Returning this morning in the book of Hebrews to chapter 10, and reading just the words of the text, verse 5 to the end of verse 7. Hebrews chapter 10, verses 5 to 7. Wherefore, when he cometh into the world, he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not, but a body hast thou prepared me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure. Then said I, Lo, I come, in the volume of the book it is written of me, to do thy will, O God. At the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, the air rang with a multitude of glorious declarations. To Joseph, the angel said, thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins. To Mary, his espoused wife, the angel Gabriel declared, according to the first chapter of Luke, Fear not, for thou hast found favour with God. Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. And he shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest. And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there shall be no end. He furthermore said that the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee. Therefore that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. To the shepherds on the Judean hillside, The angel choirs sang that inimitably, Luke 2 and verse 14. A song that I think men have largely misunderstood. They certainly have misapplied. But they sang, glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men. You remember that there was a man by the name of Simeon. who, we are told, waited for the consolation of Israel. When the Lord Jesus, just born, was brought into the temple, Simeon took him up in his arms. And as he did so, the spirit of prophecy came upon him. And he said, Lord, now let us know thy servant depart in peace according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation. Matthew tells us that the wise men from the east came, declaring that Jesus, just born, was the King of the Jews. Paul tells us in Hebrews chapter 1, that God the Father spoke at the birth of Christ. For when He bringeth in His first begotten into the world, He saith, let all the angels of God worship Him. So the air rang with glorious declarations. at the time of the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. But frequently overlooked among them all is the declaration that the Son of God Himself made in and by His incarnation. We have read of it this morning in Hebrews chapter 10. Because here, when He cometh into the world, He saith, this is something that He says first to His Father, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldst not, but a body thou hast prepared Me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin, thou hast had no pleasure. Then said I, in the volume of the book it is written of Me, I come to do. Thy will, O God. This morning I want us to think very simply, without attempting at all. a detailed exposition or exegesis of these words, for they, in their context, are a very involved but powerful message. I want us simply to think upon the message Christ gave at His incarnation. It's a message with three great subjects to deal with. It deals first with the subject of Scripture. It then deals with the subject of the Savior Himself. And finally, of course, it deals with the subject of salvation. Now let me suggest to you right off that among the myriad of things that can take your attention and mine, there are none more important than these subjects. Scripture, God's revelation to man in the written word, the Savior, God's revelation to men in the incarnate Word and salvation, that by the grace of God which brings it all out of the realm of the theoretical and the theological into the realm of vital personal experience. I can think of nothing more sterile than to have a theology To have a knowledge that exercises the little cells of the brain, but never exercises the deep motions of the soul. There is nothing more deadly than a knowledge of certain things, or even a speculation about certain things. that have to do with God and man, and yet they never bring us into the enjoyment of a real saving relationship with God through Christ. So this morning, we want to think of these subjects in the message which Christ Himself gave at His incarnation. First of all, He speaks about Scripture. Lo, I come in the volume of the book It is written of me. The volume of the book is undoubtedly the volume of the book of Scripture. Indeed, most learned commentators take it that while it speaks of the book in its entirety, it is specifically referring to a part of the scroll of the law that had to do with Deuteronomy. If you want to look at it just for a moment as a technicality and just as a note of passing interest, whatever this particular part of the book of Deuteronomy was, This saying, and it is reckoned that this is a reference to the Septuagint translation of it, this saying came at the beginning of the role, the word, the volume of the book, actually is simply the Greek word for the head, the head of the scroll. What a scroll it was when, as soon as you opened it up, this was the message. Now it's speaking of the book of Scripture. And the very first point that it's making, and I think that it is of passing importance to understand and underline this, that when the Son of God came into the world, angels were singing, men were listening, Wise men were traveling. A virgin girl saw the greatest miracle possible for God to do on earth in the incarnation of His Son. Heaven and earth were all agog with what was happening. And yet, when the Son of God Himself made comment upon it, The very principle, foundational truth to which he drew our attention was concerning the authority of Scripture. Now that may sound at first a little strange. We would imagine that when the Son of God came into the world, the first thing He would say would be concerning His Father, or concerning Himself, concerning His mission. Now, He does deal with these things, but He deals with them in the context, first, of establishing the authority of Scripture. And the message is very plain and very clear. Apart from the Scriptures of truth, we will never know anything truly, accurately, and certainly savingly of God. Now let me back up a little. I'm a Protestant. I'm worse than that in many people's views. I'm a Calvinist. It was John Calvin in the Institutes of the Christian Religion who emphasized right at the very beginning the reality and the power and the continuance of natural revelation. The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament show this handiwork. There's not a twig in a tree, there's not a sparrow in the air, there's not a blade of grass, there's not a worm in the ground, but if it were properly understood, would bespeak the glory of its creator. But as Cornelius Van Til said, While the heavens declare the glory of God and the sun shines in all its splendor a message of God the Creator. Sin has put man's eyes out. What we have now gazing into the heavens are the blinded eyes of darkened souls. It was Mr. Khrushchev when he was the leader of the USSR who boasted, we have sent Sputniks into space, we have sent men out away thousands of miles, and we have found no God. Astronomers use the most powerful instruments known to man to search what they think are the outer reaches of our galaxy, and they find no God. Biologists take apart that greatest of all creations, the human body, and they find no God. The truth is that they are so blinded by sin that they sound like blind men saying there is no such thing as color. They are dead men saying there is no such thing as life. You see, if we are ever to know even how to read the book of nature aright. And this is where Protestantism differs from Romanism. Thomas Aquinas had two books, the book of Scripture and the book of nature, and man could come to certain great truths about the book of nature or about the God of nature from that book. But according to this book, we can know nothing aright until we know God in the Scriptures. And that's why when the Son of God came into the world, he led an emphasis on the authority of Scripture. There is throughout this book a tremendous emphasis upon the written revelation. And it is to me, I think, An important thing, that before the incarnate Word came into the world, God sent the inscripturated Word, so that we have an objective standard of divine revelation. It's interesting that when the Lord Jesus came into the world, he did not simply say, by virtue of my eternal deity, I declare. Now, he did say that. That's the meaning, actually, of those great statements throughout John's gospel, I am. Those are some of the deepest statements. When Jesus says, I am, he is taking the Old Testament name Jehovah, and he is applying it to himself. Wasn't it an amazing thing that when they came into the garden of Gethsemane, and they were searching for him? He said, Whom seek ye? They said, We seek Jesus of Nazareth. Now, of course, they weren't seeking him for anything but for murder. And he said, I am! And they fell back upon the ground. Just an indication that he did say, And I emphasize this because many liberal theologians say he never claimed to be Jehovah. He did claim it constantly. But he didn't simply say, I am God, therefore. No, he said, there is a volume that has the stamp of divine inspiration and divine authenticity and divine authority. And even the Son of God submitted His claims to be what He was and to do what He did to the authority of this written revelation. You see, there is nothing valid that has not its foundation in the written Word of God. There's nothing valid. We're living in a day when the so-called Christian church has got away from its moorings. Throughout the world, they're—let me give you an example. In South America, they have liberation theology, a modern Roman Catholic movement now taken over even by so-called evangelicals. The general secretary of the World Council of Churches is an evangelical, within quotation marks, from the southern part of America, and he is a liberation theologian. We have black theology, we have feminist theology, we have all sorts of theologies, and what we have in them all is an attempt to have a Christianity without the Bible. I have read hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of the productions of these people. I have volumes of their books and of their handbooks, of their schemes, and all the rest of it. And I have come to the conclusion that at the end of it all, what they are seeking is a church of man's manufacture, a gospel of man's manufacture, a salvation of man's manufacture, and ultimately even a God of man's manufacture. There's nothing new in this. There was a famous German skeptic, one of their top psychologists. And when German rationalism was seeking to debunk the Bible and build the European church without the Bible, this man— and I'm not going to try and give his German pronunciation, that would be Dr. Gingery's province. I'm glad I know no Nazi language. It's just because he's of German extraction. I apologize for that. But anyway. this man said to them, and they couldn't answer him. You do not worship God. You worship an extension of yourself. If the God you worship is the product of your thinking processes, if he is the product of your speculation, then you have as surely formed him as the heathen out in the jungle has taken his little bit of wood and carved it into some shape and fallen down before it. That's true of a logical syllogism. God is never found at the end of theoretical speculation. God is never built by the hands of man or by the minds of men. God is, and God has revealed himself and has inscripturated that revelation, and apart from it, according even to Jesus Christ, you can know nothing of God or his Son or anything else. You're left on a shifting sea of human speculation that will let you sink forever into the darkness without God, without Christ, and eternally without hope. So he speaks of the authority of Scripture. And he speaks of the focus of Scripture. This is something that I keep referring to here. And I think that we as fundamental Bible believers need to get a grip of this, because fundamental churches have got away from it. The focus of Scripture is Christ. You go to the book of Genesis. What is the meaning of the book of Genesis? It is Christ. One of the loveliest little books I have in my library is by a man called Henry Law. And it's called The Gospel in Genesis, starting in Genesis chapter 1. It's not an exhaustive treatment of Genesis. Another book that I love to read and I've enjoyed many hours in is A. W. Pink, Gleanings in Genesis. The strange thing is that A. W. Pink wrote this book when his theology was furthest from what it came to be and furthest from what mine would be. He came to see the light, and he became a real old-fashioned Reformed Protestant. But before he ever got there, he was a hyper-dispensationalist. But he wrote that book, and he could see the gospel right through the book of Genesis. He went on to write gleanings in Exodus. What did he find in Exodus? Christ is the focus of Exodus. I have often told you, if you have difficulty reading the book of Leviticus, as many Christians do, You should speculate a few dollars and buy the book by A. A. Bonner, a great Scottish Presbyterian preacher, On Leviticus. And I think when you get that book, you'll discover that it is one of the greatest books ever you'll have on your hand, not only because of the immensely great scholarship that's in it—I don't think you'll even notice much of that, though it's there—but but because every page of it breathes Christ. I remember Joan saying to me years ago, I'm coming to read the book of Leviticus again, and I get lost in it. Have you anything to help me? And she read through Bonner, and she read through Bonner again, and it made that book just a new book. Not that there was anything new in it, but she saw the focus is Christ. People wonder, why does the Bible bother to have all these genealogies in it? Why should we be bothered with lists of names? The Reader's Digest editors felt that God had made a mistake in putting them there, and so they edited them with a whole lot of other things out, and now we have an edited version of the Scriptures. God didn't know enough to keep the genealogies out. But the genealogies are there because they are absolutely—and when Jesus came, were absolutely vital to establish his lineage according to the flesh. And though they have been lost as far as the Jewish lists are concerned, they're not lost to the God of heaven. The focus of Scripture, even in the very genealogies, is Christ. The Bible is not. And you know, I need to emphasize this when our troops are in the Middle East and Saddam Hussein is sounding warlike, and every prognosticator on earth is now identifying him as the Antichrist and all the rest of it, and setting dates for the coming of the Lord. The Bible is not a handbook of what's happening in the Middle East, though ultimately, as the great prophecies come to pass, you will be able to fully understand what's happening in the light of Scripture. But the Bible, even in its prophecy, has its focus on Christ. Take the last book of the Bible. To many people, it's the book of Revelations. You always know a person who doesn't know his Bible by how he pronounces the last book of the Bible. I've heard great scholarly individuals who know everything about everything talk about the book of Revelations. It just tells me they've never read the book. It's not the book of Revelations, it's the book of the Revelation. That's the first thing. But I listened to preachers preach on it, and you would think it was the Revelation of the Pope. or it was the revelation of the beast, or it was the revelation of the common market, or it was the revelation of the Roman Empire. All those things are touched upon in the book of the Revelation, but in the first chapter, you are told what the focus of the book is. It is the revelation of Jesus Christ. I am amazed when I hear preachers preach through the book, and I never hear the name of Jesus Christ. I never hear the way of salvation. I never hear of the blood atonement. They can go through a book that has as its chief title for Jesus Christ, The Lamb, and they never preach about the cross. Now, there's something wrong when we miss the focus of Scripture. Jesus Christ is the focus of the book. Every one of the 66 books has its ultimate meaning in him. There is one God, said Paul. There is one mediator between God and man. There is one salvation. There is one way of salvation from Adam throughout the Old Testament right through to the end of the New Testament. There is only one way to eternal life, and there is certainly no hope for anybody outside of Jesus Christ. He came into the world and He says, in the volume of the book, it is written of Me. He is the focus of Scripture. The second great subject that He addressed in His message at His incarnation was concerning Himself. He spoke of the Savior. Now, I'm going just to give you an outline, and I'm going to use a strange type of terminology right at the beginning, but I do it deliberately for a couple of good reasons. The text speaks of three important things about the Savior. It speaks of what I will call his very body. Now, I use the word very in its ancient theological meaning. In the Nicene Creed, Christ is called very God of very God, or true God of true God. and very man of very man. This text speaks of his true body. The apostle knew what he was writing here. The Holy Ghost had a tremendously important point to make. Even at that early day in the church's history, there was an entire movement getting underway. It was called the Gnostic Heresy, and it had various branches. The Dosetics among them, taking their name from the Greek verb which means to seem or to appear, they were saying the body of Christ was merely a fantastic thing, a phantom. It had the appearance of a body, but it wasn't a real body, because according to the Gnostics, anything material must be inherently evil. I'm not getting into their wild theorizings, except just to point this out. When he came into the world, he says, A body thou hast prepared me. not merely the appearance of a body, but a very body, a true body. As Paul says, he is bone of our bone, he is flesh of our flesh. It is a true humanity that Jesus Christ took into union with his eternal deity, not merely an appearance of humanity, Now, I have to emphasize this, because this is something upon which good men have often gone wrong. In the last century, two great men, as far as their widespread fame and their usefulness was concerned, went right off the lines here. One was Benjamin Wills Newton, and the other was J. M. Darby. And here is a strange thing. When Newton went off on the humanity of Christ, J. M. Darby opposed him. Newton, immediately being a great and godly and humble man, though one of the greatest scholars in the world in his day, he humbly acknowledged, I have made a mistake, a terrible mistake, and I totally withdraw it. And then J. N. Darby went on, having opposed him, to establish the very doctrine that he had condemned in Newton, two great men, and they made a terrible mistake. They used to call this the heavenly humanity of Christ. You know, there's no such thing. If he is a heavenly humanity, we're all lost. If something other than true humanity could redeem humanity, God only needed to create an angel and send him. But no angel, no alien substance, if I could put it that way, could ever redeem mankind. There's a great Unitarian theologian by the name of Canning who mocked the Reformed and Orthodox doctrine of the redemption that's in Christ by saying that no alien person could come in. and take our place and die in our stead and pay our debt. Of course, he was right. But where he was wrong was that Jesus Christ is no alien. He is truly man, a very body. But it speaks of his virgin birth because it says, a body thou hast prepared me. And that little statement of the apostle Paul here in Hebrews 10 is a reference to the constant witness of the New Testament to the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. He was not born of natural generation. Had he been, he would have been in the very same boat as all the rest of us. He was born, as we have read this morning in the gospel of Luke, he was born of that miracle. of the Holy Ghost overshadowing the womb of the Virgin Mary. Now, we get into something here that is very, very holy, and it's impossible for us to describe. How can you analyze a miracle? If you could do that, it wouldn't be a miracle. So I've got to be careful what I say. But it has become sort of popular in orthodox circles, to speak of the humanity of Christ as being begotten by the Holy Spirit. It doesn't sound that that's a great heresy, but it's simply not true. It's simply not true. Because behind it there is this notion that all that the Virgin Mary was was a container. I can't really think of a better word. That's all she was. And without wanting to sound flippant, she could have as well been made of plastic as made of flesh and blood, because she actually contributed nothing. She simply was the container, the channel. And the Holy Spirit did a miracle and created a new thing, and she simply carried it along, but it had nothing to do with her actual flesh and blood. That has become very popular, especially in orthodox circles. But it's far from orthodox. We get back to this very body of Christ. We get back to this true humanity of Christ, and our entire salvation depends on the reality of the humanity of Christ. How did Paul put it in Galatians 4 and verse 4? When the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son. What does it then say? Made of a woman. That miracle that took place in the womb of the Virgin Mary was unspeakably great, indescribable, but essentially it was God the Holy Spirit so moving and so sanctifying the substance of the Virgin Mary, so working miraculously upon it, that from her substance without any human paternity, From her, the seed of the woman, as Genesis 3.15 calls it, he produced the true humanity of Jesus Christ. And from the very first instance of that creation, that humanity was in personal union with the eternal Word of God. His virgin birth. Born of a virgin. That's what Christ is claiming at his incarnation. But you know, the birth of Christ was not an end in itself, and he and his apostles never made it so. That's why I think very wisely. In Scripture, there is no festival for the birth of Christ. I'm very happy, like C. H. Spurgeon, I'm very happy to use the Christmas period when people are willing to hear about the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. I'm very happy to employ that. But it is not a holy day. There's only one holy day in the calendar of New Testament Christians, and that's the Sabbath day, the Christian Sabbath, the first day of the week, the Lord's Day. That's the only holy day there is. When you get into other holy days, Paul says, I'm afraid for you. that you're going back into Jewish ritual and getting away from the doctrine of grace. And I think one reason why the New Testament does not lay any stress upon the observance of the birth of Christ is that, given the romanticism and the triviality that is natural to all of us, men would focus so much upon the birth, they would think that that was an end in itself. And that's not just speculation on my part. If it were my purpose today, I could take you through a whole line of theology from the Roman Catholic Church into the Episcopalian tradition, and I could show you that they lost out in the gospel because they adopted the notion that the salvation of humanity is in the incarnation in itself. I could also show you that liberal theology has taken the very same position, that in the incarnation, which of course they don't mean in strict biblical terms. They mean it in the terms of a German theologian by the name of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who made Christ just the ideal man. that's beside the point. Still, they say in the incarnation, humanity is reconciled to God. In the incarnation, by virtue of it itself, nothing else. The whole of humanity—and that means every individual who ever lived—is reconciled to God, but that's not what the Bible teaches. The Bible makes the birth a means to an end. It is not the end in itself. The virgin birth is of surpassing importance, but only because it leads to the vicarious death of Christ. And the Lord Jesus here says, "'Lo, I come in the volume of the book it is written of me to do thy will.'" What does He mean? The following verses tell us that He means, verse 10, the offering of His body once and for all for our sins on Calvary. So here is the message of Christ about Himself. He speaks of His very body, He speaks of His virgin birth, and He speaks of His vicarious death. Now that all channels to the final great subject with which He deals at His incarnation, and that's the subject of salvation. When you understand what I've been saying so far, then you'll understand what He says about the standard required for men to be saved. The standard is absolutely perfect obedience to the will of God. How can sinners be saved? By absolutely perfect obedience to the will of God, that they be without original sin and that they be without actual transgression. For nothing that defileth shall enter into heaven. I think I've mentioned to you before when I worked in the insurance business with A bunch of people, one of them was a very devout young Roman Catholic lady, and she said to me one day, you know, you couldn't be going to heaven because only perfection can enter into heaven. And she nearly died when I said, Gwen, you're absolutely right. The standard for salvation is a righteousness that can stand up under the scrutiny of the eyes of God, with which God can find absolutely no fault. So then, what's the way of salvation? How can sinners be saved? This is what the Lord Jesus is here addressing. He says, sacrifice and offering. thou wouldst not. In burnt sacrifices and sacrifices for sin, you have no pleasure." What is he saying? He's saying, first, you're not going to be saved by legal righteousness. You're not going to be saved by trying to keep the law. If it takes absolute perfection to get into heaven, then you and I can never get into heaven by trying to keep the law, because we're not absolutely perfect in anything we do. Furthermore, he's saying that you're not saved by legal ritual. The slaughter of bulls and of lambs and of goats and of doves and of various other animals of sacrifice can never put away your sin. He's saying, although that Old Testament ritual was but a picture book, it was but a book of types and shadows, it was but pointing forward to the great reality. But if you put your trust in a shadow, you're not going to be saved. You can't be saved by legal righteousness. You can't be saved by legal ritual. And I want to tell you, it doesn't matter what ritual you put in there. Churches nowadays, of course, don't bring lambs up and slaughter them in the altar, but they have their own ritual. There are millions across the world who are taught in many denominations that by simply having the waters of baptism applied to them by that very ritual, They're reconciled to God. They're saved. There are millions others, and they're taught that when they take a little wafer of flour and water at the mumbo-jumbo of a priest, it becomes the very deity and humanity of Christ, and as soon as they eat it, they are thereby made right with God. Doesn't matter what your ritual is, doesn't matter whether it's Protestant ritual, Roman Catholic ritual, evangelical ritual, liberal ritual, it doesn't matter what your ritual is. He's saying you can't be saved by ritual. What he's saying is you can only be saved by redemption. We can only be saved by the satisfaction which Christ offered to God. Notice this, I come to do thy will. later in this very portion of Scripture, it goes on to say, by the witch will we have been sanctified. Now, stop and think. We tend to read through the Bible so easily, you know, that these deliberate points of tension and apparent paradox are missed. Jesus had to come to do the will of God, that will that we couldn't keep and couldn't satisfy. And then it says, by that will we are saved. That not only means that God wills our salvation, but it means that the will of God, expressed in the law of God, has been perfectly satisfied by Christ who came to do His will. He did the Father's will. He absolutely met the standards of the broken law. He kept its precept. And on the cross, when He shed His blood, He paid its penalty. The old hymn put it beautifully. I love to think of these words, Jehovah bade his sword awake. Christ it woke against thee, thy blood the flaming blade must slake, thy heart its sheath must be, all for my sake, my peace to make, now sleeps that sword for me." You see, that is God's way of salvation. Upon a life I did not live, upon a death, I did not die. Upon another's life, another's death, I stake my whole eternity. God made him who knew no sin to be made sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. The glory of the gospel The genius of the gospel is justification by free grace through faith in the merits of Christ. When a man comes to receive Christ as his savior, the righteousness of Christ is made over to his account. The biblical word is, it is imputed. It is made over to his account. When Jesus died, He died bearing legally all the guilt of all my sin. When I stand before God legally, I am equally invested with all the righteous merit of Christ. That's why Paul could say, of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom and righteousness. Jeremiah said his name is Jehovah Sidcanu, Jehovah our righteousness. Remember what I said? It takes a perfect righteousness to get into heaven. Can you have a better righteousness than Christ? Can you have a greater perfection than Christ? Ah, when you have Christ received by faith, you have a perfect righteousness. You have the title deed of heaven. But don't insult God with a baptismal certificate. Don't insult God with a church register. Don't insult God with the list of your do's and don'ts and your efforts and your struggles and say, here is my hope for heaven, my friend. come the way of the cross, come the way of Christ, and you'll find that salvation is by the application by faith of the merits of Christ to your soul. And finally, as he deals with salvation, the Lord Jesus speaks of the experience of it, not just the way of it, but the experience of it. Christ's incarnation proclaims something that you and I need to get into our hearts and into our heads, that personal salvation is absolutely real. You know, people love to argue about things. Politics is one, and religion's another. I suppose that there are more conversations on those subjects if you come from where I come from, you add the weather. But there are more conversations on those subjects than probably any other subjects in the world. There's more talk about that even than about money. And do you see what that's saying? This is something that people talk about. It's something that people argue about. It's something that's theoretical. Something that's philosophical. But it's not real to most people. It's not real. You've only got to look at the way most people who talk about these things live, and you'll know it's not real. I've told you about the days when I was in employment in the insurance industry, and I made an effort to witness to all and sundry concerning the grace of God in Jesus Christ. I never have forgotten witnessing to a young lady there. I was only interested in giving her the gospel. Everybody else was interested because she was one of the most beautiful girls in Belfast. They were all drooling over her. I saw her as a sinner that needed to be saved. She was supposedly an atheist. She was no more an atheist than I am. And that became very clear as we talked. But I well remember a young man who would have done anything just to get talking to Marlene. he heard me speaking with her, and he saw her standing for prolonged periods of time talking to me about these things, he got on to a good thing. He was a son of a Presbyterian elder, so he decided, I'll talk about these things. And he chipped in immediately, only to unloose the tigress from her cage, and she said, You dirty little hypocrite! people like you who have people like me the way we are. You can talk about this when he's talking about it, but when the rest of the crowd are talking about their filthy yarns and their ungodly stories, you're talking about it with them. Don't you talk to me about religion." I wasn't talking to her about religion. I was talking to her about the Savior. That was the difference. You see, Salvation is real. It's absolutely real. I want you to get that. Over in Northern Ireland, we have a humorous way of putting it, that an Englishman, a Welshman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman all talked about salvation, why they liked it. The Welshman said, salvation's great because you can sing about it. Scotchman said, salvation's great because it comes for nothing. The Irishman said, salvation's great because you can fight over it. The Englishman said, salvation's great because you can talk about it. And that just sums up the national characteristics. But I love the way the old Scotchman put it. He said, salvation Man, it's better felt than told. You're better to feel it than simply talk about it. It's real. It's real. Our text calls it sanctification, set apart unto God. taken out of the fire. Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire, taken out of the fire of sin and lust and condemnation, and set apart unto God with the stamp of God upon the forehead? When Ezekiel saw the man with the inkhorn, what was the message? Destroy not the earth until these people with the mark of God upon them are set apart for salvation. can't destroy those who are set apart unto God. In this book of Hebrews, the word sanctification is the great all-encompassing word for salvation. It means regeneration, reconciliation, peace of conscience, justification, cleansing of life, consecration unto God, with even a hint of glorification yet to come. That's salvation. Now, anything less is not worth talking about. It's not worth it. R.A. Torrey, the great American evangelist, used to preach a great sermon on saving religion and saving faith. He said in four different points. I'm not going to try and get them all this morning from memory, but he said that if your religion doesn't make you a better man, it's not the true religion. It's no use. But ultimately, if your religion doesn't save your soul from hell and bring your soul to heaven, it's not the true religion. It's useless. Here's the message of Christ in his incarnation. Paul summed it up, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Here is God's salvation in his incarnate Son. recorded for us in Scripture, witnessed to us by the Holy Ghost, you can be saved and know it. Make sure today you're not just singing Christmas carols. Make sure you're not just enjoying the tinsel and the glitter of what now people call the holiday season. Make sure, my friend, that you know through the Scripture and its witness, the Savior and the salvation that only Christ can bring. For neither is there salvation in any other, for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. Let's bow our heads in prayer. Let's all pray. In just a moment this meeting will be over and you'll be free to go. I wonder as you go how you stand related to God. The old Scotch Presbyterians talk about salvation as being rightly related to God. Rightly related to God. I wonder how you stand related to God. born in a Christian home, worshiping week by week in a Christian church, reading the Scripture, singing the songs, but are you rightly related to God? Come to Christ today, man, woman, boy or girl, make sure you receive Him by faith. What is faith? Dr. Paisley sums it up beautifully, forsaking all. I trust Him. forsaking all, I trust Him. Come that way, and you'll find the truth of Jesus Christ's glorious promise, Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out. If I can help you in the things of God, I'm here as your servant for Christ's sake. I invite you to remain after the others leave. Let me open the scriptures with you. Let me give you some gospel literature. and show you how to be saved, how to be sure you're saved, and go on your way rejoicing to serve the Lord Christ. Father, bless Thy Word. We thank Thee for him who came into the world to do Thy will. Oh, we bless Thee for the volume of the book of Scripture. We thank You, Lord, for an inspired Word. And O God, we're glad that this stands impregnable like the rock of Gibraltar against all the streams of man's attack and criticism. We bless Thee for the focus of the book, which is the Lord Jesus. We thank You for the Savior. We thank Thee for His true body, His true humanity, for His virgin birth, for His vicarious atoning death. We thank Thee for the salvation which He has purchased with His blood, and now offers freely by His grace. We ask Thee, Lord, to bless those who have already received Christ, remember those who know Him not, and bring them all into Christ. Bring all our young people into the knowledge of Christ. Grant that they'll not grow up with a head knowledge, but without a heart experience of the Savior. Hear our prayer. Bless Thy word now, we ask of Thee, and give abiding fruit for it. Part us with Thy blessing. Keep us in Thy fear. Be the abiding portion of all Thy blood-bought church, both this Sabbath day and until our Lord Jesus either calls us home or comes again in all His glory, we ask in Jesus' name. Amen.