Where would you and I have been if sin had been followed by immediate catastrophe?  While the foot of Christ is fleet as that of a roebuck when He comes to save, it does seem as if he were hoppled with great languors and infinite lethargies when He comes to punish.  Oh, I celebrate God’s slowness, God’s retardation, God’s putting off the retribution!  Do you not think, my brother, it would be a great deal better for us to exchange our impatient hypercriticism of Providence because this man, by watering of stock, makes a million dollars in one day, and another man rides on in one bloated iniquity year after year—­would it not be better for us to exchange that impatient hypercriticism for gratitude everlasting that God let us who were wicked live, though we deserved nothing but capsize and demolition?  Oh, I celebrate God’s slowness!  The slower the rail-train comes the better, if the drawbridge is off.

How long have you, my brother, lived unforgiven?  Fifteen, twenty, forty, sixty years?  Lived through great awakenings, lived through domestic sorrow, lived through commercial calamity, lived through providential crises that startled nations, and you are living yet, strangers to God, and with no hope for a great future into which you may be precipitated.  Oh, would it not be better for us to get our nature through the Grace of Christ revolutionized and transfigured?  For I want you to know that God sometimes changes His gait, and instead of the deliberate tread He is the swift witness, and sometimes the enemies of God are suddenly destroyed, and that without remedy.

Make God your ally.  What an offer that is!  Do not fight against Him.  Do not contend against your best interests.  Yield this morning to the best impulse of your heart, and that is toward Christ and heaven.  Do not fight the Lord that made you and offers to redeem you.

Philip of France went out with his army, with bows and arrows, to fight King Edward III. of England; but just as they got into the critical moment of the battle, a shower of rain came and relaxed the bow-strings so that they were of no effect, and Philip and his army were worsted.  And all your weaponry against God will be as nothing when he rains upon you discomfiture from the heavens.  Do not fight the Lord any longer.  Change allegiance.  Take down the old flag of sin, run up the new flag of grace.  It does not take the Lord Jesus Christ the thousandth part of a second to convert you if you will only surrender, be willing to be saved.  The American Congress was in anxiety during the Revolutionary War while awaiting to hear news from the conflict between Washington and Cornwallis, and the anxiety became intense and almost unbearable as the days went by.  When the news came at last that Cornwallis had surrendered and the war was practically over, so great was the excitement that the doorkeeper of the House of Congress dropped dead from joyful excitement.  And if this long war between your soul and God should come to an end this morning by your entire surrender, the war forever over, the news would very soon reach the heavens, and nothing but the supernatural health of your loved ones before the throne would keep them from being prostrated with overjoy at the cessation of all spiritual hostilities.