The Word Podcast

 

The word saved means saved.

 

If a ship sinks a thousand miles from land there is no way that the people can swim to shore.  They cannot make it to safety alone.  But there is a ship nearby that comes to their rescue and picks them up out of the water.  But we do not feel that it has saved the passengers if they are drowned before they arrive home safely. 

 

We only consider them saved if the boat actually finishes bringing them to land.  It is the same way with salvation.  We are adrift on a sea of sin with no way to make it to safety on our own.  Christ comes and picks us up.  But it would not be salvation if He later on drops us back in the sea to perish.  For Him to save us, He must take us all the way.

 

Phi 1:6  Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform [it] until the day of Jesus Christ:

 

You can be assured that when Christ picks you up and saves you that He will take you all the way to heaven.  He will never drop you.  Saved means Saved.  You cannot loose your salvation.

 

He has stood before the world, proclaiming something which he called the gospel.  He has been a noted preacher; the multitude have been hanging on his lips; they have listened to his words; before his eloquence a nation stood amazed, and thousands trembled at his voice.  But his preaching is over; the time when he can mount the pulpit is gone; another standing-place awaits him, another congregation, and he must hear another and a better preacher than himself.  There he lies.  He has been unfaithful to his charge.  He preached philosophy to charm his people, instead of preaching truth and aiming at their hearts.  And, as he pants upon his bed, that worst and most accursed of men – for surely none can be worse than he – there come up one, a soul from the pit, and looking him in the face, says, “I came to thee once, trembling on account of sin; I asked thee the road to heaven, and thou didst say, ‘Do such and such good works, ‘ and I did them, and am damned.  Thou dist tell me an untruth; thou didst not declare plainly the word of God.”

 

He vanishes only to be followed by another; he has been an irreligious character, and as he see the minister upon his deathbed, he says, “Ah! And art thou here?  Once I strolled into thy house of prayer, but thou hadst such a sermon that I could not understand.  I listened; I wanted to hear something from thy lips, some truth that might burn my soul and make me repent; but I knew not what thou sadist; and here I am.”  The ghost stamps his foot, and the man quivers like an aspen leaf, because he knows it is all true.  Then the whole congregation arise before him as he lies upon his bed; he looks upon the motley group; he beholds the snowy heads of the old, and the glittering eyes of the young; and lying there upon his pillow, he pictures all the sins of his past life, and he hears it said, “Go thou! Unfaithful to thy charge; thou didst not divest thyself of the love of pomp and dignity; thou didst not speak ‘As though thou ne’er might’st speak again, A dying man to dying men.’

 

Oh! It may be something for that minister to leave his charge, somewhat for him to die; but worst of all, the sting of death will be his sin: to hear his parish come howling after him to hell; to see his congregation following behind him in one mingled herd, he having led them astray, having been a false prophet instead of a true one, speaking peace, peace, where there was no peace, deluding them with lies, charming them with music, when he ought rather to have told them in rough and rugged accents the Word of God.  Verily, it is true, it is true! The sting of death to such a man shall be his great, his enormous, his heinous sin of having deluded others.

 

 From thoughts on the Last Battle – sermon by Charles Spurgeon

The least promising lad in a lady's class was a raggedly dressed boy named Bob.  The superintendent secured a suit of new clothes for him.  After three Sundays, Bob was missing.  The teacher visited him and discovered that his new clothes were torn and dirty.  The superintendent gave him a second new suit, and Bob returned to Sunday school.  After attending twice, his place was empty again.  Once more the teacher learned that the second suit had gone the same way as the first.  Utterly discouraged, she told the superintendent that she must give him up.  Please do not do that, urged the superintendent.  I'll give him a third suit if he will promise to attend regularly.  Bob did promise, and he did attend regularly.  He became an earnest Christian, joined the church, was a teacher and studied for the ministry.  He became Dr. Robert Morrison, honored missionary to China, who translated the Bible into the Chinese language and opened the gate to teeming millions in that country.

One time my wife’s right side of her face swelled up.  The doctors had no idea of why.  They did a cat scan and did not see anything wrong with her face, but they did see a small lump in her thyroid.  So they scheduled an ultrasound and a nuclear thyroid scan.  By the time that they got to these tests her face swelling went totally away and never came back.  The thyroid tests showed that she had a tumor on the surface of her thyroid that was 1.5cm.  They scheduled surgery for 5 weeks later, saying that it will be a small incision and that they will just scoop it off the top of the thyroid.  When they operated they found that the tumor had grown to 2.5cm, and that it had grown into the middle of the thyroid.  The doctor then had to make a much bigger incision and remove that lobe of the thyroid.  He was amazed at how fast it was growing.  It turned out to be what is called a complex type of tumor.  It has both hard and liquid sections in it.  The doctor said that 70 percent of the time when they take this type of tumor out that it is cancer.  In Tina’s case it was not cancer.  But the rapid growth rate of this tumor makes you wonder what would have happened if her face had not mysteriously swollen up.  I like to think that it was God’s way of making sure that the tumor was detected in time.  

 

When God sends something unpleasant your way, we need to just have faith.  We need to remember that God is all knowing as well as a loving father.  We need to remember that God knows what He is doing.  He has a reason and we do not have to understand why. 

We are to have faith and trust it to our Savior.

 

There was a man in Chicago who twice determined to give his heart to God but never had the courage to acknowledge Christ before his ungodly companions.  When recovering from a long sickness, he still refused to come out boldly on the side of Christ, saying, “Not yet; I have got a fresh lease on life.  I can’t be a Christian in Chicago.  I am going to take a farm in Michigan; then I will profess Christ.”

 

I asked him, “How dare you take that risk?”  He said, “I will risk it; don’t your trouble yourself any more about my soul, Mr. Moody.  I have made up my mind.”

I have never left a man with a sadder heart in my life.  The very next week he was stricken down with the same disease.  His wife sent for me and said, “He doesn’t want to see you, but I can’t bear that he should die in such an awful state of mind.  He says, “My damnation is sealed and I shall be in Hell in a week.”

I tried to talk and pray with him but it was no use.  He said his heart was as hard as a stone. “Pray for my wife and my children but don’t waste your time praying for me.”

 

His last words were, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and I am not saved”; and then the angels bore him away to judgment. – D.L. Moody

 

Mr. Moody witnessed to him until the end, but he waited too long and went to eternity without Jesus.

 

What about you?  Are you putting off getting born again? 

Don't wait any longer!  Don't take the chance that your heart will become hard.

Call upon Jesus right now, tell Him that you are a sinner, and ask Him to save you, and you have His promise that He will.

 

Try to visualize this scene. 

 

A man leaves home jogging.

He jogs and then turns left

Jogs some more and then turns left

Jogs some more and then turns left and heads back home.

When he gets there, there are two masked men waiting for him.

 

Who are the men and why is the man jogging?  Have you visualized the scene?

 

I dare say that most of you are thinking the masked men are robbers but they are not robbers. 

The human mind likes to jump to conclusions and without thinking much about it.

 

So what is really happening in our scene? And who are the masked men? 

The man is a baseball player who hit a home run.  He leaves home jogging when he gets to first he turns left and goes to 2^nd base turns left and jogs to third, turns left again and jogs home where the two masked men (the catcher and the umpire) are waiting for him.

 

Don’t be too sure of first impressions.

 

One spring, before the Civil War, a boy in search of work came to Farmer Taylor’s prosperous Ohio farm.  The farmer knew nothing much about the boy except that his name was Jim, but he gave him a job.  Jim spent the summer cutting stove wood, bringing in the cows and making himself generally useful.  He ate in the kitchen and slept in the haymow.  Before the summer was over, Jim had fallen in love with Taylor’s daughter.  When the farmer refused to let him marry her – telling him bluntly that he had no money, no name and very poor prospects – Jim put his belongings in his old carpetbag and disappeared.

 

Thirty-five years passed before Taylor one day pulled down his barn to make way for a new one.  On one of the rafters above the haymow, he discovered that Jim had carved his full name – James A. Garfield.  He was at that time President of the USA. 

 

 

 

God had prepared the answer before he had asked

 

A man was trying to prepare himself for Christian service and his funds ran out.  It looked liked he would have to leave school.  He then earnestly asked the Lord to come to his aid if it was His will for him to go on with college.  The next day he got a letter containing a check that was large enough to take care of his needs.  He was happy that his prayer had been answered.

 

But Satan whispered to him to look at the date of the letter and he would see that it was not an answer to his prayer because it had been written before he had prayed.  This dampened his joy until he remembered that the Lord had said, “Before they call, I will answer.”  Then he realized that God had known his need and had prepared the answer even before he had called upon Him.