Now, they are plunged in darkness.  They know nothing about our way of salvation, nothing about the pardon of sin, nothing about purity, nothing about righteousness, nothing about heaven.  We want to multiply their chances to rid themselves of sin, and to take hold upon life, and make their way in the path of peace.  And the Master seems to so think it that He says:  “Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations.”  And if they will believe it, as I read, they will be saved.  “But how can they believe if they have not heard?  And how can they hear without a preacher?  And how can they preach except they be sent?” So the Master says, Go, send quick, everywhere.  That I take to be the teaching of the Book concerning their needs.

But there is another side of it, and that is the side that swings in under the passage I have read this morning, and that is our side of it, our relation to the cause:  “If any man have not the Spirit of the Lord Jesus, he is none of his.”

Now, what is the spirit of Christ?  I will tell you:  He came not to be ministered unto.  Please remember that.  Not to see how much He could gather into His own bosom out of the lives of others.  Not to be ministered unto; not to be petted, and dandled, and lifted along and fed all the way, with no burden and no care and no work—­not that.  He came, not to be ministered unto, but to minister; to pour out of His life into the lives of others; to see what He could do to make others blest; and “to give his life a ransom for many.”  Not merely to give the little pittance that He could spare and not know it any more than one would miss the farthing with which he would buy his ride on the street car, but to give His life a ransom for many.  And if any man have not that spirit, he is none of His.

Now I preach you a doctrine of salvation by faith only, and I put the emphasis on the word only.  That is exactly what I need as a sinner:  I want some sort of release from my past transgressions that will give me a new start.  I have gotten behind; I am borrowing money to pay interest with, and I see no way out.  I must have a spiritual bankruptcy law.  Somebody must come in to my relief, or I am everlastingly undone.  And so I preach this blest doctrine of the Book of God:  “By grace are ye saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves:  it (the salvation) is the gift of God.”  I take salvation as a divine gift, and take it with a glad heart.  It gives me a new chance; it unhinges my present struggle for heaven from the past transgressions of my life, and gives me an open door to heaven that I could not reach on any other platform.  And so I preach this doctrine to sinners, knowing that it is exactly what they need.