A Gospel Address, delivered at the Victoria Hall, Exeter,
by Heyman Wreford.
“As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one. There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they arc together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulcher; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips. Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.
Their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and misery are in their ways. And the way of peace have they not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes. Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it said to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.” —Rom. 3:10-19.
There is no fear of God before their eyes. It is a fearfully solemn reality, and as inconceivable as it is solemn, that men have “no fear of God before their eyes.” Within the limits of his human life man fears a thousand things, but the fear of God never troubles him. He will fear the darkness of the night, and fly from peril in the day, but the overwhelming thought of God never troubles him at all. In his anger he will curse his God, and blaspheme the Saviour, and call on God to damn him. He will make a mock of the most sacred mysteries of salvation, and challenge the very devils in his unbelief.
I well remember, when a lad, teaching in a Sunday School. Living near the school was an infidel. One day he sent for me to come and see him. I went to his house, and he began complaining of the noise the children made when coming out of school. He then began to blaspheme God and the Lord Jesus, and before his children, said the most awful things about Christ that I ever heard. I could not tell you what he said about the blessed Saviour. I was so horrified that I looked him in the face and said, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself to speak in this manner before your children.” I then spoke of what Christ was to me. He became almost livid with rage, and seizing a knife that was on the table, threatened to kill me if I did not leave the room. His hatred of the Lord was blazing from his eyes. I left him with words of warning on my lips, which I emphasized in a letter I wrote to him next day. I never saw him again, but I shall never forget the awful passion that possessed him when I spoke of Christ.
Three young men were seated together the last night of the year. Two were saved and one was not. The two Christians were pleading with their companion to come to Christ. He listened impatiently for awhile, and then said, “I don’t want to be saved; and if there is a hell I am willing to go to it.” There was silence for a while, and then one of his companions took his watch from his pocket and said, “Do you decide here, in the presence of God, on this last night of December at fifteen minutes past eleven, to reject Christ as your Saviour, and to choose hell as your eternal portion?” He answered, “I do.”
Ah! Christ of Calvary! Thou avast made sin for the sinner there. Let these sinners before Thee realize that Thou art “the Lamb of God that bearest away the sin of the world.” Thou didst keep God’s holy law Thyself, and Thou hast died for those who could not keep it. Bear with these unbelievers a little longer, gracious Saviour; perchance tight the fear of God will come upon them, and they will come to Thee for salvation. And Thou wilt not cast them out; Thou wilt receive them even now.
God destroys the negative when we believe in Christ.
As long as the photographer has the negative, so long can he reproduce the photographs. When the negative is destroyed there is an end to it.
Now, as long as you are a sinner in your sins, so long are those sins reproduced day by day in your godless life. And if you die in your sins and stand before the Great White Throne, you will find that divine photography has kept a record of all your sins in the books that will be opened there. The faithfulness of God’s portraiture of you that we have been looking at this evening will be manifest then. You will have to admit what perchance you will deny now, that the likeness of the third of Romans is a good one of you. But if you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and accept Him as your Saviour, then it becomes true of you what the apostle says in Rom. 6:5, 6, 7, “For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin.”
We are, as believers, identified with Christ in the likeness of His death, and we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection. And then the knowledge comes to us that our old man is crucified with Him, so that the whole body of sin should be destroyed.
We are no longer identified with the old world that crucified cur Lord, but through faith in His death we are dead with Christ and have Him for our life, Who died for us; we now belong to the sphere where He lives in resurrection life. He has conquered death for us, and because of this we are sure of resurrection. We are crucified with Christ, nevertheless we live: yet not we, but Christ liveth in us; and the life which we now live in the flesh, we live by the faith of the Son of God, Who loved us and gave Himself for us.
I have no time to enter into the fullness of this great theme, but it is a fact that I have a part in His death, and in His resurrection.
Would to God that all my hearers could enter into this, that “he that is dead is justified from sin.” And sin can no longer be laid to my charge if I am dead with Christ, and have Him for my life.
It is thus that the body of sin is destroyed. “Old things have passed away, and all things have become new.”
Listen to what a well-known saint of God wrote as to this:—
“The ‘I’ that was crucified together with Christ, and died together with Him, is what I was — a creature made for its Creator’s glory and praise, but in its lapsed condition living from itself, and by its own power, and to itself — this I reckon dead; the I, yet not I, is myself as part of the new creation...
“But Rom. 6 goes further, because it not only makes an appeal to our heart’s affections, but shows God’s thoughts and counsels, and His view of Christ’s death; that He, occupied with Christ’s death, counts me dead who believe in Him; and that I am bound to count or reckon myself so, too. Now, this meets the difficulties of the greatest and of the least of us. We that believe have been brought out of that system in which self is looked at as everything, into another, in which Christ is looked at by God, and we too, in Him, the alive One. He only is the fountain, stream, end of all God’s good pleasure, but we get our place both in Him before God, and with God in His thoughts about Him: for the Spirit is in us.”
It takes some a long time to realize these things. A poor woman had lived without Christ for seventy-eight years. She was saved, and the magnitude of the love that had saved her over helmed her. “Just think of it,” she would say. “I lived seventy-eight years in the dark, and now I’m saved, and Jesus has done it all.” And then in her simple way she illustrated her salvation on the cottage table. She began at one end of the table, and drew a line with her finger to within half-an-inch of the edge on the other side; then she stopped and said, “I went that far in my sins, nearly over, but there I trusted Jesus, and so I am saved by grace.”
Yes, planted together in the likeness of His death.
“Because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him who died for them and rose again.” Planted also in the likeness of His resurrection.
And now my time has gone. What mysteries of eternal love and grace have passed before us! We have seen our portrait as sinners taken by God Himself. And God has given us our portraits as saints in Christ. Let us look at one or two of these portraits as we conclude: — “Ye are complete in Him.” Nothing wanting in that picture. “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” The devil’s negative destroyed, and the heavenly photograph preserved forever.
“And hath made us kings and priests unto His God and Father.” What a change! From the filthy rags of sin, to be arrayed in royal raiment, and to be clothed in priestly beauty, and thus arrayed to stand before a holy God. “Made meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light” —we who once “sat in darkness and the shadow of death.” What a wondrous transforming through the operation of the Holy Spirit in us! Praise and glory to His Name Forever and forever.