In this sermon, the preacher begins by acknowledging that human nature remains the same throughout history, regardless of cultural differences. The congregation is urged to have a renewed interest in the gospel and a passion for sharing it with others. The preacher prays for a harvest of souls and emphasizes the importance of not giving up on spreading the message of salvation. The sermon concludes with a prayer of gratitude for God's plan of salvation through Jesus Christ and a reminder to be cautious in how the message is shared and received.

Let's pray. O Lord Jesus, we've just been thinking of an incident that took place in thy earthly life back in old Judea. Here we are, Lord, in another part of the world, on another continent, among another kind of people, in another period of history. Human nature hasn't changed at all. Men still have two eyes and two ears, their head still on top of their body and their feet underneath. They still grow old and die and children are born. Everything is the same. Color, cultures, distances, they change. O Lord, thou knowest. People remain the same. There are people here tonight, eager people who'd run to inquire, how can I be saved? Then when they find out, would go the other way. There may be people who would eagerly inquire, how can I be filled with the Holy Ghost? When they find out, sorrowfully turn away. My Lord God, thou must grieve thy heart as it grieves ours a little bit, it must grieve thine with infinite grief. We sorrow a little, thou must sorrow with boundless sorrow. Thou man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, we hid as it were our faces from thee, turn our back and go away. Sorrowing we go, but go sorrowing. O Lord, have mercy, have mercy upon us. Have mercy upon us, O Lord. When thou tookest upon me to deliver man, thou didst humble thyself to be born of a virgin. When thou hast overcome the sharpness of death, thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers. We therefore pray, O Lord, save thy people, which thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood. Lift them up, make them to be numbered with thy saints in glory everlasting. O Lord this night, Shepherd of death, and carry us home to our house. Put in us, we pray, a great longing after thee, a great longing desire to know thee in living encounter by the Holy Ghost through the blood of Christ. Until all our self-confidence is gone and we rest not, we ask these things in the name of Jesus. Now, our Heavenly Father, we are before thee. We think that it's hot, and we're just slightly uncomfortable, but O God, if we knew for positive certainty that thy Holy Son Jesus were coming at midnight tonight, nobody'd mention the weather. We'd be alert, and our loins would be girded, and our lamps lighted, and our shoes on our feet, and our staff in our hands, and we would be looking and hoping. But, Lord, we pray thee that thou wilt help us to live now, and to think now as if that coming was indeed as soon as midnight. And we pray that thy blessing may be on us as we think together about the call of the Holy Ghost to men. O God, help, we pray. May our minds be brought in from the busy world out there and from the noise, and may they be centered upon holy things and holy thoughts. Thou knowest, Lord, it's not certain how much longer any of us will be this side of the border, so we pray thee while we are here and opportunity is ours to live hold of it and do what we can to make our calling and election sure. Help now tonight in the giving of this word, we pray in our Lord Jesus Christ's name. Amen. Now let's pray. O love of God, thou hidden love of God, we have found thee, we have found thee, for thou hast found us. For we were not looking for thee, thou art looking for us. We have found, and thou hast found, and we know thee, or rather, as Paul said, we are known of thee. And may God bless this fellowship, this group that's heard these words tonight. May we go out amid horns and airplanes overhead and noises of every kind. And may we hear this gentle, insistent, sovereign, authoritative, winsome voice calling us to be Christians, calling Christians to be good Christians, and calling good Christians to be still better Christians, calling us to put the world away and focus our attention on eternal values that will be here after kingdoms have fallen and democracies have gone down in the dust. Great God, help us over these days just ahead, we pray in Christ's name. Amen. Let's pray. Father, we pray for these who raise the hand. We have no way of knowing what the need might be. Thou knowest about it. But the great thing is that the heart is determined, and the will is set, that they'll hear this voice of the blood of Jesus speaking and pleading like a lawyer before a court, pleading for his client. So our advocate above, Savior by the throne of love, pleads, and we pray that they may hear that voice. May quietly tonight turn away from everything, everything that could possibly slow them down, put away every weight and everything that could keep them from being the kind of Christians they ought to be. And we pray for any who may not be Christians, or who may be on the border, not sure, God in Christ's name, we pray that they may turn to thee with all their hearts. For if ye call upon me with all your heart, ye shall most surely find me. Help us now, Lord, as we wait a little further and sing thy praise in Christ's name. Father, we pray thy blessing upon the truth. Lord Jesus, we would be clean men and women, we would put away evil, we would cease to do wrong, we would amend our ways, but all this we would do knowing that in us there dwells no good thing, knowing that left to ourselves that we could not possibly wash ourselves nor make ourselves right nor live right. We thank thee for the Holy Spirit, we thank thee for the power of the gospel, we thank thee for the retreat of prayer and the hiding place of devotion. We thank thee, Lord, that it's possible to live as becomes saints, in an evil and adulterous generation. Grant that we may, for Christ's sake. Amen. Let's pray. Lord, how thou didst ever find us, when so many millions go their way careless tonight, we'll never know. But it's grace, sweet grace eternal, that takes all our sins away, and David's royal fountain washes us clean. We thank thee, and pray thee for all present to see us. We pray there might be a searching of heart and an exposing of our nature before thy light, to know whether indeed we belong in heaven or in hell, whether indeed we are sons of Adam or sons of God. O God, save us from carelessness. Here in Canada and down in the United States and in many a few other countries in the world, we're like this rich man. We have so much, we live sumptuous. He's in our way, he's making us forget that sometime soon we're going to die, and we're going to go where the claim is laid to us, where we belong. O God, help this evening and this hour to pray for Christ. Let us sing, and if now or after the service you want to see me, I'll be available. Let's pray. Could be that somebody would like me to offer prayer for you. Last Sunday night after service, a young man from another country who was a Roman Catholic came to me, said he had heard me twice, and he was concerned. I can't recall word for word, but something to the effect that he was deeply concerned about his soul and his relation to God, and could I help him. I prayed with him, exhorted him, and then told him to read the gospel of John prayerfully asking God for life. Maybe he's here tonight. I hope he is. He promised to keep in touch with me. Maybe you would like to have me pray for you. If you would, simplest old-fashioned way I know, just to raise the hand so I'll know who wants prayer. Would you raise the hand? Who would like to have me pray for you? For any need at all that might be in your life. Any need that might be in your life, put the hand up. We'll know that somebody wants prayer. Dear Lord Jesus, we pray tonight that thou wilt help us to hear thy people. Oh, we thank thee for that, that glorious, Jerusalem the golden, milk and honey blessed, where dwell the spirits of just men made perfect, and where thy church will someday be. We thank thee, O Lord Christ, victorious, triumphant Lord Jesus. God hath made thee both Lord and Christ, and hath set thee head over all things to the church, and hath made thee heir of all things. Thou who art the shining forth of his glory, and express image of his person, in whom dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, we love thee, Lord Jesus. We want to serve thee. We want this church to be a Christ's church, indeed. We repudiate the ways of worldly churches. We repudiate the psychology and philosophy of worldly churches. We insist we want to be a New Testament church. Make it so, Lord, we pray thee. Bless these dear friends, for Christ's sake. Amen. Now unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and has made us kings and priests, unto his God the Father, him be glory and dominion, now and forever. But before we sing, we want to pray. Let's pray. O our kind Father, we thank thee thou hast not left us in our sins. Thou hast sought a way for us. Thou hast planted in Christ Jesus thy Son, our Lord. Thou hast worked it out by blood and tears and wounds and death and the miracle of resurrection and the wonder of ascension to the right hand of the throne. Thou hast sent the Holy Ghost to say everywhere throughout the world, he that believeth on him shall not perish. Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. O we thank thee, heavenly Father. Time is running out. It is later than we know. Then thou hast warned us gently and carefully to be careful what we do with this message. Be careful lest we take too much for granted. To be careful lest the devil get the seed, lest the carriage of life take the seed, lest we be Christians only in name and have a name that we live but the dead. My God, it would be better that we should perish from the naked slopes of the bawling valley and from the rich precincts of Toronto. Better that we should die pagans, cutting off the necks of chickens, than to die Canadians and Americans and Englishmen and Scotsmen who heard from their childhood this wondrous message. Better to let it go. O God, what do we say to thee in that time? What answer can we have from the bawling, naked, savage men smeared with pig grease and clay, and stand up and say we never heard it? But who here can say, O God, we've heard it, and we've heard it, and we've heard it until we're bored with it. God forgive us. Give us a new something, a new baptism of interest, a new, a new athletic of interest, of fresh interest in the themes of the gospel. O God, we pray that thou would help the friends here tonight. Lord, we pray for those who are well saved, that they might become so keenly concerned for others that aren't saved, that they would continue to work for their salvation hard and struggle and pray and labor until one by one they got it in. Grant, we pray, O God, that there may be a harvest of souls at Avenue Overdue. Lord, it's long overdue, but God, we're not giving up. We expect to see it. We expect to see it, Father. We expect thee to give us a harvest. We expect to see young people brought in and older people. We expect to see their new faces and hear new voices, and see the travail of thy soul, O Lord. We expect thee. For thou art God, because Jesus Christ thy Son said, if we wanted anything, ask in his name and you'll give it to us. Because that's why the gospel is being preached, that's why we're here, so expect to see it, God. We don't believe that thou dost speak to men vainly or say anything to anybody carelessly. We believe that when thou dost make a promise, that promise is as good as gold. So we're expecting, Father, we're expecting thee to do it. O God, round the margins, our relatives, our friends, our neighbors, people all around here that are not here tonight, but they can be here, and they can be brought in, and they can be one. We pray to you, O God, fall on the churches, fall on this church, fall on our people. We pray that there will be a new affluence of love for men, that we may not depend on the word from the paper only, but that we might supplement that word with earnest soul-winning efforts. Now come on us, Father, we're looking for help, O God. Once more we remind thee that we have for this church a vision of a strong Bible-based, morally right, solid, vigorous, active, loving church, that the people will feel when they come in here that surely the Lord is in this place of the truth. The Lord may be slow, but we believe it will come. Now, I said first the little sprout, and then the stalk, and then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear. So put us through those stages fast, Lord, because we need the corn, and we need it fast. We need it soon. We pray that God meet us. We pray thee for any tonight that are not committed, that the Holy Ghost has found them somewhere there among the rocks, or on the wayside, or among the thorns. Here God has found them, we pray thee, that they might come out from there and be good ground, and receive the truth into honest hearts, and bring forth truth with patience unto perfection. We ask this in Christ's name. Now let's sing this number, please. Number one. We pray thee this night that thou would help the young man who's seeking thy faith, blessed Jesus. And then we pray for some who for their own reasons did not see fit to present themselves publicly, to pray for them, and ask that thou, Lord, well be with them as thou certainly will be with them right on, and keep them in life until they've either said the last no, or said a happy yes to thy invitation. Pray now thy blessing upon us, and may mercy and grace attend us all the days of our lives. Dismiss us now with thy blessing through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Then you will ever find at any other time, oh Father we beseech thee for all of these, take them through the fire and through the flood, but above all things through the blood, and if they have to sit by the river King Bar as Ezekiel did, or be thrown down into a pit as Jeremiah was, or be surrounded by dancing fanatical foes as Elijah was, or be on the Isle of Patmos as John was, or to fall flat down in a faint as Daniel did, oh whatever the cost we pray thee make Christian worshipers out of these men and women. This we ask in Jesus' name. Everybody stand by the King should come, that thy will should be done all over the universe. Down here as it is up there, let that be first, and the other things fall in line. Blessed be God and blessed be his holy Son Jesus Christ. This we ask in Jesus' name. Oh God our Father, we thank thee, we thank thee, we thank thee for Jesus Christ thy Son. We haven't done anything that we can think of but what we're ashamed of. We haven't done anything but what we ought to be ashamed of. We haven't done anything, our brains, our minds, our bodies, our souls, our spirits, we haven't done anything ourselves except what thou has given us. What thou has given us we're not ashamed of. We're glad for and we're deeply grateful and we will go and appear and be there dressed in thy righteousness alone, faultless to stand before thee. Thou will know us and claim us and not be ashamed of us because we were redeemed in thy mercy. Poor, scarred, bruised, pathetic, pale-faced, dying, thou didst find us and save us and lift us and renew us and give us life. We're thine. Thou bless this congregation and we pray for any who may not be saved, they must see what they're missing and turn quick to Jesus Christ and say, Lord I am sorry for my past, from here on I'm thine.