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The sermon presents salvation as a revealed work of God accomplished exclusively through Jesus Christ. Sinners must come to God through Christ, abandoning religious formality, moral self-confidence, and earthly desires, and receiving mercy through repentance and faith. Christ saves to the uttermost because He bore guilt and punishment at the cross and now lives to intercede for His people. This same power comforts believers in suffering and assures them that Christ will preserve them through temptation, weakness, and death, while the unconverted are warned not to resist the Spirit’s present call.
Theological center: Salvation is grounded in Christ’s substitutionary atonement and secured by His ongoing high-priestly intercession for all who come to God through Him.
Applications: Come to God through Christ · Seek salvation above all · Come as a spiritual beggar · Repent and believe now
Primary texts: Hebrews 7:25
“Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.” Hebrews 7:25 SALVATION is a doctrine peculiar to revelation. Revelation affords us a complete history of it, but nowhere else can we find any trace thereof. God has written many books, but only one book has had for its aim the teaching of the ways of mercy. He has written the great book of creation, which it is our duty and our pleasure to read. It is a volume embellished on its surface with starry gems and rainbow colors, and containing in its inner leaves marvels at which the wise may wonder for ages, and yet find a fresh theme for their conjectures. Nature is the spelling book of man, in which he may learn his Maker’s name, He has studded it with embroidery, with gold, with gems. There are doctrines of truth in the mighty stars and there are lessons written on the green earth and in the flowers upspringing from the sod. We read the books of God when we see the storm and tempest, for all things speak as God would have them. And if our ears are open, we may hear the voice of God in the rippling of every rill, in the roll of every thunder, in the brightness of every lightning, in the twinkling of every star, in the budding of every flower. God has written the great book of creation to teach us what He is—how great, how mighty. But I read nothing of salvation in creation. The rocks tell me, “Salvation is not in us.” The winds howl, but they howl not salvation. The waves rush upon the shore, but among the wrecks which they wash up, they reveal no trace of salvation. The fathomless caves of oceans bear pearls, but they bear no pearls of grace. The starry heavens have their flashing meteors, but they have no voices of salvation. I find salvation written nowhere, till in this volume of my Father’s grace I find His blessed love unfolded towards the great human family, teaching them that they are lost, but that He can save them, and that in saving them He can be “just, and yet the justifier of the ungodly.” Salvation, then, is to be found in the Scriptures and in the Scriptures only, for we can read nothing of it elsewhere. And while it is to be found only in Scripture, I hold that the peculiar doctrine of revelation is salvation. I believe that the Bible was sent not to teach me history, but to teach me grace—not to give me a system of philosophy, but to give me a system of divinity—not to teach worldly wisdom, but spiritual wisdom. Hence I hold all preaching of philosophy and science in the pulpit to be altogether out of p…