RESURRECTION
I feel impressed, dear friends, to speak about resurrection. If you have followed the verses which I have read, you will see that resurrection is a great essential matter. There were those in Corinth who were saying that there was no such thing as resurrection of the dead, and the apostle shows that if that is true, then Christ is not raised. If Christ is raised, if one Man has been raised up from among the dead, that is sufficient to show that there is such a thing as resurrection. If Christ is not raised, then everything is hopeless. It is as well to face these things. One has heard of a man who was a professed infidel all his lifetime, who, when he was on his death-bed, began to show signs of fear, and his companions who were like-minded with himself said, ‘You are not going to show the white feather now, surely?’, and he said, ‘It is not death that I fear; what I fear is resurrection’. And well he might. The believer in Jesus, of course, finds the greatest comfort in the light of resurrection, in the faith of resurrection, the hope of resurrection, but more than hope, the certainty of it. The believer in Jesus finds the greatest possible comfort in resurrection, and it becomes a power in his soul by which he is victorious as going through this world. He can be true to Christ, and it does not matter what happens. If, because he is true to Christ, he is martyred, what does it matter seeing there is going to be a resurrection?
You see how the light of resurrection in your soul makes you superior to everything here. On the other hand, if there is no resurrection, then, as the apostle says (v 19), “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are the most miserable of all men”. Indeed, if there is no such thing as resurrection, then we might as well adopt the language which certain wicked people adopted as we find in Isaiah 22: 13, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”. That is the language of wicked people who will not accept the truth that there is a resurrection. But there is a resurrection. We read in the 5th chapter of John’s gospel that the Lord Himself says (v 22) that God has given all judgment into His hands, “because he is Son of man” (v 27), and that “an hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs shall hear his voice” (v 28)—and what then? Will some say, ‘I am going to turn a deaf ear to that voice’? No, they will not. Not one will be able to say that. “All who are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall go forth; those that have practised good, to resurrection of life, and those that have done evil, to resurrection of judgment”, vv 28, 29.
You see, resurrection is a certainty, and applies to all, and it is discriminating. There will be a resurrection of those who are described in Scripture as having practised good, and there will be another resurrection, a thousand years later, of those who have done evil. The one will be a resurrection unto life, the other will be a resurrection unto judgment. But, you will say, What does it mean, “those that have practised good”? I thought the Scriptures say, “there is not one that practises goodness, there is not so much as one”, Rom 3: 12. Scripture does say that, and it means what it says. That is God’s judgment as to man, that “there is not one that practises goodness, there is not so much as one”. But then you can begin to practise good by believing the glad tidings. “This is the work of God” the Lord says, “that ye believe on him whom he has sent”, John 6: 29. You begin to do good by repentance towards God. That is the first thing that a person can do that is acceptable in the sight of God—to repent toward God, and to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is announced in the glad tidings as the One who gave Himself a ransom for all, and is thus announced as the Saviour of mankind.
And so the apostle is anxious that the Corinthian believers to whom he wrote should be established in the good of the gospel. And although those to whom he wrote took the ground of being true believers in the Lord Jesus, and doubtless the great majority of them were, at the same time, he goes over the ground of the gospel and he tells them that it was the same gospel that he himself had received. A remarkable gospel he had received. In Acts 26 we have an account of his appearance before king Agrippa, which actually occurred later than the time when he wrote this epistle, and he told the king what his experience had been on the first occasion when he had to do personally with the Lord Jesus. I wonder if there is someone here who has never had to do personally with the Lord Jesus? There are many here who have had to do with the Lord Jesus personally many a time, and expect to have to do personally with Him many another time, and to spend eternity with Him, but there may be someone here who has never yet had to do personally with the Lord Jesus. If so, I commend to you to read the 26th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, because you will find there, in the language of the chief of sinners, his experience of the first time he had had to do with the Lord Jesus personally. Up to that time he had thought that Jesus was just the name of a certain religious leader who had been crucified in Jerusalem some time before. And in spite of that fact, there were certain ones who were disciples of Jesus who were announcing that God had raised Him from among the dead.
And Saul, the chief of sinners, determined if he could, by might and main, to blot out the testimony to this Man, Jesus; and would threaten and kill those who dared to assert that God had raised Him from among the dead. And he did it very thoroughly. He breathed out, it says, “threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord” (Acts 9: 1), and he was on his way to Damascus, intending to lay hold of certain Christians there who maintained that God had raised Jesus from among the dead, when suddenly a light from heaven shone round about him, and he fell to the earth. The power of the light was such that he fell to the earth, and he heard a voice, saying to him, “Saul, Saul”—calling him by name, the One who was calling wanted to have personal dealings with him—“Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Acts 26: 14. Saul said, “Who art thou, Lord?” He was compelled to say ‘Lord’; there was something about the power of that light, and something about the power of that word that compelled him to say ‘Lord’, although he did not know who it was that he was addressing as Lord. He said, “Who art thou, Lord?” and to his astonishment, the answer came, “I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest”, v 15. What a revolution must have gone over in the soul of that man! “I am Jesus”—the bearer of the Name that he was bent on blotting out if he possibly could was there speaking to him from heaven in power that was undeniable, and in grace that was most attractive, and He said, “I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest: but rise up and stand on thy feet”—see how the Lord Jesus took charge at once; He could issue His commands at once—there was a rebel on his way trying to blot out the name of Jesus, and the Lord Jesus appears in grace to him, and tells him to stand on his feet, as though to say, ‘I am not going to judge you; I am not going to condemn you; I have died in order to save you, and I am in heaven in order that you might acknowledge my Lordship and move in an entirely new way in this world now, as under the authority of the Lord Jesus’. Would you like to be in that position? Thank God, there are many here who are; very many here who have acknowledged the Lord Jesus as their Saviour and their Lord, and they would not give it up for a thousand worlds, or a thousand millions of pounds, they would not give it up for anything; it is their life, and their joy, and it carries with it certainty of eternal bliss.
And on the other hand, if you have not Christ, what have you? Life for a few years at most, perhaps thirty years, perhaps forty, who can say? (I venture to say it will be very much less than that, but still, put it at that, thirty or forty years), years in which you begin to find yourself getting older, find yourself with less capacity, as people say, to enjoy life; and your life begins to disappear from you, those whom you love go in death, and so on, and then the moment comes, and you die. And what then? What is in front of you? Resurrection. That is what is in front of you, resurrection. Do you know what death is to the person who dies without Christ? and what resurrection is to such an one? To the person who dies without Christ, death is his arrest, he is arrested; and resurrection is, he is brought before the Judge. That is the position, arrest, and then, brought before the Judge. That is the position, that is what death and resurrection are to the person who dies without Christ. As regards the believer in Jesus, death is that he falls asleep through Jesus, the Lord Jesus puts him gently to sleep; He takes his spirit to be with Him, to be with Him for ever, and resurrection means that he is clothed with a body of glory like Christ, capable of filling now any position that God wishes him to fill, not in weakness, but in power and glory. Well, now, which is the better?—the believer in Jesus, or the one who puts these things off for some other time? We read of a Roman governor, who had to do with Paul, and he said, “Go for the present, and when I get an opportunity I will send for thee”, Acts 24: 25. He was a procrastinator, and we never hear of his coming into blessing. Beware, then, of procrastination, of putting things off, when Scripture says that “now is the well-accepted time, behold now the day of salvation”, 2 Cor 6: 2. And so the apostle Paul, in writing to the Corinthians, starts with what one might call ‘bedrock’. He says, this is the gospel that I myself received, and that I preached to you, and which you profess to have believed, and if you are real you are saved by it. He says, this is the gospel, “that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures”, chap 15: 3. You can see how he raises the question of sins at once. It is a question that must be raised. On one occasion, if you remember, when the Lord Jesus was here, four friends of a palsied man brought him to Jesus. They evidently desired that the Lord would heal him of his palsy, and they were so concerned about their friend and so in earnest that when they found they could not reach Jesus because of the crowd, they took him, bed and all, on to the top of the house, and dug open the roof, and let him down in the presence of all before Jesus. Now what did the Lord say to that man? He said, “Man, thy sins are forgiven thee”, Luke 5: 20. You say, ‘What an extraordinary thing!’ They had not said a word about his sins. I doubt very much whether they had even thought of them. What they were concerned about was that he should be healed of his palsy, and the Lord, as it were, says, there is something much more important than being healed in your body, much more important. There is the question of your sins. Have you faced that? That is what the Lord virtually said. He said, “Man, thy sins are forgiven thee”. The man might well have said, ‘I’ve never thought about my sins; I am not troubled about them. It is not what I have in mind—I want to be healed of my palsy’. The Lord says, “your sins”. That is the first thing to be met, as though other things are relatively of minor importance, indeed of no importance, until this matter of your sins is settled, because Scripture says that every one of us must give an account of himself to God. Every one of us. How emphatic that is! Indeed, so earnest God is that you should face it, and that every one should face it, that He has gone the length of taking an oath by Himself, a remarkable thing for God to do. If a man takes an oath in the law courts, he takes an oath by God, but God has no one greater than Himself by whom He can swear, but yet He will take an oath. He will come down to our level; He knows how unbelieving we tend to be, and so He will even come down to our level and take an oath to assure us that He is speaking in all sobriety and means what He says, and He says, “I live, saith the Lord, that to me shall bow every knee, and every tongue confess to God”, Rom 14: 11. Now God has said that “every tongue”—your tongue—has got to confess to God. What have you to confess? Your sins. That is what you have to confess. You may do it now and receive forgiveness of sins in the Name of the One who died for our sins, but sooner or later, the matter has to be faced.
And so Paul comes down to what I might say is essentially fundamental. He says this is the gospel, “that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures”, v 3. If that is so, why not have the matter settled at once? It will not avail to those who refuse it. It will not avail to those who reject it, or even ignore it, who let their opportunities pass, through carelessness. The question is, you must appropriate it now, have to do with God now, have to do with Jesus now. “Jehovah is nigh unto all that call upon him”, it says in Psalm 145: 18, “unto all that call upon him in truth”, and it says, “the same Lord of all is rich towards all that call upon him” (Rom 10: 12)—think of that, rich—ready to distribute without a second thought, without hesitation, without imposing conditions, ready to distribute blessing, forgiveness of sins, and the gift of the Holy Spirit too, to every one who comes to Him in truth. Why not appropriate it then?
And so the scripture says that “Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures”. The Scriptures were full of the idea. Under the old economy, when God confined His relations very much to His people the Jews, He prescribed a way by which people could draw near to Him, and have to do with Him, and if a person had sinned, there was a way by which he could draw near to God. He always had to bring an offering, and it was an animal he had to bring, an animal that had to be slain, and the blood had to be shed, and the person bringing it had to lay his hand on the head of the offering—that is to say he had to identify himself before God with that offering which he brought, his action meaning that he said to God, ‘Unless this animal dies instead of me then I must die, one or the other’. Now the animal was just a foreshadowing of Jesus. Jesus is spoken of in the scripture as “a lamb without blemish and without spot … foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world”, 1 Pet 1: 19. Think of God, before the foundation of the world, looking forward and thinking of you, and thinking of me, and thinking of our need of someone to bear our sins for us, so that we should not come into eternal perdition, but should be saved! And Jesus was in His mind, and in due time Jesus came—the glorious Son of God He is—and He died for our sins, according to the Scriptures. Have you appropriated it? If not, why not? There are scores around you who have, who can testify to you the reality and power of these things of which we are speaking; why not you, that is the whole point, why not you? And so “Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures”. There was no other way, the full price must be paid. You remember it says under the Mosaic law that the firstborn of an ass had to be ransomed, with a lamb, and if it was not ransomed, its neck had to be broken. Why should such a scripture as that be brought in? You say ‘What an extraordinary thing—the firstling of an ass must be ransomed with a lamb, and if it is not ransomed its neck should be broken’. Well, I will tell you why that is brought in. God does not bring in His sayings or His requirements in any haphazard way. He does not do anything haphazardly in the creation. If He created an ass, He had in mind to present something for our understanding in the ass. All His creatures have a purpose in mind, even an ant—have you ever thought of it? How thoughtless we are as we go about the world—and yet even an ant has a purpose. You will find in the Scripture that if you have been careless about these matters, and not yet had the question of your sins settled, God would say to you, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard”, Prov 6: 6. “Go to the ant”. He would say, ‘I have got something for you in the ant for you to consider’. What is the feature that marks an ant? She “provideth her bread in the summer”; that is to say, she is wise enough to look ahead, and while things are favourable, she seizes the opportunity to provide for a day that is coming when things are not favourable. And that is exactly what you are called upon to do in the glad tidings. If you have not been as wise as an ant, then let your pride go down, and be as wise as an ant, and embrace the present favourable opportunity of putting yourself right with God for all eternity.
Well, now, as I was saying, God had a purpose in creating an ass. You know how stubborn an ass is, and yet on the other hand we find in Scripture that an ass was used for the most exalted purposes—an ass was used to carry the King of kings into Jerusalem. Think of that, to carry the King of kings into Jerusalem! The Lord Jesus sat upon an ass, and rode into Jerusalem, the city of the great King. So, on the one hand, an ass is presented in Scripture according to his known features—as a very obstinate, stubborn, self-willed animal; on the other hand, an animal that can be laid hold of and brought under control and used for the most exalted purposes. And in that way he is intended to be a picture of you and me. We all of us are stubborn by nature; we all of us are self-willed by nature, and there the Scripture says that an ass must be ransomed with a lamb, and if it is not ransomed, its neck is to be broken. Think of that! Scripture says, “He that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and without remedy”, Prov 29: 1. You see, that is the application of the scripture to the glad tidings, that you are invited to see that you, as typified in the ass, marked by strong self-will, as I have been, appropriate the lamb, the Lamb of God, the One who has given Himself a ransom for all—and if you do that, then the Lord will take you on, and use you for the most honourable purposes. He will use you to carry His Name in testimony in this world, and there is nothing grander or more honourable than to carry the Name of the Lord Jesus in testimony in this world until He comes. And that is what God has in mind in every one who is brought to the Saviour. But, on the other hand, if “being often reproved”, you harden your neck, you “shall suddenly be destroyed, and without remedy”. For that is what Scripture says. If the ass was not ransomed with a lamb, then its neck had to be broken.
And so this matter of Christ dying for our sins lies at the root of everything. He “died for our sins, according to the scriptures; and ... he was buried”. Why was He buried? I will tell you why. Burial was part of the sentence of sin pronounced upon man. When man sinned God said that he should die, and that he should return to the earth from which he was taken. He said, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, until thou return to the ground: for out of it wast thou taken. For dust thou art; and unto dust shalt thou return”, Gen 3: 19. Return to the ground from which he was taken—that pointed to burial. People nowadays go in for cremation. It is not of God. Some people do it for what they call hygienic purposes. Other people do it because they are foolish enough to think that if they have their bodies cremated, they can escape the resurrection. They think that they will outwit God, and that it will be impossible for Him to raise just dust, ashes; and some even go further than that, and have the ashes scattered over the sea and that kind of thing. What folly it is! If you read the eighth chapter of Proverbs, you find wisdom speaking, that she was there before God made “the beginning of the dust of the world” (v 26) and the word for dust there is really ‘particles’. How small is a grain of dust! Before God began to make the beginning of the dust of the earth—particles. If God could create particles and assemble them and make them into the earth, do you think He cannot assemble the ashes of a person who has been cremated? My friends, it is as well to face these things. It is utter folly, and behind all these ideas lies the work of the devil in order to turn people away from receiving the gospel. And so, “Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures; and ... was buried”. When a person dies, you say, that is the end of that person, and when he is buried he is put out of sight. As long as you have got the body in the house you have got the person in some sense; you can go and look at him, although he cannot respond to you, but when he is buried, then he is put out of sight. And when Jesus took our place on the cross, the One who knew no sin, who did no sin, who was holy and spotless in the sight of God, He was there as taking man’s place, taking the place of every one who would believe on Him, indeed the value of His work is great enough to embrace the whole world, if only all will believe in Jesus. When He died, it was, before God, the death of all those who trust in Him, and when He was buried, it was, before God, the putting out of God’s sight for ever of all that they had been as sinful, all that they were as objectionable in His sight, all gone for ever in burial. You can appropriate the death of Christ for yourself, you can appropriate the burial of Jesus for yourself, and then you see that on the third day, He was raised from among the dead. That is, God has raised up Jesus, and set Him at His own right hand in heaven. All your guilt, if you are a believer in Jesus, has been met by the sacrifice of Christ, and His precious death. All that you are as sinful in your very nature and being is ended before God in that death and burial. And now there is a glorious Man in the presence of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, and every believer in Jesus is given life in Him. God will seal your faith with the gift of the Holy Spirit, and that means that you are set up for ever before God in the life of Christ, and are taken into all the favour in which Jesus Himself stands.
Now look for a moment at this matter of sins. Christ died for them. Well, that is settled. You may say, ‘How can I be sure that the matter is settled?’ ‘How can I be sure that God is really satisfied, and that He will never raise another question against the believer in Jesus?’ I will tell you how you can be sure. You can be sure this way, that the very One who bore your sins in His body on the cross, and died for you, and was buried for you, that very One God has raised from the dead, and has set Him in the highest place in glory in heaven. Would He have done that if He were not satisfied? It is inconceivable. Jesus “has been raised for our justification”, it says; Rom 4: 25. The believer in Jesus can be absolutely sure that God is absolutely satisfied, that not a single question will be raised against the believer in Jesus, but rather on the contrary, that God would set him up before Him in favour, in Christ, as Scripture says, “taken ... into favour in the Beloved” (Eph 1: 6), and another scripture says, “As he is, we also are in this world”, 1 John 4: 17. Well now, in order to make abundantly clear that Jesus really was raised from among the dead, and that therefore resurrection is a great reality, the apostle goes on to tell us that the Lord Jesus, after He was raised, “appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the most remain until now, but some also have fallen asleep”, v 5, 6. That is the way Scripture speaks of the death of a Christian—“fallen asleep”. You do not speak like that of the death of an unbeliever. People say, ‘pass on’ and that kind of thing; they use these expressions. They are not the expressions to be used for Christians. You do not want to say, ‘pass away’ for a Christian. You want to say, ‘fallen asleep’, or ‘departed to be with Christ’, or ‘gone to be with the Lord’. It says, “absent from the body, and present with the Lord”, 2 Cor 5: 8. You want to clothe the people of God with divine thoughts, and so it says here that they fell asleep. Read about the first Christian martyr in the seventh chapter of the Acts—Stephen—it says “he cried with a loud voice” as he was being stoned, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And having said this, he fell asleep”, Acts 7: 60. “Fell asleep”—that is the portion of the believer—nothing is so gentle, nothing is so precious, as the falling asleep of a believer, just put to sleep, the Lord putting in His claim to him or her, taking his or her spirit to be with Himself, and he himself caused to become unconscious of all that is going on here, but caused, I can assure you, to be very conscious of all that is going on in the presence of Christ, for it says, “departure and being with Christ ... is very much better” (Phil 1: 23)—“very much better” than the best experiences you can have as a Christian in your life down here.
Well now, I do not know that I need say very much more. But the apostle as I was saying earlier, argues in an unanswerable way that this question of there being no such thing as resurrection from the dead cuts at the very root of Christianity, and that if there is no such thing, then Christ is not raised, and he says, “if Christ be not raised ... ye are yet in your sins. Then indeed also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished” (vv 17, 18), and “we are found also false witnesses of God” (v 15). But then he says triumphantly, “But now Christ is raised” (v 20), and he knew it well, the Lord Jesus had spoken to him, and Paul had spoken to Jesus, and every believer in this world could say, I suppose, that the Lord Jesus had spoken to him, and he has spoken to Jesus. “Now is Christ raised from among the dead, first-fruits of those fallen asleep”, v 20. See what a difference that makes to a believer! I ask again if there is someone here who is not a believer in Jesus. I do beg of you to turn to the Lord; I cannot do it for you, but I beg of you to do it. You remember that when the Lord Jesus was just about to die, when He was hanging on the cross, there were two men crucified with Him, the one on the right hand, the other on the left, and one of them spoke insultingly to Jesus—think of that—a man with only two or three hours to live, dying there on the cross because of his misdeeds, because he was too bad even for his fellow-men, and speaking insultingly to Jesus, at such a crucial hour as that. The other, on the other hand, rebuked him, and said, “Dost thou too not fear God?” Luke 23: 40. Is there somebody here who does not fear God? “The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of wisdom”, Prov 9: 10. You have not begun to be wise if you do not fear God. “Dost thou too not fear God”, he says, “thou that art under the same judgment? and we indeed justly”—you can see how that man was evangelical, wanting to bring along his companion with him, saying “we indeed justly”, as though he would say, ‘I would like you to take that ground too, that you are a hell-deserving sinner, that you do deserve the judgment of God’. That is the ground which that one man was taking, and he was trying to get his companion to take it too. He says, “we indeed justly, for we receive the just recompense of what we have done; but this man has done nothing amiss”. There is just one Man in the history of the world, of whom it could be said that He has “done nothing amiss”, and that Man, the only One who could possibly give Himself a ransom for all, because to be the ransom, He must be spotless, and sinless, for He could not possibly bear the judgment due to others if He were a sinner Himself. There is just the one Man, Jesus, who has “done nothing amiss”. And there He was on the cross between the two, giving Himself a ransom for all, equally available to the man on His right hand, and the man on His left. And so he says, “this man has done nothing amiss”.
And now he says another thing, he does not say, ‘Lord, remember us’, no, you have got to turn to the Lord for yourself. Your friend just by you may be longing in his or her heart that you would do so, but he or she cannot do it for you. And so the man had tried to bring along his companion as far as he could go, but now he has to leave him to have his own transactions with Jesus, and as for himself, he says, “Remember me, Lord, when thou comest in thy kingdom”, v 42. And the answer was immediate, “Verily I say to thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise”, v 43. Such is the efficacy of the work of Christ, such is the answer that the Lord loves to give to the simplest faith that turns to Him as needing Him. And so you may do the same. And if you are a believer in Jesus, then I say the prospect of resurrection is most glorious. It means that we shall be conformed to the image of Christ. There are many believers in Jesus who are suffering in their bodies, limited in their circumstances, wishing that they could do more for Christ than they are able to do, it may be, conscious of much on that score that calls for longing to be in better conditions. Resurrection means that you will find yourself clothed upon with a body of glory like Christ’s. If you do die, and are buried, your body is sown in weakness, but it will be raised in power; it is sown in corruption, it will be raised in incorruptibility; it is sown in dishonour, it will be raised in glory; it is sown a natural body, it will be raised a spiritual body. What prospects there are before believers in Jesus! Think of the moment that is so near, when “the Lord himself, with an assembling shout, with archangel’s voice and with trump of God, shall descend from heaven; and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we the living who remain, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and thus we shall be always with the Lord”, 1 Thess 4: 16, 17. And it will be in bodies of glory like Christ’s, as the apostle says in this very chapter, v 51. “I tell you a mystery: We shall not all fall asleep, but we shall all be changed, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye”—how long does it take for the twinkling of an eye? Are you ready for it? A twinkling of an eye, and the Lord might come, and take away all His own from this world and leave those who have not believed in Him to die the unbeliever’s death, and to share the unbeliever’s resurrection, to appear before the Judge. May God grant that no one here may come into that.
You are surrounded by believers in Jesus whose hopes are bound up with Christ—and it is a certain hope—and are looking forward with joy to the moment of resurrection when we shall be like Christ and with Him for ever. But God has not brought that moment to pass yet; it rests in His hands, we know not when it will be, but the gospel is being preached tonight in order that every one here who has not yet turned to the Lord might embrace the present favourable opportunity. Turn to Him, yield to Him, He knows all your history, and knows your sins, your guilt and your need; He will answer it all by forgiveness of sins in His name from the blessed God, and the incalculably blessed gift of the Holy Spirit, by which you are given to partake in the life of Christ, have the love of God shed abroad in your heart, become conscious that you are an heir of God and a joint heir with Christ, and much more besides.
Well, I say no more. May the Lord bless the word, and grant that every one here may be found among those who have part in the resurrection of the just.
EALING
31st January 1958
From The Word Proclaimed, 1957-8
This gospel preaching may have been the first occasion on which
Mr Gardiner served after the death of his wife. She was buried on Thursday, 23 January 1958.
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