sin, give up all your plans to save yourself, and trust Christ Jesus alone – the door is always open when you come to God a lost, hell-deserving sinner. It takes a nobody to be a somebody, it takes a nothing to be something. It takes somebody going down to go up. God only saves nobodies that need forgiveness and mercy. It takes a nobody to get saved by the grace of God. No one ever becomes righteous in the sight of God, until they truly see how unrighteous they really are when compared to God’s righteousness. It takes a nobody to be a somebody, and until you become a NOTHING, you can never be anything in the sight of God. (See Galatians 6:3)
God can be found right now, He is not far off. You need to bury your pride and religious nonsense, God is near, He can be found right now. The Holy Spirit is knocking at your heart’s door. Satan will tell you, “Anytime will do,” or “Some other time,” or “You have plenty of time.” But that isn’t true. There will come a time when you can’t find God. Your heart will be too hardened, or you’ll be too busy, or you may die suddenly, and be forever lost.
There is a time when it is too late to find God. There will come a time when God cannot be found. So seek Him now while He CAN be found. If you reach out toward God, He’ll reach out to you. God will have mercy on your soul if you cry out to Him now. See Romans 10:13. Anybody who calls on God through Jesus Christ for mercy can get mercy immediately. While God is near, call on Him. Tell the Lord you are a sinner who needs mercy. Just cry out, and God will hear you. You can ask for mercy and get mercy this moment. You can ask for forgiveness and get forgiveness right now. God in Heaven hears the cry of sinners who need forgiveness and mercy.
Your soul is immortal and of infinite worth. Your soul will still be living on when the sun grows cold. Throughout eternity, your soul will be somewhere – in Heaven or in Hell. There’s no such thing as purgatory or reincarnation – those are the Devil’s lies. One soul is worth more than everything else on the planet – more than all the money, all the banks, all the railroads, stocks, homes, music, schools, bonds, jewels, and lands. Your soul is worth more than all the sinful pleasure. Your soul is worth more than everything else in this world put together. There is a Hell and Christ-rejecting sinners die and go there.
You are as full of sin as an egg is full of egg. You have broken God’s holy law by sinning in thought, word, and deed. If you wished to be saved by the law, you must obey its commands entirely, perfectly, and continuously. But you can never do that, because you sin every day. The Law is written in the Ten Commandments, it is not enough for you just to learn or memorize the commandments, you must keep them perfectly for your entire existence on earth. If you are to be saved by the commandments, you must do them all flawlessly, that is clear from scripture. The law demands perfect obedience your entire life. Whatever God has commanded, you must do, whatever He forbids, you must avoid, only by this type of sinless obedience can you live forever. You may often talk about doing your best, but God demands absolute perfect and entire obedience. If you have broken the law just once, it’s all over for you, you are guilty of breaking the law and you are condemned to die an eternal death – the wages is eternal death in the lake of fire. One single fault takes away the possibility of you ever being justified by your own works. No man on earth, except for Jesus Christ Himself, has ever kept the law perfectly.
Sinners cannot keep the law, we have already broken it in a thousand pieces, the precious vase has been fractured, and to boast of keeping the entire law is complete nonsense. You have broken the pure and spotless law many times in the past. If you are hoping to be saved by your works, you are hopelessly lost. If you were to saved by the law, you would have to have begun your life without sin, continued without sin, and then you would have to die in an absolute sinless state in order to have eternal life by your own works. That is impossible and out of the question. There could not be one sinful thought, word, or deed all the days of your life. If you sinned only once, you’re a lost sinner. You can only dream of having perfect, life-long obedience to the law. You were rebellious to your parents in your childhood, and wayward in your youth, and in your early adulthood, you were filled with lust, and all kinds of evil led you astray from God. The hope of salvation by works is only a black and miserable despair. The only way of salvation by works is by keeping the law in its entirely from your birth till death.
The Law says, “Do and live!” but the Gospel says, “Believe and live.” Under the law, it is “Do and thou shalt live; if you leave ANYTHING undone, you must die.” The Gospel says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and whosoever trusts in Christ alone shall never perish, but have everlasting life.” Simply place your trust in Christ alone and your sins are freely forgiven immediately, and you are saved forever. This simple believing, or trusting in Christ, is the essence of the Gospel. If you break the law, you are truly condemned and lost; but you can be equally sure, that by not believing on Christ you are condemned already. No breaker of law can go unpunished, and no rejecter of Christ can be saved.
There are no “ifs”, “ands”, or “buts”, in the Gospel, it is clearly “Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Whosoever believeth in Christ hath everlasting life.” The Gospel of God is so very simple, it is as plain as it gets, its easy as the ABCs of your childhood. You don’t have to become religious, educated, or be trained. No, you must confess yourself to a ‘real’ self-condemned sinner; trust in the sinner’s Savior, and you are saved completely, freely, immediately, and forever. Religion and its cults all kick at this truth. They hate it because they refuse to give God all the glory for saving them. Salvation lies only in reliance upon the work of Jesus that He finished for you. Do not try to weave your own robe of righteousness or dig up your own gold. Christ offers you His garment and gold freely. Christ gives it to you, because you cannot deserve it or earn it. You must take it freely and be rich forever, or try to do your best, endure to the end, and then perish forever in your own self-righteous and worthless rags.
Christ Jesus came from Heaven down to earth to save you from your sins. The Lord Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh, came down to earth and left the glories of Heaven. He was born of a virgin in a stable. He descended into a carpenter’s shop, and even lower than that, He was despised and rejected of men His entire life. He was the Lord of heaven and earth, yet they called Him Beelzebub, a bastard, a drunkard and winebibber. He went even lower still when He went to Gethsemane and prayed Himself into a bloody sweat, and then to Pilate’s hall, where they falsely accused Him, and then to the awful Cross where He became Sin and bore the wrath of God, they nailed Him there in His nakedness, He hung there in agony and shame, they mocked and jeered at Him, He died in a fever and in thirst, till He finally cried out, “It is finished!” He descended lower into the grave for three days, where He dwelt among the dead. He descended into the lower parts of the earth.
The saving work is done, done by Christ alone. Look to Him and salvation is yours freely. Your salvation rests completely in Jesus, so rest in Jesus. Throw your soul upon Him now, just like a baby throw into upon its mother’s breast. Have done with every other confidence. Be nothing, do nothing, only Trust Christ’s Precious Blood to save your sinful soul.
