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Praise be to His name!
He was rejected by the very persons He came to save. They
cried, “Away with this man”, Luke 23: 18, “We will not that this
man should reign over us”, Luke 19: 14. “Crucify him”, they
said. ‘We want Barabbas; we want a thief and a robber’, and
they surely got him. The moral conditions that mark the world
today you can trace, from one standpoint, to the choice men
made at the cross. They asked for one who was a thief, a
robber, a murderer (Luke 23: 18–25; John 18: 40). Well, Paul
adds, “sinners, of whom I am the first”. I would ask every one
here, Have you a sense before God of your sinnership? It is a
good point to begin with, to come to it that “All have sinned,
and come short of the glory of God”, Romans 3: 23. But God
has provided an answer in Christ and you are responsible as
to that, because God “now enjoins men that they shall all
everywhere repent”, Acts 17: 30. He has settled for Himself,
and eternally for His glory, the whole question of sin and sins.
God has judged in the Person of Christ the whole matter of sin
in the flesh, condemned it in none other than His own beloved
Son.
So you are responsible tonight to repent “Repentance towards
God, and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20: 21) is
your only hope. If you do not repent you are doomed.
Your destiny is nothing less than hell. Your only hope is the
precious blood of Jesus. Would that men would claim it for
themselves tonight and put their trust in His precious blood.
“We being still sinners, Christ has died for us”. We were
unlovable, with nothing in us attractive to God, but He
“commends his love to us”. Oh the love of God! There is
nothing finer in the universe. Soon the whole
universe will be pervaded by the love of God in all its fulness,
but in the meantime He commends His love to us. Think of
God commending His love to us, “in that, we being still
sinners, Christ has died for us”. That includes you, that