A Perfect Cure for Poverty and All Other Evils of the Day
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light,”
—Matthew i i: 28-30.
UMAN life is full of Evils; Poverty, Sickness, Bereavement, Failure, Bitterness of Heart, Despair, Death. If we could see all the tears that have been shed in America to-day, hear all the sighs and groans and wails and shrieks that have been uttered, witness the dumb heart-breaking and despair that have found no visible or audible expression, we would believe in Hell. Not in a hell lying beyond the grave, but a hell existing right here and just now. That might make it easier for us to Iseve in a hell hereafter.
7 But is there no cure? Must this all go on and on forever? No! it need not go on. There is a perfect cure for all the ills that man is heir to. There is a cure that is sovereign, sufficient, sure and speedy. Jesus Christ announced that cure nearly nineteen hundred years ago, but the overwhelming majority of men and women have not listened, and so our evils, and miseries and despair continue. You will find this cure that our Lord Jesus Christ proposed for all our ills in Matthew 1 1: 28-30, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’’ Christ Jesus Himself IS THE CURE FOR ALL OUR EVILS. He came to ‘‘destroy the works of the Devil” (i John 3:8). He does it for all who receive Him. Poverty, sickness, bereavement, failure, bitterness of heart, despair and death, as well as sin and unbelief, are all works of the devil, and we can have done with them by coming to Jesus, the Christ of God.
I propose to take up these various Evils and show how Jesus, the Christ of God, is the Cure for them all and how each one of us may be done with them right now.
I. Christ Jesus is the Cure for Sin.
^JVe begin with the greatest of all Evils, sin. Men tell us Poverty is an evil, and I believe it. They tell us Sickness is an Evil, and I believe that too. But the monster evil, the evil that lies at the root of all other evils, is Sin. Sin is the first great evil to be gotten rid of. The preachers of the so-called “Social Gospel,” and all these philanthropists who are trying to lift men out of their miseries while leaving them in their sins, mean well, but they are attempting the impossible, and must meet finally with utter disappointment. It is like trying to rid men of some sickness by attacking the symptoms and not going to the root of the disease itself. It is like trying to cure the smallpox by merely painting the pustules. Sin is the radical evil, the root evil, so we begin there to-night, and that is where we all need to begin in our own lives. Christ Jesus is the cure for sin.
1 1. In the first place, Christ Jesus is the Cure for Sin in the individual. He is the Cure for Sin in every individual who will take the remedy.
First of all, Christ Jesus saves from the guilt of Sin, Sin cuts men off from God. God is infinitely Holy and so Sin makes a great gulf between us and the Holy Being who rules this universe, the Being whom we call God, the only Being who is worthy to be called God. Separated from God, cast off from His grace and power, it is impossible for us to fight Sin in our own strength. But Jesus Christ removes the barrier between us and God. He takes our guilt upon Himself and therefore as soon as we take Him as our Sin-bearer we have again perfect access to God and to His strengthening, delivering and transforming grace. We read in Galatians 3; 13, ‘‘ Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us: for it is written. Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.’* And we read again in 2 Corinthians 5:21, Him who knew no sin, he (i, e,, God) made to be sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”
One day, some years ago, I heard a man who was brought up in childhood as a thief, who had spent years in prison in various states in the Union, and also in other lands, but who had been brought to see that God loved him vile as he was, and that Jesus had died for him, tell the story how faith in this Christ, Christ Jesus, had opened to him the way to God and to salvation. Thousands upon thousands could tell essentially similar stories. Christ Jesus is beyond question, on the testimony of countless, competent witnesses, a cure for the guilt of sin.
This last week I was standing on the street waiting for a car, and a man stepped up to me and began to talk to me, and I thought at first he was going to talk about the common subjects of the day, as so many do. But instead of that he at once asked, ‘‘ Do you think a man can sin away the day of grace I looked into his face and into the depths of his eyes, yes, into the depths of his soul. I saw the anxiety and sorrow that were in his heart, and asked him, Why do you ask? Then he opened his breaking heart to me right there on the street, and I was able to speak to him of our glorious Gospel, how according to it all our sins had been laid on Jesus Christ and settled, how Jesus had said, ‘’ Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out’’ (John 6:37). light and a new hope came into the man’s eyes, and when I left him to take the car there was a smile of peace upon his face. There IS NO OTHER GOSPEL THAN THE GoSPEL OF THE
Christ who was crucified for our sins that will bring to a man a profound sense of sins forgiven, and give him to know that no matter how many or how great his sins may have been there is pardon for him on the ground of the atoning death of Jesus Christ, and that on that single but all sufficient ground he has access to God.
But the Lord Jesus Christ saves not only from
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the guilt of sin, He also saves from the power of sin: This man of whom I spoke a few moments ago as having been brought up in childhood as a thief, who had spent years in prison in this country and other lands, told of the desperate struggles he had made to break away from the power of sin and to be a man. But failure followed failure and despair stared the man in the face. Then he took Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour, and the fetters of sin, the fetters of the appetite for drink, the fetters of impurity and profanity, and a host of evil habits were snapped in a moment.
This is but one case in thousands. Christ is a sure cure for sin, a sure deliverer from the power of sin, no matter how deep-seated and desperate the case may be. We read in i Timothy i: 15, This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’’; then Paul added his own experience, ‘‘ of whom I am chief.” This statement of Paul’s was true of course. Every statement in the Bible is true, but this particular statement that Jesus Christ came to save the chief of sinners, if he will only put his trust in Him, I have seen verified in countless instances.
One morning in the People’s Church in Minneapolis, of which I was then pastor, at the close of the morning service, one of my deacons stepped up to a gentleman and said, Are you a Christian?” ‘‘No, sir,” he replied. “Why not?” the deacon asked. “I am too great a sinner to be saved,” was the reply. To his amazement the deacon exclaimed, “Thank God!” Then the deacon turned to me on the platform and called, “Brother Torrey, here is a man who says he is too great a sinner to be saved. Thank God! The gentleman looked more bewildered than ever. I stepped down to him and asked, ‘‘Is what the deacon says true?’’ “Yes,” he said, “I am too great a sinner to be saved.” Though he had the appearance of a gentleman he was a grat sinner. He had run away and left his wife in Toronto, Canada, and was squandering his manhood and his money in gambling in Minneapolis. He had lost thirty-five thousand dollars at the gaming-table just the week before.
When he said “I am too great a sinner to be saved,” I said, “let me show you something,” and opening my Bible to i Timothy 1:15! asked him to read. And he read, “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.” “Well,” he said, “I am chief.” “Well,” I said, “then it means you.” “It is a precious promise,” he said. “Will you accept it now?” I asked. He said, “I will.” I said, “Let us kneel down and tell God so.” We knelt side by side and prayed, and when he arose he knew that God had forgiven all his sins. He left the following week for the Northwest and I lost sight of him for nearly a year; for he never wrote me. Then I learned that he had returned to St. Paul and was working every night for the salvation of others, that he had brought on his wife from Toronto, that they were reunited and so happy in their new life that they had adopted a little girl from an orphanage to make their home complete.
No man need continue in sin. God has provided a cure. The Lord Jesus Himself tells us what that
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cure IS in John 8: 36, If the Son (i. e,, the Son of God, Jesus Himself) shall make you free ye shall be free indeed ‘’ (John 8: 36).
2. Christ Jesus is not only the cure for sin in the individual. He is the cure for sin in society as a whole. Men propose various remedies for the cure of sin and crime in the world. The best of them will prove only partially availing. Whatever prohibition laws may effect they will never banish sin or crime. I believe in prohibition. I believe it was a good thing, a great thing in many ways, as many of us know by personal observation and experience, when the prohibition enactment went into effect in this land. But prohibition does not banish sin and it never will. There has been more sin and crime in our country since the adoption of prohibition than before. Prohibition is not to blame for that. There are numerous causes, prominent among which is the fact that we are reaping the aftermath of the war. Oh! war is a hellish thing, a most damnable thing. Crime would have been even worse, far worse than it is, if it had not been for prohibition. But while prohibition is not to blame for the increase of sin and crime, the increase of sin and crime after the adoption of prohibition does show that prohibition will not cure sin. Neither will any other kind of external law, no matter how wise and beneficent the law may be, cure sin. Jesus Christ alone, the personal Jesus Christ, is the cure for sin in the individual and also the cure for sin and crime in the state, in the home, and in society in general. It is His coming again that will utterly banish sin and crime from the earth, so that righteousness and the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea (Isa. 11:9).
Jesus then is the cure for all sin in every aspect of its working.
II. Christ Jesus the Cure for Unbelief.
The next greatest evil to Sin is Unbelief, Indeed the two go hand in hand; where sin reigns unbelief reigns, where unbelief reigns sin reigns. Unbelief begets sin, and sin fosters further unbelief. Undermine the faith of men in the Bible and in the God of the Bible, and in the Christ of the Bible, and a carnival of lust, greed, passion, hate, dishonesty, and murder and war, with all its accompanying horrors, is the result. Increasing unbelief is one of the chief causes, the one fundamental cause, of the carnival of lust, crime, immorality, immodesty, indecency, lawlessness, banditry, and murder that is sweeping over our land to-day. Our schools and colleges and universities have been undermining faith in the Bible and in the God of the Bible and in the Christ of the Bible, and we are reaping the harvest; and an awful harvest it is.
The things I read in the papers about men and women being held up and robbed every night, and sometimes murdered, are depressing, but to a man who looks ahead with a clear eye they are not so depressing as what one sees on every hand of the immodest, bold, shameless conduct of the rising generation, our high-school boys and girls, yes, our grammar-school boys and girls. Unbelief has come into our schools and homes like a flood, and multitudes of our boys and girls on the Lord’s Day instead of being found in Sunday School studying the one book of all other books that makes for noble character and good citizenship are found off spending the week-end in the mountains, boys and girls together, and down at the seashore watching and joining in immodest parades and various other things, and are also found in the movies by the thousands, movies whose chief attraction oftentimes is indecency.
Take any daily paper and you will find that it advertises indecent movies with grossly suggestive pictures to allure the young, advertisements of such a character that not so many years ago a paper would have been prosecuted if it had dared to publish them. Even the Y. W. C A., that is supposed to be a Christian institution and an arm of the Church,’” takes off hiking parties of young girls on the Lord’s Day, takes them away from home and Sunday School and church to spend the week-end in a canyon. A further spread of infidelism in our city would bring more profit to the bootleggers, gambling hells and brothels than a governmental subsidy. But men say, “That may be so, but I cannot help my unbelief. If I cannot believe I cannot, and that is all there is to it.” No, that is not all there is to it. There is a
CURE, A SURE CURE FOR UNBELIEF. ThE CURE IS
Jesus Christ. Go to Christ Jesus. Tell Him your unbelief. Make a clean breast of it. Tell Him you cannot believe in the Bible, that you cannot believe in God, that you cannot believe in Him, the way Christians claim to believe in Him; but, tell Him also, that if the Bible is true you want to know it, that if there is a God you want to know it, and want to know Him, and that if He is Himself the Son of God you want to know that too, and that if He will show you it, you will accept Him as your Saviour, and surrender to Him as your Lord, and confess Him as such before the world. Then take the words of Jesus as they have been recorded in the Four Gospels, take in particular the Gospel of John and read it honestly looking for light, and obeying the light just as fast as you get it, and your scepticism and your unbelief will soon vanish. My friend, you may not be to blame for your unbelief; but you will be to blame if you continue in it, for I have pointed out a cure. Thousands have tried this cure. It has never failed ii? one single instance.
For years I stood in the pulpit of the Moody Church in Chicago and challenged unbelievers to come to me and I would show them a rational cure for their unbelief, and if it did not succeed in any case I would let the unbeliever speak from that platform. Many came, but there was never a case of failure, not a single one where men really took the remedy suggested. One night a man was brought to me. He had boasted very loudly that he wanted to ask me a few questions. Well, I asked him a few. I asked him if he thought there was an absolute difference between right and wrong? He said, Yes.” Well,” I said, then you ought to take your stand upon the right to follow it wherever it carries you. Will you do it?” He tried to hedge, but I held him to it, and finally he said, ‘‘ Yes.” Then I asked him if he knew that there was no God, or if he knew that God did not answer prayer? He replied, ‘‘ No, I do not know it. In fact I think
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there is a Supreme Being,” But he added that he did not believe that this Supreme Being answered prayer. ‘‘Well, do you know He does not answer prayer?” I asked. “No,” he replied, “I do not know that He does not.” “Well,” I said, “I know that He does, but I do not ask you to take my word for it, try it for yourself. Here is a possible clue, it may be that God answers prayer. If you are honest as you say you are in your search for truth you will try this clue, and find what there may be in it. Will you pray this prayer, O God, if there be any God, show me if Jesus Christ is Thy Son or not, and if Thou wilt show me that He is, I promise to accept Him as my Saviour and to confess Him as such before the world?”
He tried now to hedge and crawl more than ever. He wanted to ask me what life was, and a lot of irrelevant questions. But I held him to the point. I showed him that he did not dare to pray. At last in desperation he got down on his knees and in his excitement kicked over a chair in doing it and blurted out the words of a prayer. “Now,” I said, “will you just take the Gospel of John and read it honestly looking for light, and come back in two weeks and tell me the result?” “Yes, I will,” he said. But he never came back. Why not? You know. He did not want to be cured of his unbelief. He wanted unbelief because he wanted sin.
But many did come back and they all came back cured. I have been making substantially this same offer for many years now in many cities, in many states and in many lands and there has never been a single case of failure yet. Never a man yet has come back who has been able to tell me that he had taken the remedy and remained a sceptic still. Now, If you doubt that cure, try it yourself.
Thd third Evil I desire to refer to is Poverty. Christ Jesus is the cure for poverty. Now I stand with Henry George when he says poverty is an evil. Men may get good out of poverty, many men have gotten good out of poverty; but nevertheless poverty is an evil. It is all very well for philosophers like Seneca, whom Ingersoll lauded and exalted above Paul and Jesus Christ, to write about the excellences of poverty when they themselves are squandering, as Seneca himself did, vast fortunes in the most extravagant luxury. Such philosophy may suit a reckless discharger of verbal pyrotechnics such as Colonel Ingersoll was, but it will not suit honest, thinking people who love their kind and keep their eyes open. Poverty is an evil.
When I walk through the homes of the very poor in various cities of this and other countries, when I see the crowding, when I breathe the poisonous air, when I hear the curses and oaths and obscenity that greet the ears of the innocent children of the poor from the day they open their eyes upon this world to the day they are carried out to the Potters’ Field, when I hear and see these things, I feel like saying, cursed be poverty.” Poverty is an evil and I hate it. Hate it not only for myself but hate it for the sake of those who do suffer from it. I cannot walk among the homes of the poor without a heartache;
Christ Jesus is a Cure for Poverty.
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and I do not wish to. Poverty is an evil: Jesus Christ is the cure.
I. In the first place, Jesus Christ is the cure for poverty with the individual
(i) First of all, Jesus Christ is the cure for poverty in the life that now is. There is no guarantee that if a man comes to Christ he will become a man of wealth in this present life. That is not desirable for most men. Indeed there are very few men who have great wealth in the life that now is, who are not spoiled by it. But there is a guarantee that if one comes to Christ, really believing in Him as Saviour, and surrendering absolutely to Him as Lord and Master, their every real need will be supplied. Jesus Christ Himself says in Matthew 6:33, ‘‘But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.’’ And the “all these things ‘’ are the things spoken of in the verses immediately preceding, food, drink, and clothing, and the necessities of daily life. This statement of Jesus Christ is true. I have watched the testing of it under peculiarly trying circumstances for forty years, and I have never known a case of failure. I have known cases of seeming failure, but when examined into fully I have found that the failure was not in the promise of God but in those to whom the promise was unavailing, simply because they did not meet the conditions of the promise. Paul says in Philippians 4: 19, “My God shall supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.^” That great promise is also true, when you meet the conditions stated in the context. I have seen these promises tested again and again in the most unpromising circumstances and neither of them has ever failed. It has seemed oftentimes as if they were going to fail, but they never have.
How many people I have known who were in the most abject poverty who have attained to positions of comfort and plenty through accepting Jesus Christ. A multitude of them go trooping by in my memory as I speak. All over the city of Chicago and all over the country there are people who have been lifted from poverty to plenty and affluence by the influence of one church, the Moody Church in Chicago. Not that this church has given them money, but the church has brought them to Christ and Christ has brought them to plenty. The same is true of many churches throughout the land. As a matter of demonstrated fact Jesus Christ is the cure for poverty with the individual.
(2) But Christ Jesus is the cure for poverty with the individual not only in the life that now is but still more abundantly’ in the life which is to come. The man or woman who accepts Jesus Christ by that act becomes a child of God and if a child then an heir, an heir of God and joint heir with Christ (John 1:12; Rom. 8:17). If the poorest beggar in the land were to accept Jesus Christ, that beggar would become at once an heir to estates before whose magnificence all the multi-millionaires in the land fade into utter insignificance. I pass by and behold the mansions of the rich in many cities, I enter and go through the magnificent palaces of kings and emperors, as I have done in many lands; and I say all this is nothing, nothing at all to what I am soon to have.
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Oh! I invite all to riches untold. There is for the child of God just a little way ahead ‘‘ an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.’’
2. But Jesus Christ is not only the cure for poverty in the individual. He is also the cure for poverty in society at large. How earnestly and fruitlessly Social Philosophers have sought for a cure for poverty. I think Henry George has come the nearest of any one to hitting upon a cure that would be effective and practicable. But I confess I do not expect to ever see it put into operation in the large way it would be necessary to put it into operation to have it accomplish any real and permanent good. And even if it were put into operation, I should not expect to see all the results that its more sanguine supporters imagine would follow. There would be poverty still, because there would still be cunning greed on the one side and improvidence and laziness and waste on the other side. But when Jesus comes again to reign He will banish poverty. Love will reign. ‘‘ The lion and the lamb will lie down together,” and the lamb will not be inside the lion, as is now so often the case. No more poverty, no more oppression, no more commercial warfare, no more brigandage of the strong robbing the weak, when Christ Jesus comes. Equality, Fraternity, and Plenty will reign everywhere.
People ask me why I long for the coming again of Jesus Christ. I long for the speedy coming of Jesus Christ for many reasons. But for one reason, because, when I go out and see the poor thousands, and tens of thousands in the great cities of our land, when I see the human hogs that dominate so much of the business and politics and society of our day, and trample the weak under their feet and into the mud in their gluttonous desire to get at their swill, I feel like crying, ‘‘ How long, O Lord, how long? Come, Lord Jesus. Come quickly. This is my only hope for those who are underneath in the present mad scramble that we call business. But that is an all-sufficient hope. He is coming! and when He comes society will be reconstructed from the bottom up and the principle that governs human life will no longer be ‘‘ competition,’’ that is, to put it in plain language, ‘‘ every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost,” but when He comes the governing principle of all society will be love your neighbour as yourself,” and poverty and want and oppression will then be no more forever.
Jesus Christ is the cure for poverty. If you wish to see poverty done away with enlist in the army of Christ Jesus.
IV. Christ Jesus is the Cure for Sickness.
The next Evil is Sickness. Some people consider sickness a blessing, and God undoubtedly does make a blessing out of sickness to some of us. I have had sicknesses and pains for which I have thanked God. But if I read my Bible right, sickness was a curse and it belongs properly to the Devil’s kingdom and not God’s. And I notice that most of the people who consider sickness a blessing are perfectly willing that the other fellow should enjoy all the blessings of this kind; and, if the blessing does chance to come their way, they are willing to take all kinds of bitter pills and nauseating potions to rid themselves of this
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highly esteemed blessing. In plain, unvarnished English, sickness is a great evil. Jesus Christ is the
CURE FOR sickness.
1. Jesus Christ, in the first place, is the cure for sickness in this present life. The general rule of God regarding His children is that God wishes them to be well, and Christ Jesus makes them well when they trust Him to do it. I am not going into the fine and disputed points about Divine Healing and the Faith Cure, but I know from personal experience and from a wide and careful observation extending over many years that the Lord Jesus Christ who Himself was raised from the dead, and ascended to the right hand of the Father and has to-day all power in heaven and on earth, does cure sickness to-day. Jesus Christ, the risen Son of God, has cured many a man and woman who has been hopelessly sick for years and whom all physicians failed to heal.
2. But it is in the life to come that the fullness of Christ* s healing power will be manifested. God’s dearest and purest and noblest children do sicken and die in the life that now is, but in that life that lies just a little ways ahead there will be no death, no sickness, and no pain. There will be, however, in that other world for those who reject Christ in this world, plenty of sickness, and plenty of pain, and eternal death — endless dying. Oh, sick one, come to Jesus. He is the cure for sickness.
Time fails me to mention other evils such as Bereavement, Disappointment, Bitterness of Heart, Despair, Death, for which Jesus and Jesus only is the cure. Christ Jesus is the cure for every evil KNOWN TO MAN. He Stands to-night with outstretched hands as He did that day in Capernaum of old when He uttered the words of our text. And He calls to us as He did to them, ‘‘ Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy lacfen, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light,”