(John - Part 15): Each on of Us Matters to God — A.W. Tozer

The Gospel Compressed Into John 3:16

The text I want to use tonight is so familiar we needn't look at it at all in our familiar King James. Everybody, for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Here, in a twenty-five word compendium, we have the Christian evangel, the message, the good news, as though God had compressed all of the meaning of the scriptures into this twenty-five word text. They say that diamonds are made from native carbon, which has been placed under tremendous pressure and crystallized, so that if we might allow our imagination to soar a bit, we would say, and could properly say, that the Holy Ghost has taken the redemptive evangel and has put it under the emotional pressure of the triune God, so unbelievably strong and powerful that it has been crystallized into this shining diamond of truth.

It is probably judged by its value to the human race, it is probably the most precious cluster of words ever to be assembled by the mind of an intelligent man. I believe that if we were to take this text which we have read here tonight and should place it on one side of some vast eternal scales, held yonder in space by some watcher and holy one who might, in the language of the scriptures, place one foot on time and one on eternity, on the sea and on the land, I believe that that one text alone, viewed, I say, and judged by its value to mankind, would prove to be of more precious use to the human race in the long run than all of the books that have ever been written since the art of writing was first invented.

There appeared in the little islands of Greece some four, five, or six hundred years before Christ a cluster of mighty minds, so mighty were they that they seemed almost to belong to another species. Their names are common names, and their books are still to be found advertised in our magazines.

You will see them. These mighty men who wrote or had written for them these mighty books, Plato and Aristotle and all that cluster of great minds, yet I believe, and I say this seriously, that if everything all of them had written could be placed in one side of a scale, and John 3, 16, and the other, that they would prove to be as light as air by comparison.

And I believe that all of the writing of all the great minds of the world, and I say this not as a very young preacher might carelessly, but I say thoughtfully, after having had a fairly good lifetime to read and think and pray, I trust some too, I do not believe that there is in all the libraries of the world now, I do not believe that all of them put together, if you were to take and bind together or put in one place, in one end of the scale, all the plays of Shakespeare and all of the sonorous compositions of Milton, and everything that Leigh Hunt and Scott and Victor Hugo and Emerson and Bacon and all the rest, all of them put together, that they had ever written, it could not mean to mankind what twenty-five words in our golden English means to the human race.

That's how highly I value John 3, 16. This is a favorite of young preachers, this John 3, 16, and yet I must say that to my knowledge, as far as I can remember, I have never preached on this text. I was trying to recall this, or trying to scrape up or dredge up out of my memory, any time that I ever may have preached on John 3, 16 down the years.

It could be that somewhere there, behind the veil of forgetfulness, I have or did preach on this text. But I cannot recall it, and I am quite sure that I have never used it as a text since I have been in Chicago these twenty-five years.

But I have quoted it, I suppose, fifteen or twenty thousand times in prayer and in testimony and in writing and in preaching, though never used it for a text. And I never quite knew why I couldn't get to this text.

And then I was reading just a few verses here the last week from Ellicott, the new, not new really, but newly brought out, one of the noble old commentators of a hundred or more years ago, now brought out by Zondervan, called the Ellicott Commentaries.

I think there are only one or two books out now, but they'll be all out, I understand. And the old, wise old Saint of God came to John 3, 16, and he said something to this effect. Now, I don't tend to say much about this text.

He said, this is a favorite of young preachers. But older preachers feel that it's better felt than talked about. So I'm going to confine my comment on this text to the minimum, and it did. He said very little on John 3, 16.

And I have held back from this text, as I say, most of my preaching lifetime, if not all of it, making allowance for a possible slip of memory somewhere. And I have avoided it, not because I did not and do not appreciate it, but because I appreciate it so profoundly that I'm frightened by it.

My reason for avoiding it, as near as I can recall them, would be, or recollect them out of my mind, would be, an overwhelming sense of inadequacy, almost despair, at the thought of marked weakness in the presence of a task which takes tremendous strength.

And knowing, as I do know, that I am marked by deep ignorance, and it seems to me that anyone to preach on John 3, 16 ought to have a. And then, when I also think how by nature unfeeling I am and how hard, and anyone to preach on John 3, 16 confronts a task that requires a great sympathy and a generous love for God and men.

Therefore, I recommend that young preachers lay away the truths they can learn about this text, but never preach on it for a long time. Preach around it, but don't preach on it. And yet, here it is. I have been preaching on John, and I have come up to it, and this burning bush is before us in the way.

And I cannot go around it, and I dare not flee from it. So I approach it. I approach it as one who is filled with great fear yet great fascination. And with my shoes off, my heart shoes at least, I want to talk about John 3, 16.

I think I'll probably not get beyond the first line. Tonight, for God so loved the world. Now, I believe, as I have said, that in this line alone, I believe that the important part of the New Testament evangelist here confess, worthy of the annunciation by an archangel, that God so loved the world.

Now, this can be restated, and that's really all that I can do with it. I cannot hope ever to run up any ramp and take off. I can only hope to restate it in familiar and say that restated in personal terms, it means this.

God’s Love Means That Each Person Matters

To me, it means that I mean something to God. I want you to write that down in your hearts and think about it. God so loved the world means to me in personal terms, I mean something to God. I matter to him.

God is emotionally concerned about me. Now, if I said those three things to you and sent you off with a benediction, if you have been listening with your heart as well as your ears, it would have been and will have been well worthy of your trip here, no matter how far you come, that God so loved the world, restated in personal terms, means that God is emotionally concerned about me.

That I matter to God, I mean something to him. Here is one of the strange paradoxes. It's funny, isn't it, how preachers talk about paradoxes? I never heard anybody else talk about it. My son told me he'd been attending some political meetings and he said no politician can ever say yes in less than 25 words.

He said he never can say yes in less than 25. I think he's generous there. But politicians never have used the word, to my knowledge, paradox. It's remained for the preachers to use the word paradox. And in case you don't know what paradox means, it means an apparent contradiction that really isn't a contradiction at all.

And here is a strange contradiction in human nature, that a man may reek with pride and be swollen with offensive egoism and struck like a poultry pigeon, and yet at the same time deep within him he may be filled with a great loneliness, a heavy sense of orphanage, that he has been orphaned and that there isn't a father to whom he can run.

There isn't a mother under whose kind hand he can run for comfort. There isn't anywhere anybody that's emotionally concerned about him outside of his own narrow little family that will die a long living.

And the result of this strange sense of loneliness and cosmic orphanage may be summed up like this, or the feeling we have about it, that for me as a person nobody cares. I matter to nobody except a little mortal circle around me, and when they go then I'll matter to nobody.

They'll bury me and pay a mound amount of money to a company and give it what they call perpetual care nowadays. And perpetual care probably means till the second generation's dead. And then they may conveniently forget their perpetuity.

But there the man lies. And this is the heavy burden of the race. My brethren, when Jesus said, Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, he didn't invite tired people to him, although tired people are welcome to come.

He didn't invite to him those who have been economically oppressed, though they also are welcome to come. He did not invite to him those who have been politically oppressed, as the Jews were under the Romans.

No, no, they can come too. But he invited to him those who are inwardly tired and emotionally fatigued, with the heavy pressure of the knowledge, or at least the belief, that in the vast universe they don't matter to anybody, that in the wild, vast world nobody actually cares, that there's no one emotionally concerned with them.

I mean, of course, except your own little flock around you, with their limited time and their limited ability. But in the great vast world we're there. There's nobody that cares. I don't matter. And there we have it, this strange paradox tearing at the human heart.

Here in one side is an egoism that is offensive and rampant, and makes a man boast and lie and strut. And on the other hand, deep within him he's a whimpering, frightened, homesick, heart sick, broken boy, knowing that there isn't anybody in the universe that's emotionally concerned.

He doesn't matter to anybody. God has made us as we are, so vast, so huge, inside of such tremendous proportions intellectually and spiritually. And then sin has brought to us this sense of orphanage, this sense of having been put out of our father's house, and then the house burnt down and the father died.

I know it's all mixed up, I know it's all crazy, I know it isn't true, but that's the trouble with the world. Sin has done that. And the same devil that once came and said, hey, has God said, was really saying, in effect, you don't matter to God.

Has God said to you, well, God lied. God doesn't have any emotional connection with you. You don't matter to God. God isn't concerned about you, and he believes a lie. And sin came into the world with all its woes and its ugly trail of death alone behind it.

And there we find ourselves now, and that's the trouble with the world. That's why men rise like Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin and the rest, and try to immortalize themselves, and try to arrange it so that when they're gone, somebody will care.

That is why, as the poet said, when he was a little boy, I wrote on high a name I deemed would never die. And when he went back at 80 years of age and saw his name carved there in his crude boyish lettering, he smiled and was ashamed, and yet wrote his beautiful poem.

And when he was a lad, he wrote on high a name he deemed would never die. It's that craving to matter to somebody, to mean something to somebody, to have somebody that amounts to something emotionally concerned with us as persons.

The Individual Versus the Masses

Now, the hour in which we live happens to be the hour of a great humanitarianism. Or rather, I should not say a great humanitarianism, I should say a great humanism. For the two are not the same, and I mean the latter, not the former.

We think of the human race in a lump. We think of the human race statistically, and we think of it as we might think of a breed of a hen, as something very populous and related intrinsically. But the individual doesn't matter, and that is the curse of statism.

That is the curse of the totalitarian government, such as old Rome in her day, and such as Nazism was, and fascism, and now the curse of communism. The state means everything. The organization means everything, but the individual means nothing at all.

And the Christian evangelist comes into that wondrously alight and says, you matter to God. You as an individual matter to God. God isn't thinking in terms of general species. He's thinking in terms of individuals always.

When the Son of God walked the earth, he always called individuals to him. While he preached to the multitudes, he did not preach to them en masse, as though they were a faceless crowd. He preached to them as individuals, that he knew each one.

These individuals mattered to him. And so the woman taken into adultery, lying there in the dust, ready to be stoned to death, was raised gently to her feet and sent away, and told that God would forgive her to go and sin no more.

And the mother was a crippled baby that she brought to Jesus that had been kicked around and pushed everywhere, until she had no feeling anymore that that babe or she amounted to anything in the vast world, was selected out of the crowd and thumbed over and touched and blessed.

And Jesus blessed the baby and called his name. Statistics, statistics. Jesus doesn't know statistics. He doesn't deal in them. He deals in individuals. And the Christian message is, God loves the world, and God doesn't love masses.

He loves people, individuals, and loves masses only because they're composed as individuals. But the world doesn't know that. I think I'm beginning to understand, as I talk, Cryer Boote said, if I could get everybody in the world to believe God loved them, I'd get everybody in the world converted.

Nature, Death, and the Sense of Cosmic Orphanage

I think that was an overstatement, but at least I believe I know what he meant. Now, this deep feeling the devil planted in us that we don't matter to anybody is confirmed by observation. All you have to do is look around you and see, and you will find that nature alone, for instance, appears to be very little concerned with the individual.

Very, very much concerned with the species, but very little concerned with the individual. Chris Tennyson said of nature, so careful of the type she seems, so careless of the single life. And so nature has planted deep within every normal human being a tremendous urge for self-propagation.

And that urge begins in babyhood and doesn't die till we die. And that urge guarantees the perpetuation of the race. And yet, when the individual has perpetuated his kind, he dies and goes back to dust.

And there isn't a spot, scarcely anywhere, but that is tainted or blessed as you like with the dust of men, for once they have been and are no more. And if we take the wings of the morning, says the poet, and the barrack and desert pier, and hear nothing but the sound of the splashings of the great Amazon, yet even there the dead are.

And all the tribes that walk the earth are but a handful to the tribes that slumber in its bosom, since the long flight of years began, matron and maid and soldier, and old man in the gray bloom of his old age, and kings, and learned men, and fools, and wise men, all lie down together, dead brain there alone.

Nature seems to confirm that idea, that you and I don't matter in the great vast universe. Who cares about the past generation? You want to check on that? Go out to a cemetery somewhere, as I sometimes do, and don't say I'm morbid, I'm not.

Go out to a cemetery and look around. Who's alive to care about that old man there? There he lies, he's been dead 200 years. Who's alive to care about him? His great-great-great-great-grandchildren may carelessly come with their camera, and between the joke and the wisecrack snap, old great-great-great-great-grandfather's old bent and leaning stone that tells where he lies.

Who cares about him? He's all round in earth's diurnal turns with rocks, and stones, and trees, and he matters no more than the rock there on the hillside. Few there are that care when we live, and fewer still when we die, and when they die, nobody cares.

God’s Concern for the Forgotten and Forsaken

Now Christian message comes and says, God cares. Christian message comes to the tramp, that old tramp. Once he was a shining lad, crawling across the floor with shining face, and dripping chin, and shining eyes, and his parents ran to grab him, and stood him up on his wobbly legs, and grabbed him when he fell.

He meant something to somebody. But they're gone, and the society has not done right by him, and he hasn't done right by society, and now he's a bum tramp. Old clothes that fit him as if he had been born in them.

Every wrinkle, every crease in his old tired body, his clothing fitted now, greased to him, and his old feet in shoes that fit him, fit his feet as though they too had been stretched on, and the whole body alive with dirt and toothy smelling, of every place that he's been in the last 15 years.

And if he is sober enough to think, he'll be saying and thinking within himself, well here I am, why am I here? Nobody cares. I don't mean anything to anybody. There isn't anybody anywhere emotionally concerned about me.

My father's gone, my mother's gone, my brother's gone to some other part of the world. He's forgotten that I live. When a policeman comes, I duck. But if I don't duck, I get told to move on, buddy. And I've been turned out of all the places that bombs even are taken.

So with a deep sense of sadness and complete orphanage, as though all that meant anything had died. He was alone in a vast and gusty universe, blown about like dust, grains, or leaves of autumn, meaning nothing to anybody, nobody concerned, nobody caring.

Mr. Evangelist said, wait a minute, you, dirt and whiskers and smell, and hollow, sunken cheek. Wait a minute. Somebody is emotionally concerned about you. Somebody isn't happy because you're the way you are.

Somebody knows your name and remembers you and loves you where you are and as you are. You mean something to somebody. Who do I mean anything to? The girl I once knew 30 years ago has long forgotten me.

My parents are gone long, long. Nobody cares for me. And then the smiling worker says, God so loved that he gave his only begotten son that whoever would in you were included, believe in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.

And I'm here from God to tell you that you do matter. You don't matter to Mayor Kennelly. You don't matter to Chief O 'Connor. You don't matter to Edgar Hoover. You don't matter to President Eisenhower.

You matter to God. There is somebody that mounts to something in the world to whom you matter. Somebody cares about you. That's the high compression. That's the shining passage of the diamond of truth, which God has thrown almost with happy carelessness out to the world and says, take it.

And there's that wounded soldier. And all I can learn, I suppose, the most complete loneliness that can possibly come to a human being would be to have all your company march on before and lie wounded in an enemy country, surrounded by no one whose language you can speak and surrounded by thousands who would kill you on sight, the cold, cold settling down on the evening.

And there you are, bloody on the hard, frozen ground. One of my boys lay like that, and I suppose that's the loneliest, most complete sense of forsakenness and abandonment. Your pal, your buddy, the commanding officer, the drop voice sergeant, everybody's gone on and left you.

The firing is in the distance, and you're alone. And if you're dying, thank God you wasn't and didn't die. But if you're dying in that last moment, even the stars are cold and full of accusation. And the hard, biting wind that pierces your torn-and-bloody uniform confirms what you've always feared.

Nobody cares. Nobody cares. I was a number to Uncle Sam. Now nobody cares. Nobody. And the Christian message comes smiling up and says, somebody does care. You're only a number to the Army, but you're a living, breathing, pulsating human being made in the image of God and the God in whose image you are made cares.

You amount to something to God. You're a treasure to God. You matter. And I imagine that there were many, many, many boys brought up in Baptist churches and Presbyterian churches and Alliance churches and other gospel churches throughout our great broad country, among that what was it, 20 ,000 or so that died in Korea.

I imagine that there were many, many of them that in that last hour, when loneliness seized upon them and they felt a sense of orphanage, remembered the text that they had memorized and gotten a little cheap prize for memorizing when they were in Sunday school.

They're lying with their last flickering breath. They turned their eyes upward to the God above and said, O God, when I was a boy they told me I mattered. Is it any different now? Have you changed your mind, God?

When I was a boy in Sunday school they told me that you were emotionally concerned about me. O God, is it any different now that I'm a big man and I've carried a gun and sinned? Is it any different now, God?

And somewhere within them the old memories came back and the ancient voice of God said, No, boy, I'm still not happy about your condition. For I so loved you that I gave my only begotten Son that whoever believed in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

The Thief on the Cross and the Reach of Grace

I wouldn't go indiscriminately and say it, but I'm quite certain that there are mothers grieving over boys they believed are in hell tonight, boys that will greet them in that happy day. Do you not think that the thief on the cross had a mother?

He was not an old man. He was a young man. Do you not think the thief on the cross had a mother? And do you not think the thief on the cross when he was dying there was in the tender heart of his mother?

And do you not suppose that that mother thought, I've failed him and society's failed him and he's failed society and he's dying a criminal, crucified on a cross, my boy, my boy? But what she didn't know was that the one who cared was within touching distance.

What she didn't know was that that outcast, that young rebel and traitor, turned his eyes to the one who cared and said, Remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom. And he said, This day shalt thou be with me in paradise.

All she knew was that her boy had died by execution and her hair was grayer and her face more tired and her wrinkles deeper and her gloom heavier. When the day was over and she knew her boy was dead, but what she didn't know was that somebody in that universe beside her cared and that that boy mattered to somebody beside his mother.

That there was somebody that wasn't happy about that thief dying a criminal and going to hell. That there was somebody who was emotionally wrought up about this. That man meant something. He had gone there from a cell, a number, and gone to the execution.

But now he matters. Suddenly he becomes significant and there isn't an angel in the wind choir above more significant than he. His name sounds yonder in God Almighty's heaven because the Christian message says, God so loved.

And that love is not the love for a species, but the love for individuals. And it was people that he loved. Jesus' lover of my soul. Not Jesus' lover of the human race, but Jesus' lover of my soul. In one strict sense, there is no human race.

It is composed of individuals, and if you take away the individuals, you have no human race. There is such a thing as a crowd, but in yet another sense there is no such a thing as a crowd. Evangelists love crowds, crowd mad these days.

They look out upon them as crowds. In one sense there is no such a thing as a crowd, for a crowd is simply a congregation of individuals. And every individual has eternal significance and meaning in the heart of God.

God’s Unchanging Concern for the Suffering

God so loved. God is emotionally concerned with the individual. That prisoner yonder may be in a prison camp, cursed and beaten and half-starved and threatened and brainwashed and cuffed around until he has been made to believe his own country has turned on him.

Lies have been told him his own country has been produced until his mind is filled with a belief that even his own people don't care anymore. Nobody cares. His country has deserted him. Nobody cares. And after months and months of anemia and a deep fatigue that for no amount of rest can cure, he arrives at that place where he can't shake it off by shaking his head anymore.

The great sense of cosmic loneliness, orphanage, somebody's death that used to care. And the Christian message comes and says, No, sonny, you've had a rough time of it. Maybe some people back home are forgotten.

Maybe the girl that swore at the station she'd be true to the end is married to somebody else now. Maybe your company has written you off and you've been notified as missing in action. Your folks don't know you're alive at all.

Maybe your people back home are dead. Maybe for all you know, sonny, your country has gone over to the other side. But I have a message for you. There is somebody that doesn't change. And there is somebody that cares.

And he's not happy about you. And he'll never be happy about you till you're safe in his bosom. He'll never feel good about you until you, he's single, alone you, with all of your discouragement and gloom and weariness, until you have come back into his heart and found your home there to live and to die there and live again there.

That's the Christian message, my friends. So all around the whole world we can go and we can tell them, the shipwrecked sailor and the chronic failure, the man who fails at everything he touches. Some people have success at the ends of their fingers.

They just have to touch it and it turns to gold. Other people are chronic failures. They've established a pattern of failure. Everything they do fails. They add up two times two, it turns to five. Nothing they can do wins.

And so it's failure all the way. And they say, well, it's all right, big fellas and men of popularity and men who make money, I fail at everything, I'm just no good. The English language is such an almost humorously downright blunt and accurate language.

It's no good, they say. And those two little words, no good, they just mean everything. A couple of women will say about another woman. And anybody with a little imagination could write a book on that.

Let me hear two old biddies say about some girl, she's no good. And I can write a book about the girl. I don't even need to meet her. Just use your imagination and put so much into it. No good, no good.

But you know there isn't anybody in the whole United States of America. Spill it over into Canada and down into Mexico and go on across the oceans of Europe and on around yet and come to Asia and take them all into the last twisted crippled black boy deformed in some hut in Africa.

There isn't one human being about which God says he's no good. In that sense, he says there's no unrighteous, no not one. We all must be saved and we'll all perish if we don't repent and we must all be born again.

But in the sense of being written off as no good and hopeless, there isn't anybody. Thank God there isn't anybody. And don't you listen to any of these interpreters of truth who say God has chosen some and not chosen others and the ones that he has chosen will be and the ones that he hasn't chosen are no good.

They're vessels of wrath fitted to destruction and God created them to have the fun of damning them. Don't you listen to such what Wesley called a horrible decree. There isn't anybody like that in the universe, sir.

I don't say there's good in everybody, but I say there's somebody that likes them whether they're good or not. I say there's somebody that's emotionally concerned about them. Everybody matters. And you tonight, my friend, matter.

Personal Faith in the Promise of John 3:16

Now, I repeated that over and over again, not because I have no other language, but because I want that to come home to your heart. I want you to take this out with you tonight. I want you to go away not carelessly talking about this or that, but I want you to go away saying, The one who was with the Father and who came and reported what he saw says you matter.

He came down from above not to condemn the world, but that the world might live. And whoever believes in him, whosoever is singular, believes in him, that the individual should not perish but have everlasting life.

And so there is one who is from above who came and said, This is what I saw there. I'm reporting what I saw. Everybody matters. And God's concerned about you as an individual. But you say, If only you knew me, Mr. Tozer, you wouldn't talk like that.

I don't know you, of course, all of you individually. But it wouldn't make any difference. It's still true. God is concerned about you. You say, Yes, concerned about the race? No, concerned about you.

Concerned about my family? No, concerned about you as well as your family. You, that you say, Mr. Tozer, I've sinned, I've lied, I've failed, I've made vows and broken them, I've made promises and failed to keep them, I'm no good.

Well, all I can say to you is that if you persist in your gloomy unbelief, there isn't anything even God can do for you. Because it's unbelief that tells you, at the same time your heart is swollen with pride, another part of your heart says, There's no use, I'm no good.

And God Almighty went to all the trouble to say, You are, not that you're good morally, but you're some good to God, because God's going to make you over. And he's proved that he cares by sending his only begotten Son.

That whoever believes in him shouldn't perish, but have everlasting life. I'm nearly done. I can only point out that faith cometh by hearing the word, and it begins to work as we begin to affirm. Now, if you would begin to affirm and say to God this affirmation, O God, believing thy word I affirm, I mean something to you, I affirm it, God.

You said it to me, now I say it back to thee. You're concerned about me. It might change the whole complexion of your life for all the years to come. You start saying it tonight. I matter. I matter. I'm a sinner, but I matter.

I'm hell-bound, but I'm not going to hell with nobody caring. Somebody cares beyond power to express. I matter. I all alone, I. I'm a number to the government, I'm a statistic, but to God I'm a person that matters.

Write your name in there. You know what I do sometimes? I never do this except when I'm by myself, maybe once or twice in the presence of Brother McAfee. He and I in our prayer life almost have become not two people, but one.

When I pray and quote scripture back to God, I give my three names so God won't make any mistakes. I want him to know exactly who I am. And unless there be any confusion, I remind him it's senior. Now you say that's silly, the old man going soft.

Is he falling apart in his old age? Oh, I only wish I'd fallen apart decades before I did, if that's what you mean. I won't let generalities and broad sweeps of thought and the en masse idea, I won't let that get me down.

When God says in his word that he loves, he means he loves me. I tell God my father's name and my mother's name. Where I was born, I tell God now, remember, that's who it is, God, this doing this praying and the one that we're talking about here.

I don't spend all my time praying about myself, certainly. But when I have occasion to go before God for anything and I want to know that somebody's talking to God, I tell God who my father was, Jacob Schneider Tozer.

That was his name, J. S. Tozer. And I remind him that's the boy. Well, affirm, I matter to God. And then turn to God and say, O God, I matter to you. Then you're pretty close to the kingdom, brother. I matter to you, God.

After you've said to yourself, I believe it's true, I matter. I'm a sinner, I'm on my way to hell, but somebody cares tremendously about me. And after your heart believes that, for that's part of the Christian evangelism, then you begin to pray.

Faith comes by hearing, and faith becomes perfect by praying. O God, I believe I matter to thee. You see how simple it is and how easy it is to come into the arms of God, to come back to God if you've wandered away, to come back home if you've strayed, to come to him for the first time as a sinner, and with the full confidence that God has taken the great truth, the truth the devil never discovered, the truth that mankind never dreamed of discovering, and compressed it by all the pressure of the triune God into this shining diamond of truth, and held it up as the Church's bright message.

The Invitation to Come to Christ

God, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Do you believe it? Do you believe it tonight? Say, Amen. Do you believe it? I believe it.

I believe it. How about you, friend? You're not a Christian, and we're not going to fix you up and tell you that everything's all right. It isn't all right. That word perishes in John 3 .16. Don't overlook that.