A Great Question and a Plain Answer

Acts xvi. 30, 31

Sirs, what must I do to be saved?.,. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. — Acts xvi, 30-31.

A PRESSING question that I pray you all to ask, and, — blessed be God! — a swift and unhesitating answer that we may all receive. The question is: “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” The answer, as most of us know — God grant that we may take it — is “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”

A gaoler in old days would not be likely to be a nervous person, or one easily frightened. What threw the one who asked the question into such a state of agitation, with his nerves all in a quiver, and he himself so deferential to the two men whom he had thrust into the inner prison an hour or two before? What? The earthquake that woke him, frightened him, because, as he felt the cool midnight

* Preached at the Simultaneous Mission, Free Trade Hall, February, 1901.

air coming into the stifling atmosphere, and saw that the doors were opened, he took it for granted that the prisoners had made a rush and gone. But that fear was quieted when the apostle said, “Do thyself no harm; we are all here.” What, then, was he afraid of? What was it that he desired to be saved from? ‘Ah, the earthquake had shaken more than the prison-walls! It had cracked the ground before him, and let him see the nether fires that were burning there. He had heard about the slave-girl that went through the streets of Philippi, pointing to Paul and Silas, and declaring that they were “the servants of the Most High God which showed... the way of salvation “; and now this Most High God seemed to have come to the help of His servants; and the gaoler felt himself brought face to face with an unknown power. The sleeping serpent in his conscience began to stir, and it was that which broke him down, hard and rough and harsh as he was, and made him grovel there before the prisoners whom he had been flogging an hour or two previously, with

The Question,

“What must I do to be saved?” Do you and I, dear friends, not need to ask that question quite as much as this heathen gaoler did?

Ah! when a preacher looks at his audience, and feels the realities of our condition as sinful men, and knows how thick is the hide through which his poor band is trying to force the arrow of conviction, he feels impotent. How shall I get at men and women who know before I say it, everything that I have to say to them, and who treat it all lightly, as if it applied to somebody in another universe from themselves? What does salvation mean? It means the opposite of being lost, and unless you and I have laid hold of Jesus Christ we are lost. It means the opposite of being sick, and unless you and I have laid hold of Jesus Christ we are sick. It means the opposite of being in danger, and unless you and I have laid hold of Jesus Christ we are in danger. Sick? Yes! I would not exaggerate. I have no doubt you are respectable, clean-living people, the great majority of you. Of course there are men and women here that have done hideously bad things; perhaps some that all the respectable Pharisees would turn up their noses at, and say, ^’ This woman is a sinner “; and my message is to them as much as to others. But I want to get at you clean-living, respectable, law-abiding, whited sepulchres. There is plenty of whitewash on the outside. Yes, but go inside. Have you ever been down into the cellars of your own hearts, and taken with you this light:” Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and soul, and strength, and mind? “If you have, I know what you have seen, all manner of foul and creeping things. Dear brother, it is not crimes that I charge you with, it is not even faults that I am bringing an indictment about, but it is something far deeper than either the one or the other, that ‘^ we all have sinned,” because we have lived to ourselves so largely, and forgotten the God “in whose hands our breath is, and whose are all our ways.” That is the sickness. Turn up a stone in any field, and what do you find below it? Ugly grey creatures that scuttle away as soon as the light strikes them. If you turn up the stones in your own hearts, you will see a swarm of creeping things that will hurry out of the light. I wonder if any man is trying to do it whilst I am speaking? God help you, dear friend, to see yourself! If the earthquake comes and lays bare to you, as I said, the nether fires, do not try to cover them over with a sheet of paper and hide them, but look until, like this man in our text, you cry out, “What must I do to be saved?”

I said that salvation was the opposite of danger, and is there not danger? Is not all sin full of misery, every moment that it lasts unforgiven? And is not there a future to reckon with? “Be not deceived, God is not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” There is an old Scottish song that runs —

Little she trowed

That the brewst she brewed

Would taste so bitterly.

You and I have to drink as we have brewed; and to ‘’ appear ... to give an account of the deeds done in the body.” So we need salvation — to be delivered from the sickness of sin, and to be delivered from the danger of death.

Now do not go away and shrug your shoulders, and say, “Oh I pulpit platitudes and rhetorical exaggerations.” There is a strange and awful power that we have of ignoring things that we do not like to remember; and you are never so foolish as when you try to forget, or fling yourself into “business” — that is to say, making money — or into amusement, in order to escape from these thoughts. There are smiling little villages all round the base of Vesuvius, and the people sing and rejoice there; and they tend their bits of vineyards, and never remember that those white wreaths of smoke from the cone at the top may any day darken, and the lava-flood creep down the sides and bury them. In the days of the old French Revolution, the aristocrats who were in the prisons, and were under sentence of death, used to get up entertainments in the evenings, where they had a ghastly mockery of feasting, and did the polite’ to one another, and sang their little songs, and danced their dances. And next morning the executioner’s men came down the corridors, and put the red mark on the doors of some that had been so merry the night before, and by midday the tumbrels came, and the guillotine ended it all. Are there not many men and women whom I address that are trying, and perhaps trying now, to pnt away from them my poor words, by thinking about other things, and who are doing just as foolishly as those poor French nobles within arm’s length of the axe?

There was an old Rabbi who said to his disciples, “A man should repent the day before he dies.” His disciples said, ^’ “We do not know when we are going to die.” Then said he, “Repent to-day.” Let me put you a plain question: If you knew that to-morrow you were to stand before God’s judgment seat, what would you do to-night? Do it.

And now let me say a word or two about This Blessed Answer, which we may all receive, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”

The question would have staggered a great many people if it had been put to them; and there would have been wonderfully elaborate and long-winded answers. But Paul was equal to the occasion, and as the whole anxiety of a soul was compressed into half a dozen words of question, so che whole hopes of the world were condensed into half a dozen more of answer. It came swift as the thunder with the lightning, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” Some teachers would have said: “Do as well as you can. and let bygones be bygones. Turn over a new leaf. Try to practise morality in the future, and it will be all right.” But I need not enumerate what different authorities would have said. I am not going to trouble you with false or incomplete answers to the question. Here is the answer: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Now, here are two things, a certain act, “believe,” and its object, ‘^ the Lord Jesus Christ.” As to the latter, look at these two texts that I see upon the galleries here: “He shall save His people from their sins.” Yes; and why are we sure of that? AVhy can I proclaim to all my brethren that great future, “He shall save His people “? Because I know that great past, ‘’ Himself bare our sins.” That is the bottom truth that this mission is trying to bring to sinful hearts that need it. It is the great gospel fact which was condensed in Paul’s words, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.” For if He is “Lord,” that implies His sovereignty and, as I believe. His Divinity. If He is Jesus, that implies His Incarnation. If He is the Christ, that implies that He is the fulfilment of all the ancient dispensation of priest and sacrifice. And because Himself “bare our sins,” therefore “He shall save His people from their sins “; and each of us from ours.

Only, let me press on you as my last word this — the condition that makes us “His people” is our faith. Paul did not say “Believe that Jesus Christ bore your sins.” He did not only say, “Believe “; he said “believe on.” And that is a very different matter. You may have the full-fledged orthodox faith that hosts of men profess to have, and yet you may not have a feather of the true trust which alone unites a man to Jesus Christ, and brings the blessing of Christ’s salvation into a soul. Faith is not mere belief; faith is reliance. Sometimes, in the .Old Testament, it is described by a word that means, “to fly to a refuge.” Take that picture of a man with the avenger of blood at his heels, and his hot breath lifting his hair as the pursuer gains on him. In another moment the spear will be in his back. But he reaches the City of Refuge, and once across the threshold of its gate, the baffled pursuer retreats. Such is faith. Haste to the Refuge.

Faith is designated by another word which means hanging on to something. Imagine a man fallen into a pit, slimy, deep, dark, and full of creeping and ugly things. He sees coming down to him a rope; he clutches it and holds, and he is lifted up into the day. Such is faith. Fly to the Refuge. Clasp the rope.

You need salvation — to be saved from your sins and from their issues. There is but one way of becnriijg it; God be thanked, the ull-suiticieiit, the only way.

Nothing in my hand I brin.!:^;
Simply to Thy cross I ding.

‘^ Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.” That is all. It takes very little to be a Christian; it takes an enormous deal to be a Christian. For it is a hard thing to see the simplicity of that great gospel message, and not to spoil everything by insisting on ow having a finger in our own salvation. “It is only Heaven that is had for the asking. It is only God that is given away.”

“The gift of God is eternal life.” Dear friend, this gaoler was a heathen at sunset; he was a Christian, rejoicing in God, long before the sun rose. People look askance at sudden conversions nowadays. I wish some of them knew a little more about what some of us know by experience in in- ([uiry rooms and elsewhere. There are some things that are best done gradually, and there are some things that are best done suddenly, I suppose that almost all great resolutions, which change a life, have to be made suddenly, however long may have been the underground process of preparation. There has to be a leap at the last, though you may have had a run to prepare before you jumji. At all events, this 1 know, that there are men and women listening to me now, whose best — may I use the word? — chance if not whose only one of ever being Christians at all is that they shall be swept by the energy of a sudden resolution, to do that which they know that they ought to have done any time these long years, that is, to cast themselves on Jesus Christ, and cling to Him as their Saviour to the uttermost. “To-day, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts.”