m a tumbler of water, and when he got it
his hand trembled so that he could not get it to his mouth. The prince
said to him, "Your life is safe until you drink that water." He took
the prince at his word, and dashed the water to the ground. They could
not gather it up, and so he saved his life. My friends, you can be
saved to-night by taking God at His word. The water of life is offered
to "whosoever will." Take it now, and live. Faith cometh by hearing,
and hearing by the Word of God (Rom. x. 17).
Faith is not what we see or feel,
It is a simple trust;
In what a God of love has said
Of Jesus as the Just.
THE DYING THIEF
Read Luke xxiii. 39-43
I am going to take as my text a man who was the last one saved before
Christ went to heaven, or before He died on the cross, and the story
of his conversion ought to give hope to every man. We have got an
account of the conversion of all classes of people in the Bible. There
is not one class left out. There is the richest and the poorest; the
greatest and the smallest; all classes of men, and all classes of
women.
There are so many people nowadays talking against sudden conversions,
that I think the very best thing we can do is to see what the
Scripture says about it--to see how long it takes God to convert a
soul. If I read my Bible correctly, there were eight thousand
converted in two days. That was a good number in a short time, was it
not? We have not got to that yet; I wish we had. But I feel sure, if
the church of God would only wake up, we should see something like it.
NEVER TOO LATE.
Well, this man was not only a thief, but a reviler of God, right upon
the threshold of eternity, a most depraved and abandoned wretch.
Matthew tells us: "And the two thieves cast the same in His teeth."
You would have thought they would have been doing something better
than that, coming so near death and the grave; and that their thoughts
would have been made very solemn in the face of not only death, but
after death the judgment. Instead of that, they were reviling Christ,
and casting accusations in His teeth a few hours before their death.
Well, I do not think this thief could have sunk any further, until he
sunk into hell. Though so far off Jesus found him. Matthew and Mark
both tell us that these two thieves reviled Him. John says nothing
about their reviling; in fact, he does not tell us about one of them
being converted. The first we get of it is i
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