The Final Battle

A number of years ago I read a story of a young boy who was reading a novel in the living room. His mother called to him and said, “Johnny, come do the dishes.” He said, “No, Mama, I can’t because right now I am reading a novel and the villain has the hero down and he’s about to kill him, so I can’t come now. I have to see how the story turns out.” But as most mothers do, she persisted, and after being persistent, he knew that he had to go, so he flipped to the last page of the book and read it. And that afternoon when he went into the kitchen he said, “You know, the villain is doing fine in chapter 6, but is he ever in for a shock when he gets to the last page.

Now you know, any evaluation of the way in which the world is going needs to include the fact that the bad guys seem to be winning. This is not an optimistic day and age in which to be alive. Remember the days when we actually thought that maybe we could win the abortion war? It’s more doubtful now than ever. Are you aware of the fact that the militant homosexuals have won so many advances through intimidation that they have the news media not only totally on their side, but also they campaigned early in the AIDS phenomenon for the right to infect others with this disease? I’m not talking about your average homosexual who struggles with homosexuality. I’m talking about the militants, and there’s a big distinction between them and others who may perhaps understand that they have this difficulty, which they don’t seem to be able to get over. But we’re living in a day and age when there are expansive rights being given to homosexual groups. The far-reaching implications are chilling for society.

We have a divorce rate. We have movies that are filled with violence and occult and moral impurity. And Christians oftentimes are watching these and filling their minds with all kinds of things that are totally contrary to what the Bible teaches, and yet justifying it on a number of different grounds because the human mind has the ability to justify anything that the human heart really wants to do.

Isn’t it interesting that in the drug war, which some people think we are beginning to win, the more information that goes out, the more people we have on drugs? Billions of dollars have been spent and yet there’s very little evidence that we are able to clean the place up because the human heart craves it. There is this high that people have.

And you look at society and you see the breakup of the home and you see the frustration and the emotional and spiritual entanglements that people have as they grow up because they don’t have a good set of roots at home, and you say to yourself, “How much hurt can there be in this world anyway?” It’s clear that the villain has the hero down if there are any heroes left), and is about to kill him. And that’s why today we want to look at the last page. We’re going to find out how it all ends.

Now if you’ve been here you know that this is the seventh in a series of messages entitled What Is God Up To? And in some sense the most important message comes next week. The title is Looking Back to Planet Earth and we are going to pretend that we are looking at earth from the vantage point of heaven and eternity and finally answering the question of what in the world was God up to, and was all the evil and all the pain in the world worth it to pull off whatever He had in mind? So I hope that you are here next week to hear the final message in the series.

But what is God doing today? He is calling out a people for His name. The purpose of the Church in the world is to tell men and women that there is an eternity to which all of us are moving with great speed and necessity, and that we must prepare to meet our God. Now there are many other things that flow out of that message, but that is the bottom line.

How has Satan tried to thwart the purpose of God in the world? First of all, he has always tried to get the Church diverted. First it was through awesome persecutions. Sometime I’d like to preach a couple of messages on the early persecutions that went on in Rome and some of the other countries, because we don’t know anything about what suffering is. You know, it’s one thing to die yourself. You can be a hero and you can say, “Sure, I’m willing to be eaten by the lions,” and you can walk out there and they have you for breakfast, but what about your wife and children? What about your family? How do they react? How would they get along without fathers? And how do children get along without mothers? It’s excruciating.

During those early centuries there was so much anguish. It’s unbelievable, and yet more people have probably died for the cause of Christ in the last century than even in the first century. It’s just that we live in this bubble of protection called the United States of America, but there are other countries in the world where there is intense persecution, where there are massacres and death, and it’s all around.

Now, first of all then, Satan tried persecution. It did not work too well. Even the pagans began to get nauseated at the amount of blood that was shed by Christians. So what he tried to do after that was politics. He tried to get the Church wedded with the State, and when the Church got wedded with the State, it lost its central focus almost immediately, because then the Church became interested in such things as political strength, and political power, and money and corruption. And the Gospel, instead of being the news by which people are born again or saved, became adherence to a set of laws or principles within the Church and within society, and this, of course, was also combined with many pagan ideas. And so the light of the Gospel was almost extinguished.

Now you find also that today Satan uses many of the same tactics of diversion. There are people today who actually think that the responsibility of Christianity is to Christianize America through laws. Well I believe in fighting for just laws, but that isn’t the principle responsibility of the Church, because man has a problem that cannot be solved by temporal laws because he has an eternal soul. And it takes an eternal answer to an eternal problem.

Satan also likes to unite various liberal Christian groups. Just last night I was talking to somebody about a retreat that some people were at – an ecumenical retreat - where a prophecy came supposedly from God (from Christ) and said, “My body on earth is broken. Please put my body together. And may all the different religions of the world and all the different branches of Christendom get together.” Well you can be absolutely sure that that prophecy, if it was supernatural at all, was not from God. It was not from the God of the Bible or the Lord Jesus Christ of the Bible. But people think that if we become involved in social action - brotherhood, getting people together, translating the Gospel into political and social dimensions - we will therefore accomplish something in this world. That may be important but not the important thing that the Church is to be doing.

You and I are to say to men and women that the world is really disintegrating and God has almost abandoned the whole thing as it rushes to destruction. And our responsibility is to tell men and women that there is a Savior who is able to save them out of the mess of this world, and a worse mess in the world to come.

Now I told you though, at the beginning of this message, that today we are going to turn to the end and see how it’s all going to end. I’ve been emphasizing during this series that the earth is actually a stage on which God has enacted a drama – good and evil, justice versus injustice and Satan versus God. This little planet was taken in the great canopy of the universe with all the angels and the demons and mankind and God. It’s all happening here. We are where the action is. Little planet earth! But today we want to hurry on and we want to see how the curtain is going to fall, and we’re going to get to the final act of the drama.

What I’d like you to do is to turn to the end of the book, the book of Revelation. And I would like to just mention briefly today three final events that are the last chapters of planet Earth. We want to see how it ends, because if we can see that it ends in triumph, we’ll be able to get from here to there with a whole lot of enthusiasm.

First of all, the first great event! And we’re talking about grand finales here. These are not little insignificant events. These are the biggies. These are the cataclysmic events that are still going to take place on planet Earth. I mean now we’re talking about the intervention of God.

First of all, Christ will return, and His return really is in two stages. In Revelation 19 you’ll notice in verse 7 we begin with the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. And do you know who is going to be at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb? We will be there. People say, “Are we going to eat in heaven?” You folks on Optifast, are you going to eat in heaven? The answer is, “Yes, of course, you are going to eat in heaven.” People think that in heaven we are going to be spirits. That’s nonsense. You are not going to be a spirit in heaven. After Jesus Christ had His resurrection body He said, “Touch Me,” because a spirit doesn’t have flesh and bones. And then He ate fish with the disciples along the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Yes, we are going to eat at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. The rapture of the Church will have been taken out. I’m going to be saying a lot of things today. In many respects, this message is very simple because I’m going to just be reading Scripture, but on the other hand it does bring together a lot of strands, which I don’t have time always to stop to explain.

But notice that it says in verses 7-9, “Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure — for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, ‘Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’ And he said to me, ‘These are the true words of God.’”

Now that’s a scene that is taking place in heaven, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. But what’s happening here on earth? I’ll tell you what’s happening on earth. You have a period of great tribulation, and the purpose of the period of great tribulation is first of all that wickedness might literally run its course. The Church is the salt of the earth. The Church is the light of the world, and when God takes the Church out, all wickedness will be rampant with incredible abandon. And that’s when you have Antichrist raising himself and saying, “I’m God,” and people actually believe it. If Shirley MacLaine is God, why can’t the Antichrist be God? So people will believe that the Antichrist is God and they will worship him, and those who do not worship him, the Bible says, will be put to death. It will be wickedness in its fullest dimension.

Another thing that is happening during that period of great tribulation is God is preparing the nation Israel to accept the Messiah, because in the end, the nation Israel will look upon Christ and recognize Him to be their brother and their Messiah. Paul says in Romans, “So in the end all Israel (the nation Israel that is in existence during that time) will be saved.”

So what you have then is Jesus Christ coming, first of all, to rapture His people. Then you have the period of great tribulation. And then He comes in glory. He said in Matthew 24, “As the lightning goes from the east, even unto the west, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be.” It is a glorious triumphant return. And what will have happened at that time? All the nations of the earth, it says in Zechariah, will be gathered at Jerusalem. And so you will have the eastern confederacy coming up, of course, from the eastern countries of Japan and China and maybe India. You’ll have Europe coming from the west, and they’ll all be gathered there at Jerusalem and they’ll begin that huge battle, that final conflict called Armageddon. And in the middle of it Jesus comes, and all of the nations of the earth forget their differences and say, “We’ve got a problem that is bigger than our own squabbles. Christ is coming. Let’s all train our guns on Him, and let’s unite and fight Him.” And that’s what you have now in the rest of chapter 19.

Verses 11-14 say, “Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses.”

Stop! Everybody stop! Everybody awake at this juncture! My dear friend, the armies clothed in white linen we just read about in the 19th chapter are the saints. We are going to be with Jesus Christ at that moment. Those of you who didn’t come with us to Jerusalem this summer say, “I want to go to Jerusalem someday.” Fine! You’re going to be here if you are a believer. You are going to take the final tour. It will probably even be better than Lutzer’s tour to Jerusalem. We are going to be with Jesus Christ, my friend, as He comes.

And notice it says in verse 15: “From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.”

Who wins? Oh, throughout the ages it has always looked as if Satan was winning. We put all of our money into abortion battles, and abortions still take place. We put our money into the drug war, and drugs still take place. We try to teach our children about righteousness, and then subsequent generations come along and you have divorce and you have all that. And you have pastors who stood up and warned their people about movies, and then we gave up warning people, and so they’ve imbibed it. They’ve gotten hooked on various kinds of sensuality, and it looks as if Satan has won another round. And on and on it goes until I get so weary. I get so tired of it.

Well, my dear friend, we’ve flipped to the back of the book. This is the way it’s going to end. Christ is going to come, and when you look at the carnage that takes place here, it is so awesome that to our twentieth century sensibilities we say, “You know, this offends me because it talks about flesh being all over. It talks about the birds coming to eat the flesh of those who have been killed by this war.” And you say, “Oh, it’s so gruesome. It’s so ugly.” Do you know why it’s so ugly to us? It’s because sin to us generally is not very ugly at all, and we don’t know how bad sin is. We don’t know how much God hates rebellion. We know that He hates rebellion. You learn that in Sunday school, but we don’t know the extent to which He hates rebellion.

What if Jonathan Edwards was right when he said, “The size of a sin should be gauged by the size of the being against whom it has been committed?” Wow! What if that’s true? Then even the smallest sin deserves harsh, complete judgment, and so Jesus steps on the scene. That’s the first cataclysmic event. Christ returns in two stages.

Now let me give you a second event, and that is Christ sets up rule in Jerusalem and rules on the earth. Oh I know there are some people who don’t believe that Jesus will rule on the earth again, and I just feel sorry for them because they are going to have to revise their understanding of prophecy. After it happens they will say, “Yeah, you guys were right. He is ruling on the earth.” I have some very dear friends who say, “How can Jesus’ glorified body still rule on this planet?” Well, Jesus with His glorified body interacted with the disciples.

Well, chapter 20! This is where the rule is specified. “Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.”

I need to add a parenthesis here. There are some people who believe that there will be no millennial kingdom on earth and so they think that this is the age of the kingdom. This is the age of the millennium, and therefore they also conclude that this is the age in which Satan is bound. And there’s a very well-known counselor whom I have met (and we have had some interesting discussions), who has written books on the fact that when people come to you today for counsel, you can know in advance that their problem is never demonic because this is the age of the kingdom and Satan is bound. My word! That’s an interesting theory of counseling. I guess Satan, if he’s bound, has a mighty long chain because this is a great chain in his hand, and it must be long enough to get all the way to Chicago, and all the way to the west coast, not to mention the east. We wouldn’t want to leave them out. And what can we say about California? Now notice! You Californians know right well that we love you. We wouldn’t talk like this if we didn’t.

And you’ll notice they threw him into the abyss and shut it and sealed it over him so that he should not deceive the nations any longer until the thousand years were completed. During the millennial kingdom Satan will be bound, and after these things he’s got to be released just for a short time.

“Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years.” That is, those that were beheaded during the Tribulation period who came to believe on Christ, even though the Church had already been raptured. But I want you to notice that it says that they came and they reigned with Jesus Christ.

You say, “Well, Pastor Lutzer, what are we going to be doing?” You are going to have a glorified body, and if you are a believer, you will be reigning with Christ too. You say, “On the earth? I thought maybe somewhere in heaven.” Well, maybe somewhere in heaven eventually, but on the earth, yes! What does it say in Revelation 5:10? You need not turn to it but you must listen carefully. I’ll even read verse 9 to give you the context.

“Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation (Are you included in that? Now notice!), and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.”

Now there’s so much that could be said about the reign of Jesus Christ upon the earth, and our participation in that reign. Remember that those who go into the millennium are all believers, but they will have their earthly bodies because people will be saved during the period of great tribulation after the Church has been raptured. But what can we say about the rule of Christ?

First of all, He will rule over the entire earth. It says in Psalm 2 that the Lord Jesus Christ is going to ask of God the Father. In fact the Father says, “Ask of Me and I shall give Thee the heathen for thy inheritance and the uttermost part of the earth for thy possession.” And it says that He shall reign all over the earth.

Also, He will rule with authority and power. Do you remember that passage in Psalm 22, which I read to you a few weeks ago? It says, “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will worship before You.” Look at that! All the families of the earth! All the families of the nations! “For kingship belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations. All the prosperous of the earth eat and worship; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust. All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you.” Everybody’s going to worship the Lord.

Now remember that the reason it is necessary for Jesus to reign on this earth, as I’ve already emphasized, and pardon the repetition, is that earth is the planet, you know, on which God decided to enact this drama. And it was here that the rebellion occurred. First of all, Lucifer said, “I will be like the most high,” and retained, as we mentioned in our first and second messages, his power and authority upon the earth. And then Jesus put man there for conflict. He says, “You take dominion.” And it is here where man has not taken dominion over the earth. He can’t control nature. He can’t even control himself. Look at the wars, the rumors of wars. Look at all the things that people are doing to one another. He can’t get organized. He can’t rule. If there’s anything that history has proven, it is man’s inability to rule.

So what Jesus Christ is going to do is to come to snatch the earth from Satan and men, and show that right in the sphere where they failed, He will succeed. And He’s going to rule with absolute authority and power. And over the earth there will be worldwide acceptance of Christ. It says in Isaiah 11:9 that the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth, even as water covers the sea.

And, of course, water covers the sea. What else would cover the sea except water, come to think of it? And that’s the way the knowledge of the Lord shall be – over the whole earth! It says in Isaiah 2, “In that day, many people shall go and say, ‘Come ye unto the mountain of the Lord, unto the house of the God of Jacob, for He shall teach us His ways, and we shall walk in His paths, for the word of the Lord shall go forth from Jerusalem. And He shall judge among the nations and shall rebuke many people. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, and nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.’”

I’m told that that verse, by the way, is inscribed here in the United States in the United Nations Building. “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks.” Are you telling me that the United Nations is going to bring that about? The United Nations is going to cause the nations of the earth to put down their armaments? You say, “Well, we’re living in a period of peace.” Of necessity it is a deceptive peace.

I know some of you are saying, “Pastor Lutzer, you seem to be a pessimist today.” I know I am, but remember that a pessimist is nothing more than an informed optimist. There is no way in the world that the United Nations is going to fulfill the prophecies in the Old Testament that pertain to God’s millennium and God’s reign of Jesus Christ on earth.

Now there’s a third event. First of all, Jesus Christ will return to the earth in two stages. He will rule the earth, and finally He will judge the earth. At the last part of Revelation 19 the beast and the false prophet who deceived so many people during the Tribulation period are already thrown into the Lake of Fire, and after the thousand years are ended, Satan is allowed one more time to try to get up on a rebellion. I don’t know why. God didn’t seem to tell us why this was necessary, but He goes to the ends of the earth and He discovers that people in the millennium are actually bearing children because they are in their earthly bodies. There are some children that have grown up during those thousand years who do not belong to God because even if Satan is bound, the human heart is still wicked and people turn away from God. And Satan is actually able to drum up some support for his final rebellion against God, and what a pitiful spectacle it is.

Verse 8 says, “And he will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, (That just really means end-time ruler and should not be confused with Ezekiel 38 and 39.) to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea.” You say, “Oh my goodness. Maybe they’ll be able to do now what they couldn’t do during the turn of events in Armageddon.” Oh my goodness! “And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city (which is, of course, Jerusalem) but fire came down from heaven and consumed them.” God says, “That is enough.” It’s like taking a candle and just snuffing out the light and saying, “That is it.” That is the final rebellion of man and the devil.

Verse 10: “And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.” The degree of their torment will be determined by the number of victories that Satan won over God while he was in existence upon this planet. And therefore, every single thing that he has ever done will be adequately recompensed so that there will be a sense of justice, and the equilibrium of justice throughout all of eternity. We are going to behold the incredible justice of God. That’s part of my message next week. And we’re all going to be able to say that God did all things well.

And notice how it came out. You say, “Well, what about the people?” Well, verse 11 and following, which I memorized many years ago in the King James Version of the Bible, is one of the most awesome, frightening passages of Scripture for those who do not know Jesus Christ, because the dead of all the ages are going to be resurrected and personally and individually stand before God.

“Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it. And Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done.”

You say, “Well, I thought salvation is by grace. How come they are judged according to their works?” They are not judged to see whether they will enter into heaven. They are judged on the basis of what they did with what they knew. Accurate, precise judgment, so meticulously weighed out! It would be like a pharmacist weighing out your prescription so that the balances of justice are perfect. All of them will suffer forever, but not all of them will suffer the same degree forever. It will depend on what they did with what they knew. And then in chapters 21 and 22 of Revelation, which obviously we cannot get into, that is heaven for the saints. The description is there.

Three great events! Christ returns to the earth. Christ rules over the earth for a thousand years, and then Christ judges the earth and all of the inhabitants that have ever been a part of the earth.

Now I want to tell you, my friend, that you can tell your love for Christ or your indifference toward Him by whether or not you are looking forward to His coming. Are you glad to see Him if He were to come this afternoon? Would He spoil your schedule? Would He rain on your parade? Do you have some things in mind that are more important than seeing Christ? If so, you don’t love Him very much. Even if He saved you, you still don’t love Him.

There’s an old Scottish story about some men who were on a fishing expedition, and they fished and were gone for weeks, and when they arrived at the shore, many of the wives of the men were there to greet their husbands. And the skipper of the ship looked and noticed that there was Bill’s Mary, and there was Joe’s Margaret. And it looked like all of the women were there, but he looked and he couldn’t see his own wife, and he was quite frightened, wondering if something had happened to her. And finally he trudged up to the hill where they lived, and he came to the house and she came and she threw her arms around him and said, “Oh, I’ve been waiting for you.” And he said, “Yeah, but all the other wives were watching for their husbands.” Ouch! You see, some of us say, “Yes, we are waiting for the Lord,” but are we watching? “Blessed is he,” the Bible says, “whom the Lord finds watching.”

I wish I could convey this to you with more articulation but I have to say that one of the things that God is certainly proving is that nobody ever wins over Him. Now I have emphasized this so often that I hesitate to say it again, but there is no such thing as you being here today saying, “I can hold out on God,” or “I’m not going to submit to Him,” or “I’m not going to be saved.” Whatever it is (that resistance of the human heart when God points out sin in your life as a Christian, for example, and you say, “I’m not going to give it up because…” and then you rationalize), you cannot win against God. You can’t either in this life or the life to come because God always has the last word. He writes the last page.

If there is anything I want to emphasize today it is to please be wholly yielded to God and do whatever you have to do to be fully right with God and with men. Don’t hold grudges against your fellow brothers and sisters. Don’t be angry with God. Don’t say, “I know better than what God is saying,” because you don’t.

Many years ago when I was in seminary I heard a story of a beautiful woman by the name of Toni Jo Henry. Her mother taught her how to dance, how to hold her cigarette, how to mix her drinks. And this young lady, because of her beauty, was very, very popular. But as sometimes happens to beautiful women, she became involved in immoral relationships and of necessity those relationships end up with regret, guilt, anger, hostility, alienation and all those other things. So one day, in a fit of anger and rage, she actually killed her boyfriend and she was put in jail.
And I am told that when someone visited her in jail, she said, “I always knew that God ran the whole show, but I tried to steal one small act.”

God runs the show, and nobody is going to steal one last act. Could I urge you to hurry to Jesus Christ, who died that you might be forgiven and cleansed so that you can be welcomed by God, and so that the anger and the hostility of God toward sin is taken out on Christ on your behalf so that you can be saved.

Come just as you are with your doubts, with your fears, with your inability to believe. You say, “Well there could be somebody here today who hasn’t been in church for a long time and says, ‘What the pastor is saying today is just incredible. I don’t know if I can believe all that.’” Come to Christ – even with your doubts. Come to Him with all your religious prejudices, all the barriers that have been formed in your mind against what I’ve had to say today. Just come as you are.

You know there’s a song that we sometimes sing.

Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
Oh Lamb of God, I come, I come.

Nobody can ever steal an act from God.

Join me as we pray.

And now, Father, we just celebrate with our hearts and minds the absolute triumph of Jesus Christ. We thank You that there is no sense at all in which the world today is out of control from Your standpoint. We thank You, Lord, that the novel already has been written. The script is written. The end is certain. It is written in stone by the finger of God. And so, Lord, between then and now, we struggle. We do not understand. We agonize, but we thank you, Father, that Jesus will reclaim planet Earth, and all the victories that Satan had ever won will be a charade. But Father, we need to bring this down to where we live, to Monday morning and Tuesday, not to mention Wednesday and Thursday. And we pray, Father, that You might mightily enable us even in this moment to give You matters that are too big for us, so that we might live fully for You.

And now, before I close, why don’t you talk to God and tell Him whatever you need to tell Him. If you are withholding something from the Lord, open your heart like you might open your hand, and say, “God, it’s Yours.” If you’ve never received Christ as Savior, say, “Jesus, save me. I come to you just as I am. I don’t understand it all, but I come.” If you have a burden that you should not be bearing, give it to God.

Thank You, Father, in Jesus’ name, Amen.