Are you ready?
Dear Friends,
The day is coming when each of us must give account of himself or herself to God. Are you ready for that day? Today’s devotional will help you. God bless you.
Because of Calvary,
John Janney
Romans 2:16 (ESV)
on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.
“…What a difference there will be among the people in their eternal destiny! By-and-by, they will awake, and arise; the judgment-seat will be occupied, and Christ the Judge will sit upon his throne. He is the man upon whom wicked men once spat; but his countenance shall be bright as the sun in that day. He is the man whom they scourged; but then he will sway the scepter of universal sovereignty, and the unnumbered myriads of our race will all stand before him. What an assembly that will be when before him are gathered all nations! They will crowd the land, and throng the very mountaintops, and stand upon the ocean as upon a sea of glass. What a multitude! But there will be one thing that will divide them, and that will be ‘a division among the people because of him.’ Do you hear the songs and shouts of the ransomed? Louder than ten thousand thunders, do you hear them? They are clapping their hands; they are shouting, ‘Welcome, welcome, Son of God! ‘ The archangel’s trumpet seems to them, as they wake up from the dead, to be the morning summons that calls them up from beds of dust and silent clay to joy and peace eternal; and every note, as it peals out, is one to which they can sing, and they chant in harmony with it the great anthem, ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing.’ But what other sounds do I hear amidst those thunders of applause, and that mighty chorus of the redeemed? Hark! sharp and shrill, there come up cries that pierce the very firmament, — terrible sounds that even the glad music of that grand morning hymn cannot wholly drown. I can hear it, though the archangel’s trumpet waxes exceeding loud and long, for myriads of lost souls have risen from the tomb, and they are wailing, wailing, wailing, ‘because of him’ whom they rejected; and above all other sounds there comes up the awful cry to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: for the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?’ There will indeed be a division among the people because of him in that tremendous day. On which side of the King will you be then, my dear hearer? I pray you to answer that question in the quietude of your chamber this very night. Where will you be when Christ shall make the final division between all the vast masses of the human race, ‘and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats’? Will you be driven to the left hand, among the goats, with the King’s curse thundering in your ear; or will you be gathered with those upon his right hand, and join with them in singing the hymns of angels and of men redeemed, to whom Christ will say, ‘Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world’?” [Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XLVII, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1901), p. 29-30]