The Acropolis of the Christian Faith — Paul Washer

Romans 3 and the Need for Divine Help

Let's open up our Bibles to the Book of Romans, chapter 3, the Book of Romans, chapter 3. Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Father, I come before you in the name of your Son. And Lord, I know that apart from Him, I'd have no part with you.

No virtue, no merit, nothing even in all these years of walking with you. I remain with Christ alone. Father, we are such a needy people. We are so dull of ear and blind of eye. We are so weak in ourselves.

We need thee, O God. And we need your help. Lord, it is a great task. And even all our plans and strategies are wrought apart from your Word and your power. Help us tonight, and we will know that we have been helped.

Strengthen us, and we will know that we have been strengthened. We look to you with great confidence because of Him. And Father, we have no handle on you to say, Do this thing for the nations, for what are the nations before you but a drop in a bucket?

Or to do this thing for us, who are we? But Father, we would ask that you would look in the face of your dear Son and do it for Him. Do it for Him. Lord, the needs are many, and the preacher is very small.

You know, O Lord, you know. In Jesus' name, Amen. In Romans chapter 3, verse 23,. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith.

This was to demonstrate His righteousness because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed. For the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith. If I had to lose every bit of Scripture and was allowed to remain with me, to keep with me, only one passage from all the words that have ever been written through inspired men, I would choose this passage.

The Gospel as the Acropolis of Christian Faith

Down through the history, great theologians and preachers have called this the Acropolis of the Christian faith. It is the essential element of the Gospel. And apart from it, you cannot preach correctly the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now you say, well, Brother Paul, this is about missions. We need to understand a few things. Missions is not about sending missionaries. And missions is not about doing missions. Missions is about the communication of truth to men.

And you can send out all the missionaries in the world, but if they're not communicating truth, it is rot and it is flesh. Another thing that we need to understand is that we live in a day when the Gospel is not very clear.

A great sin of our age is what I would call Gospel reductionism. We have taken the glorious Gospel of our blessed God and turned it into four spiritual laws or five things God wants you to know. And if someone will say yes to all our little evangelical questions, we will popishly declare them saved if they will repeat a prayer after us.

We hear countless stories of evangelists going abroad and preaching to tens of thousands of people and all of them being converted, and yet when the missionary goes to look for them, he can't find a single one on Sunday.

We have an age of superficiality, an age of making a lot of noise. But what is being accomplished? I would submit to you that our greatest need is to rediscover the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to proclaim it.

I've always said this, especially to the young missionaries that I've dealt with, give me one man, simple enough, to walk into the middle of the town square with an open Bible and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ until someone comes out of there converted or he comes out laying on a stretcher.

We need preachers. We need men who believe that this task and women who believe that this task is so great that not all the strategies in the world can make one soul converted. There is a power of God for salvation and it is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Supremacy of the Gospel Over End-Times Speculation

And so I would like to take this time to review this Gospel. You say, but Brother Paul, we understand it. Listen to me. There's much to do today about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the correct interpretation of the Book of Revelation.

I can assure you that you will understand everything about the Book of Revelation and everything about the Second Coming on the day it occurs. But I can also assure you this, that you will spend an eternity of eternities and you will still not comprehend the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

It is not Christianity 101. And now that we've got that out of the way, after five minutes of counseling, let's go on to greater things. There is nothing greater in the Christian life than the Gospel.

There will never be anything greater than the Gospel. And there is no power to save outside of a clear proclamation of the Gospel. Now this is for the lost man and the one who has not heard. But don't think it stops there.

The greatest motivation, the only true motivation in the Christian life is what God has done for us in the person and work of Jesus Christ. I was listening to all the testimonies and hearing the singing and I was so elated.

I just wanted to buy a plane ticket and go somewhere and preach the Gospel where it hasn't been preached. But I have found that even the fire that's built up through missions conferences quickly dies down.

There has to be a stronger medicine. Something that will keep a man on the field. Something that will make a woman stay. When everything in them is screaming, it takes more than a conference. It takes the revelation of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Everything that we are and everything that we do is to be motivated by this one thing. He shed His own blood for my soul. The Christian lives between two days. The day when Christ, the Messiah, hung before men.

And the day when all men will kneel before Christ. That is our motivation. Now, let's look at this little Gospel of ours and see if we understand it as much as we think we do. First of all, let's look at the text that we learned.

Human Sin and the Need to Be Wounded by the Law

Probably the first verse that we ever learned possibly in Scripture. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. You know, when you hear something, over and over it becomes common. And when it becomes common, it loses its power.

I remember the first time crossing the Andes Mountains and I couldn't understand why the veteran missionary was asleep in the midst of all this majestic beauty. And then years later, as I took a group of young men across the same mountain, I found myself snoring.

There is a sense in which the more you hear something and the more you read something, it loses some of its majesty. It's not the fault of the text. The fault is our own. But it happens nonetheless. All have sinned.

One of the greatest problems with Gospel preaching today is we are not wounding men. We are not wounding men. Why do men not seek a Savior? Because for the most part in much preaching, men are pretty much okay.

They just need to be tweaked here and there. They've got everything they need. They just need one thing to make their perfect life a little more perfect and that's Jesus on top. And they don't understand that all men are born in sin.

Wretched and defiled and God-hating with a dark and dead heart. There is no man who seeks Him. When we go to preach the Gospel in the mission field, we must realize that our job is an absolute catastrophe and will be in failure upon failure apart from the power of God resurrecting dead men.

Not only dead men, but dead men who with whatever power is in them, whatever animation, hate God. We must in our preaching convince men, work to tell men, use the Scriptures with all our might to scream out, All have sinned.

If I jangled some keys here tonight, it would not fill your heart with joy. And do you want to know why? Because you're not locked away in a dungeon somewhere. If you were locked away in a dungeon, then the sound of keys would cause joy to spring up in your heart.

Much of Gospel preaching today has so little power. It's not very difficult to get men saved. The problem is getting them lost. All have sinned. I know we do not understand that text because if you truly understood it as a Christian, you would jump right now out of your seat, fall on the ground, and worship with joy that you've been saved from such a heinous thing.

And if you're lost here tonight, I know you do not understand the passage because you would tremble with fear to the point of death. All have sinned. A lot of popular preachers are gaining a lot of popularity today because they make it their purpose not to speak about sin.

But they go against the work of our Lord who in preaching preached sin. They go against the work of the apostles who worked with all their intellectual might, moved by the Holy Spirit to reveal the sin of men.

And most of all, I can assure you that a preacher or a missionary that does not make much of sin does not have the work of the Holy Spirit in their life because it is one of the great tasks of the Holy Spirit to convict men of sin.

And when you don't believe that, you're working against the Holy Spirit. If we look in the book of Romans, just here, we see the Apostle Paul laying out for us the closest thing we get to a systematic theology.

And yet he takes his first three chapters and he works with all his might to do one thing. To shut men off from every fleshly hope. To close them in, to lock the doors, to provide them nothing of relief in the flesh so that they will cry out to God and mercy.

All have sinned. Think about that for a moment. Do you know why people do not tremble about sin? Because they don't understand God. Because the God in America today looks more like Santa Claus than He does Yahweh of the Bible.

God’s Holiness, Human Rebellion, and the Universal Reach of Sin

All have sinned. It's as though on the day of creation, God stands there and He commands the stars to put themselves in space and they all bow and worship and obey Him. He tells planets to set themselves in orbit and to move at His decree and they all bow and obey Him.

He tells mountains to be lifted up and valleys to be cast down and they all obey Him. And then He looks at the brave sea and He says, you will come to this point and you will come no further. And the sea bows and worships.

And then He looks at man and says, come. And man goes, no. The heinous nature of sin, the revelation of that truth is the work of the Holy Spirit. And as ministers of the Gospel, we are to be kind, we are to be loving, we are to be gentle, but we are to make much of sin.

All have sinned. How much sin work do you do when you're witnessing? How much do you lay out the Scriptures before men? How much convincing do you do? I know the popular thing, the question is, do you realize you're a sinner?

If a person says yes, we go on to the next question. If a person says yes, I know I'm a sinner, it means absolutely nothing. The question is not, do you recognize you're a sinner? The devil recognizes he's a sinner.

He's a mighty fine one at that. The question is not, do you recognize you're a sinner? The question is, upon hearing the preaching of the Gospel, has God so moved in your heart that the sin you once loved, you now hate?

That the sin you once boasted of, you are now ashamed? That the sin you once clinging to, you now desire with all your might to be separated from it, to be redeemed from it? All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Modern day interpretations go something like this. It's all about man. God has a wonderful purpose for your life, but you didn't reach that glorious, wonderful purpose. That's really not the emphasis here in this text.

You have to look at this text in its context, which is Romans 1. When it means all have fallen short of the glory of God, it means although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God nor give thanks.

Man's greatest problem today is he's all about himself. He has an infinite hole in that heart of his and it cannot be filled up with all of his own self or all the world. It requires infinite. And that is God.

I'll give you an example. Just look at our Christian bookstores today. We are the most wealthy, most protected, most safe Christians who ever walked upon the face of the earth. And yet you go into these Christian bookstores and 75 of the books deal with how empty we are.

Why are we so empty? For the same reason Jesus Christ never was. He said, I have food to eat that you know not of. My food is to do the will of Him who sent me. All about self. Men are full of self. Men do not need more self esteem.

They need to realize that that is their greatest problem and what they need is to esteem the only one who is worthy of esteem and that is God. To lose themselves in Him. But in order to preach this way, in order to have a gospel this way, men must know who God is.

The Gospel Begins With God’s Attributes

If I were to give a conference on how to get a good life in this age, if I were to give a conference on how to balance your checkbook in the name of Jesus, I could fill up an auditorium. But what if I gave a conference on simply the attributes of God?

Do you realize that Sunday morning is one of the greatest hours of idolatry in America? Because the people worship what they do not know. If I were to pass out even here right now, a piece of paper saying, write out for me, just classical historical Christianity, a description of the attributes of God along with a few texts.

Do you realize that so many people today worship a God that is no God at all, even in our churches. They worship a God they've made with their own mind and they worship what they've made. One of the greatest needs in our evangelism is to teach men who God is.

The gospel begins not with man, but it begins with who God truly is. Because therein lies the problem. If God was not who God is, then sin would not be the problem that it is. But sin is the problem that it is because God happens to be not only love, but holy and just.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Another thing that is very important to understand is that sin has consequences and they're not natural. Death is not a natural consequence of sin.

It is a supernatural consequence of sin. It is the judgment of God. There is a thing called wrath. There is a thing called justice. There is a thing called holiness. There is a sense in which God will judge every man according to his deeds.

There is a sense that God will pronounce judgment upon all men and many men will be placed in hell by the very Word of God. God will make the decree. Shall not the judge of all the earth do right? Man has sinned.

Man is at odds with God and God is at odds with men. If you don't believe that, you don't believe historical Christianity. But then he goes on, verse 24, speaking about the Christian being justified. Being justified.

Justification as a Forensic Declaration

Being justified does not mean just as if I'd never sinned. It rhymes, but it just doesn't mean that. Being justified does not mean that the moment a person places saving faith in Jesus Christ, they are made righteous before Him because if that were the case, they'd be absolutely perfect.

Never to sin again. But to be justified before God is a forensic or legal declaration that God declares that person to be right with Him. Now, how does that happen? He says, as a gift by His grace. He's being redundant here.

It seems, but with great purpose. It's almost as if he's saying, being justified or declared right with God by a gift, as a gift, as a gift, as a gift. That it is a gift. And nothing but a gift. Now, let's look at two things here that are very important.

First of all, a study of religions of our day. It's a very, very valuable thing to do. There's a sense in which there are only two religions. Religion of grace and a religion of works. Anyone who claims to a religion of works does not understand two basic things.

How holy and just God is and how sinfully wicked they are. They are blind to those two realities. But I want us to look at something for a moment. Let's just think about this. Justified as a gift. The same word is used when it says they hated Him without a cause.

Did anyone ever have a cause for hating the Messiah? Did anyone ever have a cause for hating Christ? Could anyone ever point to Jesus and say, You have done this and that and therefore I have just cause for hating you.

No. Christ never sinned against God or man. But it says that they hated Him without a cause. And in the same way here in this text He's saying, He justified them without a cause. They did not give Him a cause to justify them.

It's like when Israel, basically the question is asked, God, why have you chosen Israel in Deuteronomy? Why have you set your love upon Israel? And the answer is a taunt. He says, I've loved you because I loved you.

And what He's basically saying is, Israel, the only reason I love you is because I have chose to love you. It has absolutely nothing to do with your virtue or merit. It is all because of Me. If you are justified, it has absolutely nothing to do with any virtue or merit in your life.

It has all to do with who God is and the saving power of the Gospel. When we look at religions we can see this. You speak to a, let's just put before us today, an interview with an Orthodox Jew, Muslim, and a true Christian.

I have to say true Christian because of course in America everyone is Christian. That's why it's so hard to evangelize the Muslims. But you ask the Orthodox Jew, if you died right now where would you go?

He may say paradise or the way of the righteous. Abraham's bosom. Why? I love the law of God. I honor the law of God. The law of God has central place in my home. I am a righteous man. And the reporter says, well, ok, I understand that.

The reporter goes to the Muslim. If you died right now where would you go? I would go to paradise. Why? I love the Koran. I have made the pilgrimages, the daily prayers, the giving of alms. I am a righteous man.

Ok? Come to the Christian. Sir, if you died right now where would you go? To heaven. Why? In sin I was conceived. And in sin did my mother bring me forth. I have broken every law that God has ever given.

I deserve thee. And the reporter stops him and says, Sir, you're a paradox to me. I don't understand. These other two gentlemen I quite understand. They're going to heaven because that's exactly what they deserve.

But, sir, you're telling me that you're going to heaven and yet you describe for me, in the most horrendous way, all the reasons why you should not. Why, sir, are you going to heaven? And the Christian cries out, because I'm going to heaven based upon the virtue and the merit of another Jesus Christ, my Lord.

Christ. Making much of Him, much of Christ. Everything is Christ. Being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption. I love all sorts of music, but sometimes I have problems with certain Christian music.

Problems with my own Christian speech at times. When we begin to use words lightly. Brother, I've been redeemed! An old Puritan who they said of Him that after He would use certain words in Scripture, He would remain silent and His lip would tremble.

I have been redeemed. Redemption. A price paid to liberate a captive or a slave. And you were not redeemed with trinkets, blood of silver, and blood of goats. You were redeemed by the blood of God's own Son.

There is enough truth in that statement to carry you on to glory, if you understand it. Nothing else do I need. That is why I hate preaching that tries to use something other than Jesus Christ to get me to accept salvation.

I need no other argument. I need no other plea. Don't tell me He'll heal me. I don't care. Don't tell me He'll give me a fine car or a wonderful home or insurance or my best life now. I don't need it.

Tell me one thing. Did He shed His own blood for my soul? Then don't cheapen the call. As old Leonard Ravenhill used to say, Christ will offer you two things. Eternal life and a tree to die on. But because of His blood, tis enough.

Tis enough. And the motivation. Oh, my dear friend, so many of you take mission trips. And that's a wonderful thing. You go over there and say, this is a wonderful life. Yes, it is for the first six weeks.

It can be hell. Even when you're not persecuted. Even when people aren't knocking down your doors. You have no idea the difference between a few weeks and six months. When things are no longer new. And it's no longer happy.

And it's not fun. And it takes you four days just to find truck tires. And you realize that every time you pray, the Hallelujah chorus doesn't break out. And there's just a lot of hard, monotonous work.

And you feel so alone that your bones are screaming. You need something more than a choir of the fire to keep you there. You need something more than Christian music. You even need something more than a call.

You need to know and grow all the days of your life in this. He shed His own blood for my soul. He shed His own blood for my soul. That is what propels a missionary. A missionary makes no mistakes. He may not have physical chains around his arms, but he is a prisoner.

And if he's not a prisoner, he's not a missionary. They are imprisoned with something much stronger and at times more terrible than chains. It is the love of Jesus Christ that constrains them. When you work and work and work and then after all your work is done, everything falls apart, a five-minute wind blows it all away and to pick it all back up again, there's only one thing that can make you do that.

He shed His own blood for my soul. And my value is not measured. And great leaders of great conventions need to understand this. The missionary's value is not measured by success. It's measured by faithfulness.

It's measured by faithfulness. And not even faithfulness to another's call or another's power, but to their own station that God has given them and their own thing they do in His name. You can tell I was a missionary.

He shed His own blood to buy my redemption, which is in Christ Jesus. Just recently in Colossians, just going through the Greek text and understanding that the text not necessarily says created by Him, by Christ, but created in Him.

Everything that has ever been done by God has been done in and for the Son. Everything is about the Son. And that's the way we should be. Everything about Him. We're not excited about missions. You can turn missions into idolatry.

Excited about Him. And I pray for my little boys at night. I don't pray, oh God, make them great preachers, because there's a lot of great preachers who will die and go to hell. Don't make them great this or great that.

But, oh Father, take them. Take their heart. Give it to Your Son. Be prisoners of Your Son. Let them be driven by passion, even if they're only driving a broom as a janitor, that they have more passion in one sweep than in a thousand sermons of a cold-hearted preacher.

In Christ. A young man walked up to me one time and said, you're right, Brother Paul, Jesus Christ is all we need. I said, young man, Jesus Christ is all we have. There's nothing outside of Him. There are just two spheres of existence.

Adam and Christ. Death. Life. Condemnation. Justification. So it goes on. Whom God displayed publicly. I want you to look at this. Speaking about the cross, Martin Lloyd-Jones said that God placarded Him.

A good English word. He placarded Him. He put Him up like a sign that you see on the side of the road. He wanted it to be in the most visible place. He could have put away sin in so many other places, but He chose the central city of the universe, the greatest religious mecca of the universe, and outside that city at the crossroads, He placarded His Son.

Propitiation and the Divine Dilemma

Why? Salvation is more. The cross is more than just salvation of men. The cross is for the revelation of God. That in the cross, we might know who God is. And it says that God displayed Him publicly as a propitiation.

In my opinion, absolutely the most important word in the entire Bible, other than the names of God. Propitiation. A propitiation. Because this answers a question. This answers the greatest question. A question that if you've been sensitive to this text, you realized.

A question that if you've been sensitive to this text, it's literally dropped open your jaw. A divine dilemma. A problem that cannot be solved. A boulder to be moved. It is a major marvel. It is the gospel, and you've got to understand this.

And what do you have to understand? It's this problem. It says here in verse 23 that all men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And it says in 24, some of them were justified. That is wrong.

You say, what's wrong? There's a problem. I want you just to go, just for a moment, to the book of Proverbs to understand what I mean when I say that is wrong. Chapter 17, verse 15. He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous, both of them alike are an abomination to the Lord.

Now what is an abomination? There's just no word for it. It's too strong. It's the most heinous, loathsome, beyond words, beyond definition, disgust. And what does it say? He who justifies the wicked is an abomination to the Lord.

He who justifies the wicked is an abomination. But then we look in Romans 3, and what do we see? God justifies the wicked. You ever thought about that? If God is just, He cannot forgive you. If God is holy, He cannot fellowship with you.

He cannot. Not because there's some law above Him that constrains Him, but His own nature. If God is just, He cannot forgive men because men are wicked and the judge of all the earth must do right. The greatest problem in all the gospel is this.

If God is just, He cannot forgive the wicked. You say, well, I don't understand the problem. Of course you don't. Look at our culture. It's not exactly a culture of justice, is it? We're not reading ancient books on law.

I doubt very seriously that any presidential candidate is reading Rutherford's Lex Rex, The Law of the King. You see, we're a people of unclean lips. We drink down iniquity like it was water. We know not our left hand from our right.

But here's the problem. Let me put it before you. In modern vernacular, let's say that you go home tonight. Your entire family, you find them. You left them home. You go home and your entire family is slaughtered on the floor.

And standing over, your final breathing member is the murderer with blood on his hands. He strangles the life out of your last child. You run across the room. You throw him to the floor. You tie him up and you call the police.

And the police take him away to prison and then finally to the judge. And this man who's murdered your entire family stands before the judge here in this county. And the judge looks down at him and says, I'm a very loving judge.

I forgive you. Go home. You are going to scream out, I demand justice. You are going to write the newspapers. You are going to call the media. You are going to be sending letters to senators in Congress.

And you are going to say that there is a judge on the bench far more vile than the criminals who stand before him. It is the work of a judge to do justice. It is not right. It is twisted and wrong and dark and horrid and society collapses and we cannot live under such a moral strain.

You demand such justice from your judges? What about your God? The greatest question in all of Christian theology is this. How can God be just and at the same time the justifier of the wicked? That's the greatest problem in all of Scripture.

Isn't it amazing? I say things like that and I look at people and they go, I've never heard that before in my life. And yet it's the very central part of the gospel. I think we've lost it folks. We've taken the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We wonder why the gospel has so little power and so we've got to do all this church growth stuff and everything else and you just can't preach the gospel anymore because it doesn't have power. It can't draw Generation X or Y or Z or anything else because we're not preaching the gospel anymore.

A truncated creedal form. But it's not the gospel. The gospel is powerful and it is deadly. It is life-giving and it is scandalous. But therein lies the power of God for salvation. How can a just God forgive wicked men and still be just?

A propitiation. In ancient Castellano, we use the word propicio. In La Reina Valera, in the old Spanish version. Amo, sed propicio a mi. Master, be propitious or merciful to me. Just imagine for a minute.

Justice Satisfied Through Penal Substitution

Imagine we're 500 years ago and we're in Valladolid, Hispania. We're in Spain. And I'm a slave. And the punishment for a slave is that if he is stealing, he's killed. That's law. That's what the law says.

He must die. And so I'm stealing. And my amo, my master, comes in. And he catches me. And he grabs me by the collar with full witness around him. And he begins to drag me to the gallows and I fall down on my knees and I say, Amo, sed propicio a mi.

Be propitious to me. Be merciful to me. You say, Well, now the master has to make a choice. Ah, there's a problem. Law demands my death. Justice demands that I die. There is a sense in which I'm asking my master to disobey the law.

To turn a blind eye to justice and to let my sin go. As I've said, society cannot bear that strain. Neither does the kingdom of heaven. And a just God most certainly will not. Before God can forgive wicked men and declare them right, justice must be satisfied.

Now we need to be very careful here. When I say justice must be satisfied, I'm not saying that there's some great law over God that even He Himself must submit to. Now, when I say justice must be satisfied, I'm saying God's justice must be satisfied.

Have you ever heard preachers go, God could have been just with you, but instead of being just, He was loving? Do you have any idea what that preacher just said? God's love is unjust. No, my friend. God is love and God is just.

And in love, God satisfies His justice with a sacrifice. A propitiation. A sacrifice powerful enough to satisfy God's justice, appease God's wrath against man, and make it possible for a just God to receive wicked men and to declare them right with Him.

Even though their works scream out the opposite. Well, what kind of sacrifice do we need? We're well instructed that the blood of bulls and goats cannot do this work. A son of Adam has sinned. The son of Adam must die.

Man has sinned. Man has fallen. Man deserves death in hell under the wrath of God throughout all eternity. There is only one way to save a man. Satisfy justice and put away that wrath. Appease it. How must that be done?

As I've said, it requires a man. But then again, it requires more than a man. The one who dies in the place of men must be a son of Adam, but he also must be the son of God. God the Son. The fullness of deity.

And you say, why? Well, let's look at some reasons. First of all, Jonah in the belly of a fish said a very wise thing that I think we've forgotten. Salvation is of the Lord. Salvation is of the Lord. That is why the doctrine of the Jehovah Witnesses is such an abomination because they're saying that the Lord of glory made a creature and sent Him down to correct our condition and to make reconciliation possible.

If that is true, then a creature has saved us and a creature is worshipped. But the Bible says the opposite. Salvation is of the Lord. And He shares that title with no one. Not archangel. Not king. The one who dies on that tree must be God because salvation is of the Lord.

There's another reason. Who else but God could withstand the wrath of God? Don't you understand that mountains melt before His wrath and rivers dry up and the sea bows its head in fear? Young men sometimes tell me, I'll stand before God one day.