In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the importance of repentance and the need to turn away from self-centeredness and please God instead. He urges the audience to run from false gospels that focus on success, prosperity, and self-improvement, as well as churches that glorify men rather than Christ. The preacher also highlights the sacrifice of Jesus, who took on the wrath of God and satisfied justice, allowing sinners to be justified. The sermon encourages listeners to seek a genuine and transformative relationship with God.

He was not willing that any should perish. Master, forgive and inspire us anew. Banish our worldliness. Help us to ever live with eternity's values in view. Said that great man who birthed that revival, God, stamp eternity on my eyeballs. You know, if we can't live as a different breed of people on this earth, we've no right to live here. We shouldn't be affected by changing customs or changing styles, or changing opinions, or whether the stock market goes up or down, or whether the crowds are gathering for... that doesn't make any odds. We ought to live every day as though we come out of another world into this world with the power of that world upon us. To live and speak and move and have our being in Jesus Christ. It's going to be an awesome day. Have your kind of figured how you'll get on when you stand there? Before all the saints of all the ages, and you and I have to stand there alone on the dais and be judged for the deeds done in the body, for every aspect of our lives, for our praying, for our giving, for our living, for our talking. No, it's not so simple to be a Christian. After all, it's a majestic thing. Oh, brothers and sisters, if you are praying today for yourself, for your soul, for the souls of your family, for the souls in your church, pray for a new hunger and a new thirst. I read of a man in the Middle East who got lost in one of the deserts. I don't remember which. But I do remember his report. He said that someone found him and brought him back to life. And in reporting, he said, the first day, he said, after the first full day, it seems to me the first full day, I would have given my right arm, he says, for just a cup of cold water. By the end of the second day, I would have given my two arms for half a cup full. By the end of the third day, I would have given two arms, two legs, and my life for a drop of water brought by a dirty finger and touched my tongue. Oh, my friend, this is what Jesus expects the Word to do within us and the Spirit to create within us, something that gets us out of bed in the morning, something that brings us to our knees during the daytime, something that brings us together to the house of God to hear His Word and to obey it and to heed it and to put it into practice, something that sends us into the four corners of the world, this marvelous compulsion born of the Holy Ghost. Do you know anything of it? Do I? That except you repent, you shall all likewise perish. Have you repented? Or have you neglected it? How are you going to escape? For He has declared that except you repent, you'll perish. We've defined repentance as a change of mind, of intention, and purpose from pleasing self to pleasing God. For in it is the seed of all righteousness and all holiness. As a sinner, your purpose was to please yourself and your direction was aimed that way. Then you came to the place of repentance. You made a right about face and a complete turn, and from that moment on, your intention was to please God and your purpose was to glorify God, and the end of your being was His satisfaction. Not your being satisfied with Him, but His being satisfied with you. Now, have you repented? Except you'll repent, you'll perish. You see the fatality of neglect here. You can see how important it is that you shouldn't overlook this. Apostle Paul, let me read it to you. Don't turn. 2 Corinthians chapter 6. He says, What agreement, verse 16, is the temple of God with idols? You are the temple of the living God. As God has said, I will dwell in them and walk in them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Verse 17, he says, Wherefore, come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive you and will be a father to you, and you shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty. Touch not the unclean thing. This is not talking about homosexuality and pornography. These are unclean altars. This is a table of devils. And the Holy Ghost says to Paul, Touch not the unclean thing. Come out from among them. Run for your life, because this is about your life. This is not just about an opposing theology or conflicting viewpoint on Jesus. This is about your life. My mind is forever branded with the story that I heard of police officers from the city of New York as people were fleeing from a crumbling building. There were police officers and firemen and others that were running towards the building, saying, Run for your life, at their own peril. And in some cases, I believe they knew they were going to die, but there was a sense of duty. I was crying out to God. I said, God, oh, Jesus, don't let my sense of duty be less for your kingdom than these beloved firemen and policemen were for those that are perishing in the falling tower. We're living in a generation when truth is falling into the streets. I want to be among those that are not running away from the conflict, but running into the conflict and say, Run for your life. Run from gospels that focus only on success and prosperity. Run. Run from those who use the name of Christ only for personal gain. Run from those that are picking your pocket in the name of Jesus. Run. Run from gospels that only focus on self-improvement. How can I? Three steps to a better personality. Three steps to this and four. Run. Run from churches where men and not Christ are glorified. Run. Run, body of Christ. Run. Get out. Don't touch the unclean things. Run from churches in America and Canada where there is no Bible. There's no cross in the theology. There's no soul-searching word. There's no repentance from sin. There's no mention of the blood of Jesus. Run. It's unclean. Run. Run from churches where the worship leaves you cold. There is no sense of God because they don't know God. Run. Run from churches where you're comfortable in your sins. That's a table of devils. If you come into the house of God and you've got sin in your life and you're not convicted of it, you're at a table of devils. Run from pulpits that are filled with political men who are using the pulpit of God for a personal political agenda. Run. Run from those who preach division between races and cultures. Run. Run. Get out. Turn it off. Get away from it. They know nothing of God. Run from ungodly spasmodic movements and endless empty prophesying. Beloved church, run for your life. Run from preachers that stand and tell stories and jokes. Run like you've never run before. Run for those that are only after your money and they use one gimmick after another, one foolish thing after another to get your money. Run. No longer to be connected with an organization. No longer to have a salary. No longer to have a fixed income. No longer to have retirement benefits. No longer to enjoy medical insurance or any such thing. And increasingly and totally and finally and irrevocably to be utterly dependent on him. Are you coming to that? Maybe the better question is are you willing so to come? Or do you want to clutch and retain what is the foundation of your present security and yet be spiritual? And yet speak lofty things. And yet talk about the body of Christ and God's kingdom purposes in the earth. And you yourself not to have entered that kingdom. Because you're unwilling basically, deeply, irrevocably and finally and totally to go, sell, give, come and follow that you might have entered into life. He speaks about people who have. He says, In them the spirit of the risen Savior works already. They have mounted with him from the grave. They have risen out of the darkness of doubt. They are in the brightness and sunshine of a day in which God is ever light. Their step is as free as if the clay of the sepulcher had been shaken off. Their hearts are lighter than those of other men. And there is in them an unearthly triumph which they are unable to express. They have risen above the narrowness of life and all that is petty and ungenerous and mean. They have risen above fear. They have risen above self. They have entered into life. It has been a kingdom come. They have the witness in themselves, the kingdom witness. For them, heavenliness has already begun within the soul. Their immortality lies in union with him who is the object of their affections and they seek no other. He is their assurance, their trust. Totally, finally, eternal life is a life of this quality. The present life has always been held to be a time of testing and of preparation. The enjoyment of eternal life in the future has always been made conditional upon the use we make of the present. Only those whose lives are now lived in such fellowship with God as earthly conditions permit can look forward to the fuller fellowship hereafter. I would make one exception. I would strike out as earthly conditions permit. Earthly conditions do not permit. Earthly conditions are opposed to this kind of totality. The earthly spirit and mind and mentality will cry out fanatic, madness, going too far. It does not permit this kind of whole giving. If our consciences tell us anything, they tell us that it matters eternally what we do with our lives now. The eternal issue is before us now. Eternity has to be taken into our present consideration now. The knowledge of the eternal and eternal life has to be effectual now. There's an actual place of entry. It's called salvation. It's waiting for a certain totality from us which many of us have not yet given. I've said it many times. I've said it again this morning that no man is greater than his prayer life. I don't care about his organization. These boys all have a, what is it, a mailing list. It doesn't worry me. Let me live with a man a while and share his prayer life. I'll tell you how tall I think he is or how majestic I think he is in God. Supposing I could say to Gabriel this morning, Gabriel, hand this book down. Well, let's preview eternity. Here we are, millions of people, all the prayer bodies. America has produced some of the greatest praying patient of Portland. Had a floor harder than that. And at the side of his bed when he knelt, he used to pray and pray and pray. And when they washed his body for burial, he had great big holes on his knees like camels, like history says that James in the Bible had camel's knees, at least tradition says that. Well, it's a living fact that a patient had them. And when they were washing him, somebody said, but what abnormal knees, they're calloused, they're heavy with calluses. Yeah, because he used to pray at the side of his bed with energy. And in that hard floor he wore two grooves like that, about six or seven inches long, where he used to pray and make intercession. Praying patient of Portland. Many of you can buy the book if you haven't read it, I think it's in the book still there, Praying Hyde, John Hyde. I met somebody who used to hear him pray and told me what an amazing thing it was to hear him pray in India. You know, we think we've got a message, you've got to drop it here and run there and catch a plane here and go there and say, no, no, that's not the greatest ministry. It's good, God has ordained it. But the greatest ministry I'm sure is the ministry of intercession. Let's ask Gabriel to hand the book down. Let's look at all the apostles and all the saints of all the ages. There's Phineas, look, there's Phineas with his amazing revival. There's William Bull, the founder of the Salvation Army. There's John Wesley. Here are all the great heroic figures, we've all read about them, and here they are all watching while the book is handed down. And somebody's going to read the record. Would you volunteer and say, well, I'd be happy to read my record to this multitude. Supposing I say, Gabriel handed the record for 1724. And I open the book there, I read 1724. I go down the beast, David Brainhard, just a young American, died at the age of 28. All he possessed was a cowhide that he had tanned and he wrapped himself in it and put a rope around him and he rode over the Susquehanna River there and he followed the Indians and he had tuberculosis. And he said, I got up this morning and the Indians were still committing adultery there and still drinking there and still beating their tom-toms and still shouting like hell itself. He came out of the pee-pee he was sharing and he said there was nowhere to pray. So I went out in the forest and he said, I knelt and the snow was up to my chin. And it was a half hour after sunrise. He weighed about 95 pounds. No, he didn't have a heater with him or anything else. He was just there in the frigid snow. Half an hour after sunrise and he said, I did so wrestle in prayer, he said in his archaic English. I wrestled in prayer for about 12 hours. The sun was setting and then I could only touch the snow with the tips of my fingers. The snow was up to his chin when he started praying. And he makes intercession of little body that weighed 90 pounds until the sweat of his body melted the snow. Well, God pity us, we can't get folk to our churches and we've got velvet cushions on the seats and we've got nice stuff on the floor so our darling little knees won't get hurt. And boy, we can't get, we can't muster a corporal's guard to pray in the average church. Praying patient of Portland, John Hyde, the great intercessor, David Brainerd. When God opens that book of intercession, when he puts the fire to their prayer life, their devotional life, I'll tell you what, there'll be nothing lost. It won't be wood, it won't be hay, it won't be stubble. Sin was always coming forth, sometime here, sometime there, sometimes in the other place and you always needed the Lord to deal with it. But then Jesus came with grace. And some people have the idea that grace means, well, it doesn't matter now if you sin, because God's sort of changed his mind about all these things and you know, now even if you sin, the blood of Jesus is always there to cleanse you. So the end result is that with this false understanding of grace, a lot of Christians, their standard of life has become lower than the standard in the Old Testament. It's true. Some of the sins that you hear about Christian leaders and well-known evangelists falling into, can you imagine Elijah falling into such sins? Or Moses? Or John the Baptist? Or Jeremiah? Or Isaiah? Or Ezekiel? No. Their standard of life was far higher than the standard of life of the average Christian preacher today. Do you think those fellows are running after money like a lot of today's preachers are running after? How is it that Moses could lift those Old Testament people to such a height through the law, through the tube of ointment? And Jesus, whom these preachers and other Christians are supposed to be following, seems to have brought people to such a low standard. That's a cheap grace. It is another Jesus. It's not the Jesus of the New Testament. The law came through Moses, grace came through Jesus Christ. Which is meant to lift us higher, law or grace? Grace. How much higher? As much as Jesus is higher than Moses. That's the answer. If you have faith for that, you'll say, Lord, I'm not going to rest satisfied with this cheap Christianity, this third-rate, useless grace that is being preached in the world today. I want the real thing. How many of you would be happy with a cheap counterfeit of some valuable product? You want the real thing. Nobody would be happy with a counterfeit diamond or counterfeit gold. A lot of Christians are going in for a counterfeit gospel and for counterfeit grace. They imagine that they are rich. It's like a man who's got a string of false diamonds and he thinks he's wealthy. It's only glass. It's not diamonds. And if only our eyes would be open to see that what we call grace is not grace. If it were grace, you know what would happen? Let me read to you in Romans chapter 6 and verse 14. Sin shall not be master over you. Sin shall not have dominion over you. For you're not under law, but under grace. So there's a question sometimes in a meeting I say, even the six-year-old children who can read English can answer this question. Any six or seven-year-old child can answer this question because the answer is in this verse. How do you know when you are under grace? Can you give me the answer from that verse? Sin shall not have dominion over you. If sin has dominion over you, are you under grace? That is the simple test in the word of God. Let God be true and every man a liar. Now this is the testimony of the word and how important it is therefore that you shouldn't miss heaven by 18 inches. Multitudes of people are going to do that. Our evangelical churches are filled with people that are going to miss heaven by 18 inches because all their salvation is up here and it never got down here where Christ became their life. They have the verse, but they don't have him. The pain of the cross is that the son died there forsaken of his father and under his own father's wrath, carrying the sins of a wicked people. Let's go to the garden for a moment. Just think about this. Jesus Christ is in the garden and he says, let this cup pass from me. Let this cup pass from me. Father, let this cup pass from me. I've heard so many preachers say Christ trembled at the fact of being crucified. Christ trembled at the at the fact of being thrown off to the Romans to be beaten, to be to be hung on a tree rubbish. Let me tell you something. Is our captain not greater than the ones who follow him? How is it that we hear about martyrs who have been burned at the stake singing hymns? How is it that we hear about martyrs who willingly walked out of their house and said, here, place the cuffs on me, carry me to the tree, all for the sake of my Lord? And they trembled not even by their lip. And yet our captain trembles in the garden. Was it a cross? Was it nails? Was it a crown of thorns that made the omnipotent God shudder like a babe? No, it was this. He said, let this cup pass from me. What was in the cup? I was teaching at a classical reformed school several years ago. The front row were kindergartners on back. And I asked that question and a little girl stood up. I said, what was in the cup? She said, sir, the wrath of God was in the cup. That's why when I got all those letters about people mad about the film from Mel Gibson, I would write them back and say, well, I probably have a problem with some of his things he does in there, but I have a greater problem with Southern Baptist preachers and the way they preach the gospel. I heard a man during this movie who had this great big radio program where she said, I'm going to tell you the true meaning of the cross. And he never got to it. Not once. He preached a romantic, emotional, sentimental version of the cross that has no power. The power is that when Christ was on that tree, he bore the wrath of almighty God. He bore the curse. Turn with me for a moment to the book of Galatians chapter 3, verse 10. For as many as are of the works of the law are under a curse, for it is written, cursed is everyone who does not abide by all the things written in the book of the law to perform them. They're not afraid. Well, then I suppose I should tell you what it means to be under a curse. It means this, that if you are not converted, you are so vile, so loathsome, so detestable, not only before a holy God, but a holy heaven, that the last thing you will hear when you take your first step into hell is all of creation standing to its feet and applauding God because he has rid the earth of you. You see, oh, to give this church, to give this creature a sensitivity to sin. Are you shocked? Go to verse 13. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us. Do you understand what I just read? You were shocked that sinful humanity would be considered so wicked that the last thing it would hear when it takes its first step into hell is all of creation standing to its feet and applauding God? Well, then be more shocked that the thrice holy son of God would bear your sin and become the curse before his father, a serpent lifted up in the wilderness. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Do you not understand what he just said? Are you like the liberal theologian that says Christ at this moment realizes he's not the Christ and gives his last cry of despair before he dies? Or are you a true believer that realizes that in order to be a true believer, in order to be a child of God, no holy son of God was forsaken by his father and then crushed under his own father's punishment. You say, oh, brother Paul, you're gone too far now. Have you not read Isaiah 5310? It pleased the Lord to crush him. Take a 10,000 pound millstone and put another on top of it. Put a grain of wheat between them and see what you've got when it comes out on the other end. Take a dam a hundred thousand miles high and a hundred thousand miles wide and have it break in front of you. And as the torrent of water rolls down towards you to engulf you, to destroy you, all of a sudden the ground opens up and drinks it down and not one drop splashes to your feet. And so Christ raised his hand up to heaven and took the wrath of God, that great cup, and drank it down. When he cried out, it is finished, he turned it over and not one drop came out. He drank the wrath of God and satisfied justice and appeased wrath, and therefore God can now be just and justify the sinner. This is what he's done. This is what he has done. You see, except you be converted and become as a little child. It's the attitude of constant correction to the will of God and continuous concern that you please him. Not simply that some place in the past you made a transaction and signed a decision card, but today the attitude of your heart is, I want to please God. And if he shows you that some action, some attitude, something you're doing doesn't please him, you don't rest in the past. You aren't simply resting there. You're saying, Lord, I want to please you today as much as that day back there when I first met you. And you have a continuous attitude toward his will. Houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and farms a hundredfold, along with persecutions, not so much from the world, but from other Christians who think you have gone too far. Why do they persecute you? Why do you make them boil? Why do they find something growing in them that is an irritation and vexation with you who are a kingdom person? Because it shames them. Because it scandalizes their present Christianity. Because it really reveals to them what the true commitment to the king is. It shows them that they are yet outside the kingdom. If only you were not there to confront them. If only your example was not a burr under their saddle. If only they could continue to persuade themselves that they're wholly given to God and look what they're tithing and look what they're donating and look how they open their homes to meetings and look how often they attend the youth thing or this, that, or the other. But your total kingdom consecration, the all, the finality, the totality of it, angers and irritates them and will engender in time to come, and even now, a persecution. If you have not experienced persecution, it is ipso facto evidence already that you are living beneath the kingdom level. It's the single greatest scandal of modern Christianity is the absence of persecution, which indicates that our Christianity, however much we adorn it and however much we applaud it, is something less than the entry into a kingdom of heaven in the earth. An exhibition now of the powers of the age to come that broil men up into an anger which vents itself as persecution. You say, what is repentance? Well, let me just give you an illustration instead of a theological treatise. Let's say that you came here tonight, no desire in your heart to hear anything from God. Maybe it came from all the wrong reasons. And right now, the only thing in your heart is that I'm preaching too long. Can you be saved? No, you cannot. And if you remain in this condition, you will die in your sins and you will go to hell. Without repentance, there is no salvation. Maybe you came here tonight, you had no thought of anything of God in your heart at all. You cared not for the things of God, the word of God. You just wanted to get through the worship and through the message. But maybe as the worship was going on, your heart was somehow strangely warm and you begin to hear a voice within a voice. Yes, my dear friend, that can happen in worship. And then when the preaching came, it was like an iron. It was like a call. It was like a beat that something began to stir in your heart. You begin to see the holiness of God, the wretchedness of your own virtue. You begin to hear things about Christ and what he's done for you. And the only thing you can think about right now is I will do absolutely anything to be saved. That is repentance. You lack one thing. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved on the Lord Jesus Christ. The Puritans spoke a lot about repentance, not only from sin, but repentance from good works. You said, what do you mean? There is a real sense in which repentance is simply this. You give up from trying to justify yourself. You just quit. You see that every one of your most righteous deeds is nothing more than filthy rags and you detest them and you throw them to the floor and you stand there before God and say, unless you move on my behalf, I am damned. And you believe, you believe, you trust.