And let me remind you that the act of refusal is a very simple one.  Not to accept is to reject; not to yield is to rebel.  You have only to do nothing, to do it all.  There are dozens of people in our churches and chapels listening with self-satisfied unconcern, who have all their lives been refusing a beseeching God.  And they do not know that they ever did it!  They say, ’Oh!  I will be a Christian sometime or other.’  They cherish vague ideas that, somehow or other, they are so already.  They have done nothing at all, they have simply been absolutely indifferent and passive.  Some of you have heard sermons like this so often that they produce no effect.  ’It is the right kind of thing to say.  It is the thing we have heard a hundred times.’  Perhaps you wonder why I should be so much in earnest about the matter, and then you go outside, and discuss me or the weather, and forget all about the sermon.  And thus, once more, you reject Christ.  It is done without knowing it; done simply by doing nothing.  My brother! do not stop your ears any more against that tender, imploring love.

Then let me remind you that this refusing the beseeching of God is the climax of all folly.  For consider what it is,—­a man refusing his highest good and choosing his certain ruin.  I am afraid that people have been arguing and fighting so much of late years over disputable points in reference to the doctrine of future retribution that the indisputable fact of such retribution has lost much of its solemn power.

I pray you, brethren, to ask yourselves one question:  Is there anything, in the present or in the future condition of a man that is not reconciled to God, which explains God’s beseeching urgency?  Why this energy and intensity of divine desire?  Why this which, if it were human only, would be called passionate entreaty?  Why was it needful for Jesus Christ to die?  Why was it worth His while to bear the punishment of man’s sin?  Why should God and Christ, through all the ages, plead with unintermittent voice?  There must be some explanation of it all, and here is the explanation, ’They that hate Me love death.’  ‘Be ye reconciled to God,’ for enmity is ruin and destruction.

And finally, dear friends, this turning away from Him that speaketh from Heaven, of which some of you have all your lives been guilty, is not only supreme folly, but it is the climax of all guilt.  For there can be nothing worse, darker, arguing a nature more averse or indifferent to the highest good, than that God should plead, and I should steel my heart and deafen mine ear against His voice.  The crown of a man’s sin, because it is the disclosure of the secrets of his deepest heart as loving darkness rather than light, is turning away from the divine voice that woos us to love and to God.

Oh! there are some of you that have heard that Voice too often to be much touched by it.  There are some of you too busy to attend to it, who hear it not because of the clatter of the streets and the whir of the spindles.  There are some of you that are seeking to drown it in the shouts of mirth and revelry.  There are some of you to whom it comes muffled in the mists of doubt; but I beseech you all, look at the Cross, look at the Cross! and hear Him that hangs there pleading with you.