Do You Love Christ?

Driving home: What do you need to do to go to hell? Live and die a stranger to love to Christ. That's all.

Pastor Martin pictures a church filled with people who never told a lie, never stole a nickel, never cheated on a math problem — perfect by every external measure. Without love to Christ, the whole bunch would still go to hell. That is how indispensable love to Him is.

But if it were filled with people who had never once told a lie, who had never once stolen so much as a nickel, with kids who never so much had even cheated on one little math problem from the kindergarten right up through high school. It's not, but suppose it were. The auditorium was filled with people who never lied, never cheated, never done a lustful deed, never stolen, never thought a lustful thought. People who were models of morality.

10:39 - 11:08 Read in full sermon

We have instruments to test fever, height, and weight. What instrument do we have to test love to Christ? The Scripture itself, applied to our hearts.

You go down to the infirmary at the school and she says open up your mouth in goes the thermometer The nurse says I don think there anything wrong with you I think you got a temporary test upset That's about all. So you run back to your class. You see, if I ask the question, do you have a fever? I have an instrument to help me answer that question.

14:02 - 14:24 Read in full sermon

Driving home: I would give up heaven itself if that were necessary to keep Christ.

Pastor Martin remembers his children, when small, climbing up next to him while he read and snuggling under his arm. He'd ask, 'What do you want?' They'd say, 'Nothing, Dad. I just want to love.' That is delight in a person — and that is what love to Christ feels like.

They still do it sometimes, not quite as much in the same way. But I'd be sitting reading a book or something and one of them would sit next to me and snuggle up the way they do when they want to, you know, ask you for something.

26:05 - 26:14 Read in full sermon

Driving home: I would give up heaven itself if that were necessary to keep Christ.

The true believer says, 'I would give up heaven itself if it were necessary to keep Christ.' The false believer would give up Christ for heaven. The difference is whether you delight in the gifts or in the Giver.

I would give up heaven itself if that were necessary to keep Christ.

27:52 - 27:59 Read in full sermon

Paul says he is excited about a beautiful picture he is describing — the glory of Christ — and his hearers don't get excited because they're blind. Until the Spirit shines in, the gospel is form without glory.

But he says there's a problem. I'm trying to describe a beautiful picture to men who are blind.

38:26 - 38:33 Read in full sermon

Get the little book Fair Sunshine, Pastor Martin urges, and read of children ten and eleven years old who voluntarily went to martyrdom rather than deny Christ. Children who loved life — and loved Christ more.

Some of you need to get the little book Fair Sunshine and you'll read of children You listen to me, kids. Children the age of some of you, 10 and 11 years of age, who voluntarily, deliberately, consciously gave themselves up to lingering torturous death in the highlands of Scotland out of sheer love to Jesus Christ.

46:03 - 46:27 Read in full sermon

The point: Test your love by your obedience — do you keep His commandments, especially the inconvenient ones?

Jesus tells His disciples, 'That the world may know I love the Father, arise, let us go hence' — hence to Gethsemane, hence to abandonment, hence to the blood, hence to your hell and mine. Love proves itself by costly obedience.

And then look at the classic example in verse 31, But that the world may know that I love the Father, I shall now give an eloquent description of what love to the Father means in the heart of God the Son no he says that the world may know that I love the Father what do I do? as the Father gave me commandment even so I do and then those next words are eloquent with all the realization of Gethsemane in the agony of Golgotha the abandonment of the brassy and the blackened heavens He says that the world may know that I truly love my Father. That all my professed love is not empty talk. That the wo...

49:15 - 50:02 Read in full sermon