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JESUS SHALL REIGN, HALLELUJAH
“Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel
to every creature.”
N my travels around the world I have
come more and more to realize that the
world does not possess Christ; the more
I see, the more the sad thought has been
forced upon me that “He came unto
His own, and His own received Him
not.” Os course there is plenty of
' religion in the world, but religion does
I not mean Christianity. For instance,
I
the Mohammedan is a strictly religious man; his
devotion to his religion, his attention to his prayers,
etc., is very striking, and yet he does not accept
Jesus Christ as the Saviour of the world. The
religion of the Jew is just as ‘binding upon him as
ours, and yet he rejects Christ. The Chinaman has
a religion which is deeply rooted, and yet he knows
nothing of Christ. And so we might go on until
we had encompassed every race of mankind, and we
would find each race with its particular religion.
Man’s nature must have a religion, and when he
hasn’t the real religion, he must needs manufacture
one, and oh, when you come to consider it carefully,
how few of the great mass of human souls have the
gospel of Jesus Christ.
THE RELIGION OF GREED.
Even in Christianity there are many creeds, and
in many of those who hold so tenaciously to their
creed, there is very little of Christ. It is just s
reasonable to suppose that there is many a nan
holding to his creed, expecting it to save him, with
out Christ, as that there is many a man who has
religion without Christ. However, I would not make
any war on creeds; at one time I heard a man preach
an hour and fifteen minutes on the folly of having
a creed. My brethren, the creed is as essential to
Christianity as my bones are to my body. The creed
is what you believe and every man has a creed,
whether it is writen or unwritten; whether Chris
tian or anti-Christian.
And so it is possible for a man to have a creed,
even an orthodox creed, and not be a Christian.
You may have a creed about Jesus Christ, and yet
not accept Him as Saviour and Lord. Martin
Luther had a creed which he clung to as he clung
to life; and yet Martin Luther, while crawling up
the stairs, doing penance for his sins, putting into
operation what he believed about God, heard a voice
saying, “The just shall live by faith.” He wor
shiped a creed and not Christ.
The Countess Schimmelman lived for thirty years
worshiping a creed; and one night she had a vision
of her “living Lord Jesus” as she is so fond of
expressing it, and she found that she had never
before known what He was.
And so I say it is possible for us even in the
Christian church to have and cling faithfully to a
creed, and yet fail to realize a vital, living experi
ence of Christ. One of the most trying things to a
pastor is that after all of our toiling and sacrifice,
men and women, members of our churches, have no
tian or anti-Christian.
Another thing that forces itself upon me as no
thing else in this world, is this, that Ibis old world
needs Christ as it needs no other one thing. The
Lord Jesus is the solution of every problem that
beats in the human heart. What will you do with
Jesus is the one question that rings from the battle
ments of heaven, forcing itself upon every man,
woman and child.
We need the salvation of Christ, for, if the teach
ing of the Scriptures be true, then Jesus Christ is
the only hope of the sinner’s redemption. Os course,
I know that this is getting more and more unpopular,
particularly in so-called intellectual circles. When
I was conducting a campaign in New York City at
one time, the unregenerate press and the liberal
pulpit of that city joined hands with one another
and made the charge that my theology was too
narrow for our enlightened civilization. This was
because I dared to espouse the plain teaching of
Tabernacle Sermon by Reb. Len G. Broughton, D. D.
Stenographically reported for The Golden Ate. —Copyright applied for
the Scriptures, for “There is none other name
under heaven given among men, whereby we must
be saved.” But in spite of the lashing that I
received from the hands of the press and the pulpit,
I never saw men and women more readily accept
salvation than at that time. It only takes the
teachings of real truth to bring men to Christ. I
think the secret of the failure to bring men to
Christ lies in the fact that we have ceased to
impress the great cardinal doctrines of sin, and of
the salvation from sin. And herein lies the differ
ence between the old preachers and the preachers
of today. The old fathers preached and believed in
a heaven and hell, Christ and anti-Christ. Richard
Baxter in his “Call to the Unconverted,” and
Jonathan Edwards in his famous sermon, “The
Sinner in the Hands of a Mighty God,” have done
more to bring men to faith in Christ than any two
that have ever lived. They are the embodiment
of the doctrine of the church of that day. We have
got to swing back from this spirit to the teachings
of the Word of God, if sinners are to be turned
from their evil way. Men must see themselves as
sinners and Christ as the only Saviour from their
sin, and from the wages of sin, which is death
eternal.
ENDURANCE OF LOVE.
You have heard that story of the young woman
in England during Cromwell’s time whose lover
was doomed to die. She pleaded for pardon, but
to no effect. It was decided that at the tolling of
Curfew on a certain day, the young man must die.
On the appointed day, you remember how that
young woman climbed up into the tower where the
Curfew bell hung, and waited for the time for the
ringing of the bell. When the bell began to swing
she leaped from her position in the dusty tower
and caught the clapper of the bell and held on,
muffling its sound. Again and again the old sexton
pulled upon the bell rope, but the young woman held
on to the clapper and no sound was heard. The
old sexton was deaf and did not know that the bell
was not ringing, so When he had pulled the rope a
sufficient number of times he came away. Coming
down on the street, the young woman met Cromwell,
and she knelt before him lifting her bruised and
mangled hands, and told with a broken heart the
story of her love. You will remember that Crom
well pardoned the young man because of the loyalty
of the young woman who so suffered that he might
be free.
But I wish I was capable of painting you another
picture of one who suffered that another might go
free. Yonder on Calvary’s tree, hung the One who
died that you might be free from sin; there in agony
of body, mind and soul, He pays the penalty for the
sins of all this world, and, oh, can we realize it, He
bore all those sins on His sinless soul; can you
conceive of it? The weight of all the sins of this
world, past, present and future, bearing down upon
that soul which knew no sin of its own. Those
hands that are now nailed to cross were once busy
in ministering to the sick, the needy and the sor
rowing; His hands did not know selfish service;
never once were they withheld from serving others,
while His own needs often went unsatisfied. Those
feet that are now nailed fast to the cross were
always going on errands of mercy and love; no
matter how rough the road, no matter how the
stones pricked and cut those feet, they never failed
when it was to serve the needy. Can you see the
wounded side, where the life blood has ebbed away ?
The heart now lies still that once beat in compassion
for humanity; that heart has been pierced by the
Roman sword, that through the spilling of that
blood your sins might be covered.
“ ’Twas for my sins my precious Lord
Hung on the cursed tree,
And groaned away His dying life,
‘For thee, my soul, for thee.
“Oh, how I hate those lusts of mine
The Golden Age for March 25, 1909.
That crucified my Lord!
Those sins that pierced and nailed His flesh
Fast to the cruel wood.
“Yes, my Redeemer, they shall die,
My heart hath so decreed;
Nor will I spare the guilty' things
That made my Saviour bleed.”
CHRIST, THE EXAMPLE.
We need Christ also, as an example; something
to measure our lives by. If He is Lord and Master,
then His subject must follow Him in the details
of life. When you have a business proposition to
consider, man, do you ever ask “If this confronted
Jesus, what would He do?” A man came to me
recently, a man who desires to do the right, and
said, “I have had such a proposition made to me.
What do you think of it? Is it right?” I said,
“What would Jesus do?” “That 'settles it,” he
said. As a business man in Christ you cannot afford
to have a lower standard than that.
Are you a politician? When a question that
involves morality comes up, what do you do? Do
you stop and consider what Jesus would do if con
fronted with that same problem? Let me tell you,
Christian, whatever your station in life, this is the
way in which you ought to determine the right and
the wrong. Young man, young woman, in your
realm of society, do you let your Lord have anything
to do in your life? When you consider the question
of the theater, the dance, or the card table, the
only question that you ought to consider is “What
would Jesus do?”
We need Christ that we may through
Him bring salvation to the world. How can we
do this if we have not the spirit of Christ? There
was a man going down from Jericho who fell among
thieves. They beat him, robbed him, and then left
him in a ditch to die. A priest came along and
said within himself, “Brother, you don’t belong
to my parish,” and so he passed by on the other
side of the road. After him came a Levite, who
thought, “Well, I have enough to do to help look
after the Levites. I can’t take everybody up.”
Then along came that other man. He heard the
groans, he saw the bleeding wounds and naked back.
Without hesitation he got down off his horse, got
down in the ditch by the man, bound up his wounds
the best he could, then very tenderly lifted him and
placed him on his own horse, and then started off
toward the town, holding the poor, bruised body to
keep it from falling off. He took him to the inn,
ordered a room prepared for the man, promising to
pay for everything that was necessary to be done
for him. Ah, there is the solution of the problem,
there is an illustration of the Spirit of Christ.
When the world sees that spirit controlling us in
our attitude toward our fellow man, then and not
until then, will sinners be anxious to hear us and
to receive the Christ. You have heard of the Irish
man who was accosted on the street one day by a
preacher who asked him if he would not come to
Christ. The Irishman had been on a protracted
spree and had had his coat, his hat and all his
money stolen. Said the preacher, “You need
Jesus.” “But, faith,” said the Irishman, “what
do I need him for?” “He would save your soul
in heaven when you die,” said the preacher. “Me
soul, is it?” he said, “I think me life needs saving
now. I need something that will put a coat on me
back and shoes on me feet and courage in me heart
to battle with the world again.” This brought con
viction to that preacher. He took the man to a
restaurant and paid for a good dinner for him to
eat; then he took him to a clothing store and clothed
him from head to foot, then he preached Jesus to
him. This is the gospel that the world wants, the
gospel of helpfulness, the gospel of brotherly kind
ness. Thank God, the world will have this gpspel
manifest some day, when He cometh to reign in the
heart and lives of men.
(Continued on Page 3.)
