To Wait for Christ — to Work for Christ.
The horrible sins of advanced civilization are worse than any sinning the world has ever known it seems as if much of the foulness of all the centuries had been damned up, and the loathsome waters had been let loose upon the world.
You read in our June “Message” the opinions of uninspired men as to the conditions of humanity today, and you read what the Holy Scriptures said of what the world must expect in the last days of this Dispensation, that is the days in which we are living. Thank God for every “born again” Christian on earth today. Thank God for the lights for Christ set on the truth of life that cannot be hid. Thank God for the voices that awed all the Babel sounds of a godless world, proclaim the Truth as it is in Jesus. Thank God that amid these devil-days of inconceivable iniquity, the standard of the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world,” is floating wide and free.
Thank God that although Christendom is divided into tens of thousands of creeds and heresies with no cohesion and little faith — the forlorn hope of Christendom are those who are waiting for the Son of God to come from heaven, to take the Christians home to glory and who can say from their redeemed hearts, “We believe and are sure, that Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” If a man cannot say that, he is a traitor to the cause of Christ. He has no divine credentials to speak or work for Jesus Christ in the world at all. Christ’s soldiers must be those who “take up their cross and follow Him.” Who from the heights, of resurrection can look back on the world from which they had been delivered by His grace, and onward to the glory where the risen and the ascended Jesus sits on the right hand of God.
The duty of Christians in these “last days” is to wait and work for Jesus Christ on earth until He comes again. The Lord Himself said when on earth, “I must work while it is called today, the night cometh when no one can work.” He worked for God today and prayed beneath the stars by night — He never failed or faltered in the purpose of His life until He bowed His head upon the cross, and surrendered His life to God; until with thorn-scarred brow, and bleeding hands and feet, and riven side, He could say, “It is finished.”
He alone could say, “the perfect Servant” — “I have glorified Thee on the earth — I have finished the work Thou gavest me to do.” What shall we be able to say in life’s last hours. Paul said, “I have finished my course.” Mr. William Kelly said to me, as I sat by his bedside four days before he passed away: “I have done my work for Christ; I want to go. Others will be strengthened to do their work, but mine is done.”
With the failure of his bodily powers he was longing to go. “I want to go.” The tired hands are lifted up to heaven and to God. The eyes, growing dim to earthly sights and sounds, have a clearer vision now for that which is beyond. “I want to go.” The desert sands are trodden, and from his Pisgah heights he beholds the Promised Land.
With the weariness of earth and time weighing heavily upon him, he seeks “the rest that remains to the people of God.”
May we wait, and may we work for Christ.