Faith and Duty: Sermons on Free Texts, with Reference to the Church-YearBuchheimer, L. B. (Louis Balthaser)
Religion
Faith and Duty: Sermons on Free Texts, with Reference to the Church-Year
Buchheimer, L. B. (Louis Balthaser)
Church year sermons; Lutheran Church -- Sermons; Sermons, American
But does not the Record here, verse 12, and the Bible _elsewhere_,
emphasize that we will be judged according to our works, according
to what we have done? Indeed, but this does not contradict salvation
by faith in Christ Jesus; our faith, to prove itself genuine, must
work and does work. If there are no works, we may rest assured
there is no faith. At the last day our works will be inquired into
to ascertain the nature of our faith. If there is no love toward
the brethren of Jesus, no manifestation of Christ's Spirit toward
Christ's suffering members, we may take it for granted that faith
is dead. Our works come into account as fruits of our faith;
but faith in Christ Jesus is the principle on which all stand or
fall, for--what will the outcome of that final judgment be? "And
they shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous
into life eternal." The Bible everywhere speaks, in connection
with the Day of Judgment, of mankind being separated into two
distinct portions. Now the wheat and tares grow together. There is
a difference between them, even at the present, which the skilled
eye in many instances can detect, but, as yet, they run together,
and there is no severance of them into separate fields or pastures.
It will not always be so. Infidels and Christians will one day
cease to live under the same roof, or believers and unbelievers to
be unequally yoked together, or the children of the devil and the
children of God to be intermingled in the same families, firms, and
societies. When men come to appear before their Judge, the record
is: "He shall separate them one from another, and shall set the good
as sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left." In ancient
times the left and right hand of a judge meant much. To be placed on
the right hand signified acceptance, acquittal; on the left hand,
condemnation, rejection. And He shall say to them on His right hand:
"Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you
from the foundation of the world." And, addressing Himself to the
other, there break from the lips of the Judge the dark, desolating
words: "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared
for the devil and his angels." One shudders to speak them, but here
are the words from the lips of the almighty Judge Himself. Who can
alter them? On the one side is an inheritance, a realm of divine
blessedness, a kingdom which knows no evil, a life which knows no
death. On the other side gapes a lake of unquenchable fire, never,
indeed, meant or made for men. Punishments are there, and tears
that ever fall, and flames that ever burn, and miseries that never
exhaust. Exactly what it is I cannot tell, and wish that none may
ascertain. I can only rehearse the expressions of God's Word upon
the subject,--"blackness of darkness, worm that dieth not, weeping
and gnashing of teeth"; and no representation is more awful than the
one employed in the text, "a lake of fire," seething, sweltering,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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