ADDRESSES ON ROMANS not to your credit. God gave you Chtistian parents perhaps. an open Bible, restraint on every hand. Why? To lead you "to repentance" (verse 4). And if you reject His grace, then you justly bring upon yourself His wrath. Nicodemus represents all that culture, education, and influence can do for a man, humanly speaking; but to him the Lord Jesus said: "Ye must be born again" (John 3:3-8). This is the imperative of Christianity: "Ye must be born again!" To be circumstantially righteous - as men term "righteous"; to be kind and generous and philanthropic and moral because of repressive influences and environment and early training-these things can not fit the sinner for the presence of God. To condemn the harlot, yet to be filled with pride; to praise virtue while practicing vice, may be all that man requires, but not so with a holy God. An unsaved man in the city of Chicago was showing his Christian friend his beautiful new home. One thing for which he was especially thankful was the fact that the poor and the base and the low were not his neighbors; he lived in a very select community. But almost with every sentence he took the name of the Lord in vain. Little did he care that because of "the hardness" of his "impenitent heart" he was treasuring up the "wrath" of God. Little did he care that, like the rich man "in torments," he could take no riches into eternity. To the rich man in torment Abraham said, "Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things. and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented" (Luke 16:25). The memory of rejected light, eternal life spurned, is the portion of the lost, never-dying soul. In verses 6-16 of chapter two Paul puts before the moral- ist the principles that will govern the righteous judgment of God: 1. THE JuoGMENT OF Goo WILL BE AccoRDING TO DEEDS, verses 6-10. It will not be according to words or profession. This does not refer to salvation by works, for no [Page 33
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