17
January 1928
T h e
K i n g ' s
B u s i n e s s
Christ, Our True Refuge S ermon B y E vangelist B ritton R oss ( Extension Department, Bible Institute of Los Angeles')
'Misfortuné for which we are not responsible and which we could not avert, may come upon us at any moment and overwhelm us if we have no secure refuge in such times. Sad news may come to any of us at any moment. Some of you have already had sorrow. Probably some of you have not, but you will have sooner or later. Every home becomes a house of mourning sohietime. God does not desire this. He wants all His children to be happy, and He has bent all His energies and resources to promote this purpose. Grief, like remorse of conscience, weighs with crushing weight upon those who suffer, often driving them to dis sipation, insanity or suicide in their despair. The only refuge for an accusing conscience is the love and peace of the Lord Jesus Christ. For you cannot run away from your conscience. It eats, sleeps, works and plays with you and gives, you no privacy under any circumstances. Everyone needs a refuge from sin. T h e N eed is U niversal Sin is the worst disease of all, and everybody has it. There is but one refuge from it, and that is the one men tioned in the text. You cannot play with sin any more than you can play with a 1 serpent. The most deadly, most contagious, most damnable disease that afflicts humanity is sin. It has all times and all places for its own. And there is but one remedy. There is but one Great Physician, who is unerring in His diagnosis and detection of this awful disease and is abso lute and undeviating in cubing it. There áre many roads to hell, but only one road to heaven. Every man needs a refuge from the devil. No man is able to fight with him in his own Strength. Christ alone has been able to conquer him. He first met him in the wilderness of temptation after His forty days of fasting, and gave him three such terrible blows that he was completely knocked out, and from that day to this His Spirit has met and overcome Satan in many human hearts as the battleground. I have stood on the battlefield of Waterloo and in the Pass of Thermopylae, at the foot of the Pyramids, and on the plains of Achor; but when I saw the wilderness where Jesus overcame Satan I was on the site of the most ter rible conflict that ever occurred on this old earth. This same Christ living in me has given me many times victory over the same enemy. Everyone needs a refuge from death. And here, too, Christ was first to triumph over this dread enemy of all humanity, and in Him alone can any one else conquer the man on the pale horse. Because He lives I shall live also. I do not mourn a dead Christ, neither do I mourn for dead loved ones without hope. I once dreaded the time when I should be called on to stand at the bedside of dying loved ones. With the knowledge of a risen Christ, who is living, the fear is all taken away. W ha t of t h e J udgm en t ? I hope, my Lord will come before I will be called on to meet death. You ask if I haven’t grace to die? My an-
“And a .man shall be as an hiding place from the wind; a covert from the tempest : as the shade of a great rock in a weary land." Isa. 32:2. WICE in my life I have had brought home to my heart a very vivid realization of the aptness of Isaiah’s figurative language in the text. ; One of the most striking pictures I saw in the Tate Art Gallery, in London, was that of a raging tempest sweeping trees, houses and barns before it.. In one corner was a party of frightened people observing the approaching'storm, and in another a group of awe-stricken horses, with heads erect and distended nostrils, bodies apparently all a-quiver as they intently watched the coming storm and heard its roar. In my tour of Egypt I stood on the great Pyramid of Cheops, and looked across the desert as far as the eye could see, and that is a long way in that clear atmosphere. In the opposite direction I could see across the Valley of the Nile, which stream courses its way along the center of the strip ,of valley rendered fertile and fruitful by its waters, and beyond this I could see the desert on the other side. ■On camel’s back I rode through that desert as far as the Tombs of the Kings, a parching, hot, windy journey over a desolate and weary land. Just before we reached the tombs, scorching hot and thirsty, we rounded a sand hill and came suddenly into the shadow of a huge rock, towering up out of the sands many hundreds of feet above us. It was like entering a cave; the air was delightfully cool and refreshing, making us feel like new creatures. Instantly the words of this text came into my mind, and 1 said the old prophet certainly knew what he was talking about when he spoke of the shadow of a great rock in a weary land as a grateful refuge for the wayworn traveler. What that great rock was to me that day, Jesus Christ has been to me every day since. M ay N ot R ealize N eed Every man needs a refuge, though many do not recog nize it until the oncoming storm is hard upon them. .Because they do not feel the need of fire in the summer time, many do not provide fuel for the winter blasts of snow and ice and chilly winds. They are not as wise as the ant and the bee. The devil makes it his chief business to see that men do not feel alarmed until destruction is upon them and is so near that alarm will do no good. All men need a refuge, for any man’s inner life is liable to be swept by storms of more or less violence. The storms of sorrow drive some to despair and even to self-destruction, because they have not availed them selves of the refuge God has provided for all. . Storms of misfortune are ever rendering men hopeless unless they have refuge in this covert from the tempest. Dry and fruitless are the lives of those who have never drunk of the rivers of water, living waters, supplied by Jesus Christ the Savior. The journey of life lies through a weary desert to those who have not access to the Great Rock of Salvation.
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