The Unchanging Christ and Other Sermons, 10. The Folly of Procrastination (24:25)
Text: “When I have a convenient season I will call for thee.” (Acts 24:25).
I AM not going to occupy you with the story of Felix, his duplicity, his perfidy, and his folly in deferring the question of salvation until for him I fear it was forever too late. For as you know, what little history records concerning him suggests that he lived and died in his sins. But I want you to consider with me the foolishness of following his example in saying, not so much perhaps to a servant of God, but to the Holy Spirit of God, what he said to the Apostle Paul, “When I have a convenient season I will call for thee.”
I am addressing myself I presume to an audience composed largely of Christians, yet I am sure there are many here tonight who are still without the saving knowledge of Christ. I take it for granted you intend to become a Christian someday. You have not thought of spending all your life in rebellion against God and going out into eternity an impenitent sinner to be lost forever. You have said to yourself over and over again, “Someday I must settle this question and settle it in the right way. Someday I must yield to the voice of God; someday I must accept Christ’s gracious invitation.” But you have added, “Not now. When I have a convenient season, a more convenient season, will take this matter up and give it my earnest attention.”
Let me earnestly inquire, When do you think that more convenient season will arrive? When do you think it will be easier to face your sins in the presence of God, to confess them, to turn to God in definite repentance, and to accept the Lord Jesus Christ by faith as your Saviour, than it would be tonight?
Will it be a more convenient season, a better time to go into this matter when perchance you are stricken down by illness and find yourself lying helplessly on a sick bed? Is this your idea of a convenient season? When you can no longer rush hither and thither as you do now, but when on a bed racked by pain and weakened by disease, you lie in a quiet room or perhaps in a hospital ward with plenty of time to think, and to weigh the great questions of time and eternity? Are you so sure this will be a more convenient season? Do you think it more likely that you will be in a better condition to take up such tremendous issues when weak and sick and perhaps tormented by anxiety as to the final outcome? During the years in which I have sought to preach the Gospel of Christ, I have sat by thousands of sick beds. I have been sent again and again by anxious relatives who have said to me something like this, “This son, (this husband, this wife, this daughter, or whatever else the relationship may be) is very ill and we fear has never turned to Christ. Will you not come to see if you could help such an one to a definite decision?” And so often I have gone in and the nurse has said, “Be careful do not say anything that would excite the patient”, or “the doctor has warned against anything that might make the sick one think that death is near,” and I have felt so handicapped as I have tried to speak of Christ and the soul’s great need. But in so many instances the brain has been so wrought or the nervous system so upset that I could only get in a few words and then after reading some passages from God’s blessed Book kneel in prayer, and commit the sick one to Christ. I am afraid that sometimes I have actually prayed rather for the edification, as I hoped, of the patient, than that my words might reach the ears of God, that is, hoping that indirectly some expressions used in the prayer might be carried by the Spirit of God home to the heart of the one who lay there so restless or perhaps so lethargic, and over and over again, when the end has come there has been no assurance whatever that the Word has found lodgment in the soul or that the sinner was saved.
My friend, a sick bed is a poor place upon which to settle the question of one’s relationship to God. Tonight while you are strong and well, while the eye is clear, and bright and the breath comes regularly and the pulse beats in an orderly way, it is the time to attend to the question of your soul’s salvation. Do not, I beg of you, think of a sick bed as affording a more convenient season.
Then again in this rushing work-a-day age when there seems so little time for quiet meditation, are you saying to yourself, “When I can take life more leisurely, when I do not have so much to occupy me, perhaps when I have made my fortune and can retire from business, that will be a more convenient season, and then I will attend to the matter of getting right with God?” But have you ever reflected how many people there are who never attain to this period of leisure? Do you realize that the great majority of us are so situated that we have to work on and on saving very little; and then perhaps by some unexpected change of condition, lose all that we have saved, and so struggle for bread and butter right up to the last until eventually the poor overwrought heart suddenly stops and we go out to meet God. Oh, what a solemn thing if one is thus called to meet Him unprepared! You have
You remember the other verse of that old gospel hymn:
While you are waiting for a time of greater leisure, when as you fancy you may with less distraction take up and settle the solemn problems that have to do with your eternal weal or woe, will you not remember that it is given to very few indeed to ever reach such a desirable state in life? Surely then the only wise thing is to heed the call of God now.
Jesus called Peter from a busy fisherman’s life; He called Matthew from the tax collector’s office where he was doubtless literally overwhelmed with work. He stopped Saul of Tarsus in the midst of a rushing career, and all found salvation through heeding His Word. You do not need more leisure in order to inquire more particularly in regard to these things. The Gospel is so plain, the invitation is so clear, the message is so simple, you have but to lift your heart in the midst of all the rushing things of life and look to Jesus in faith to be eternally saved.
Are there others who are saying, perhaps not with the lips but at least in their hearts, “Go Thy way for this time. When I am old, I will send for Thee”? Are you cherishing the hope that in old age if you ever attain to it, you will be better prepared to come to Christ than you are in youth or in middle life? Do you realize that very few old people who have lived all their lives in sin ever turn to Christ at last? Do you remember that the Holy Scripture speaks of the heart being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin? Do you recall that there is such a thing as the conscience becoming seared as with a hot iron so that it ceases to register? You have often heard the expression, “He or she is gospel-hardened” and it sets forth a condition to which many, alas, attain. There are people all over Christendom who have heard the Gospel so many times that it ceases to move them in the slightest degree. Pharaoh hardened his heart against God so often that at last we read, “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” How did He harden it? Simply by the repeated declarations of His will to which Pharaoh refused to give heed. The sun which softens the wax hardens the clay, and the same gospel message which melts the tender heart of an exercised youth, will make no impression whatever, perchance upon the hard heart of an aged sinner.
I shall never forget listening night after night to Dwight L. Moody in the old Hazzard’s Pavilion, Los Angeles, when I was but a lad of twelve. I could not get a seat the first night I went, the place was so full, so I climbed out on one of the steel girders reaching from the top gallery supported from the roof, and there I lay looking down upon the great throng, watching the sturdily built matter-of-fact businesslike man, who had been advertised as the renowned evangelist, Moody. I was greatly impressed by his intensity, and many a time as I lay there, I said in my heart, “Oh, how glad I would be if I could some day reach great throngs of people with the Gospel in the way that man is doing.” I remember so well one night Mr. Moody asked all who were sure they were converted to stand on their feet. He kept them standing while the ushers gave an estate of the number who had risen. They were reported to be between five and six thousand. Then Mr. Moody asked all who had come to Christ before they were fifteen years of age to sit down. To my amazement, fully two-thirds of that great throng dropped to their seats. Then he said, “All who became Christians before you were twenty, sit down.” Less than one-half were left standing. Then he requested all who were saved under thirty to sit down, and another grtatsompLy1 took their seats. So it went on, those under forty, under fifty, and by that time there were perhaps not twenty people still standing. It was one of the most striking testimonies I have ever seen of the fact that the great majority of people are saved in early youth, and very few indeed ever turn to God after they have passed the one-half century. What stupendous folly then for any one with whom the Spirit is now pleading to say, “When I get old, it will be a more convenient season. Let me alone now, Holy Spirit of God; come back to me when my hair is white, my step is infirm, my eyes are dim, and my nerves shattered and my whole body has become decrepit and infirm.”
Or are there some here who are saying, “When I feel different then I will come.” You think the present is not a propitious season because you are not overwhelmed with emotions. But on some future occasion when your feelings are more deeply stirred, when perhaps you imagine yourself to be better than you are now, or more interested in spiritual things, then you will come to Christ and close with his offer of mercy. Have you noticed that God nowhere asks you to feel different before you come to Jesus? Everywhere the Scripture insists on immediate response to the call of God irrespective of frames or feelings. It is not necessary that you go through some great emotional experience in order to trust in Christ. You remember the old hymn:
You do not have to improve yourself before coming to Christ. He is not calling upon you to cleanse your own heart from its sinfulness or to break off evil habits that have bound you. You are not asked to help Him save you, but He offers to take you just as you are and save you fully and completely by His own almighty power.
And now I would ask you to consider the divine answer to your suggestion that you wait for a more convenient season. In 2 Corinthians 6:2, the Holy Spirit has said, “Behold now is the accepted time, behold now is the day of salvation.” And in Hebrews 3:15 we read, “Today, if you will hear His voice, harden not your hearts.” Why should you thus attempt to defer the settlement of your soul’s salvation when God is so ready to save you now?
Consider four things which I want to press upon you briefly in closing.
1. Remember no better time will ever come. No matter if you live to a vigorous old age, you will never have a better opportunity to close with Christ than you have now, and it is questionable if you will ever be more ready to be saved. In the meantime even supposing you come after sixty or seventy years of living in sin, you will have lost just that much joy and peace which you might have had by being saved earlier.
2. This is of great importance. You will never have fewer sins to account for than you have tonight. Do you say, “I am not a great sinner?” What do you mean by that? If you are still rejecting Christ, you are guilty of the worst sin any one can possibly commit, for nothing can exceed in guilt the spurning of God’s own blessed Son. But take the question of actual violations of His holy law. Every day that you live, you are adding to the number of your transgressions. Suppose that you only commit three sins a day, one in thought, one in word, and one in deed; that would be in round numbers 1000 sins a year, and you are perchance 20, 30, 40, 50 years of age. Then you are guilty of 20, 30, 40, 50,000 sins already, and every day you live you are adding to the number. Is it not the greatest folly to go on increasing your guilt while hoping for a more convenient season to be cleansed therefrom? But who is there who has only committed three sins a day? Is it not a dreadful fact that the record is far greater than that, and that you now stand guilty before God of untold myriads of sins for which no other atonement is possible than that which was made by Christ upon the Cross? Why not then trust at once in Him who died and have the blessed assurance that all your sins are forever cast into the sea of God’s forgetfulness.
3. In the third place, consider, God will never be more ready to save you than He is now. He has manifested His love to the fullest extent in sending His only begotten Son to be the propitiation for our sins. He has given His Holy Spirit to convince of sin, righteousness, and judgment. He has sent His messengers out into all the world with the Gospel proclamation. Everywhere they go they are instructed to cry, “All things are ready, Come.” Do you not see that you are insulting God when you coldly turn away and say, “I intend to accept the invitation someday but not now. When I have a convenient season, I will call for Thee.”
4. Lastly, let me affectionately remind you that the Gospel will never be more efficacious to bring peace to your weary heart than now. The blood of Christ will never avail to any greater extent than at this present moment to cleanse your conscience from every stain of sin and make you perfectly fit for the presence of God. The work of the Cross is finished. There is nothing to be added to what Christ has done. God calls upon you to believe the message and to bow in thanksgiving at the Saviour’s feet. Will you not do this now while our hearts are lifted up to Him in earnest prayer for all in this presence who are, still unsaved?