It takes but a moment to make a convert; it takes a lifetime to manufacture a saint.

We glory in our wonderful gospel of love and mercy for the unsaved, but we usually act as if we have no gospel for the saint who has been tripped up by the devil!

In the United States of America there are twenty-seven million people under twenty-one years of age who receive no Christian training at all. Juvenile crime in the big cities is tremendous – sometimes it seems absolutely out of control. Every week one million people are dying without Jesus. In one minute, eighty-five people pass into eternity. In just the brief span of a church service hundreds are passing out into the presence of God. Does that mean anything to you?

Heaven’s justice and righteousness must be recognized and maintained. Apart from grace, you find yourself bankrupt and insolvent, desperately in debt and helpless to meet God’s judgment. Therefore, your only hope is to fly to the wounded side of the Lord, who in His life kept God’s law perfectly and in His death paid the price of your rebellion.

God’s call to any man and the anointing of the Spirit for service are conditioned upon that man’s heart response.

Let a man be right with God, reconciled through the blood of the cross, humbled at the foot of Calvary; let him be broken, coming to God guilty and hopeless and needy; and at that moment God takes hold of him and transforms and uses all his gifts and qualities, until that man becomes a mighty influence. But he has first to come down from his ladder of pride to the very foot of the cross.

When you are living by faith through the darkness of circumstances, other people become aware of the radiance and sweetness of your life, and they are truly blessed. When you refuse to admit your failure, God cannot be revealed through you to others, and they may be lost for eternity. Oh, the sin of unbelief has desperate consequences, not only for yourself, but for others!

It is only the love of God shed abroad by the Holy Spirit that can cause effective repentance and cleansing – not simply Christian work or service, but the shining sweetness and fragrance of the love of Jesus Christ. It is this which touches a life that is out of adjustment to the will of God.

What we are is much more important to Him than what we do for Him. We mean far more to God than the work we do.

Return to the battle again, no longer trusting in the false and insufficient human resources which so foolishly we had taken into the battle, but now trusting in the limitless resources of our risen Lord.