God's favour.We have all sacrificed God's favour through sin. The only
actual one. One of these men is worth one hundred and ninetysix millions of dollars, by an actual inventory of his property taken a few days after the time of which I am speaking. The other man is one of America's greatest financiers. You and I stand there and look in, and you say, "Well, I would like to be in that man's shoes. One hundred and ninetysix million dollars! I do not know anything about his religious convictions, I do not know anything about his eternal prospects, but he is well fixed for many years to come so far as this life is concerned." You are mistaken. While you and I are looking in, that man falls out of his chair on his face on the floor, and when Quincey Garrett picks Wm. H. Vanderbilt from the floor he is a corpse. For all his one hundred and ninetysix millions he had no hope for five minutes. Friends, we all of us here tonight are like men standing on the seashore looking out over the boundless ocean of eternity, and as we look out, there comes towards some of us those of us who have a living faith in Jesus Christ gallant vessels laden with gold and silver and precious stones, with every sail set, waited swiftly towards us by the breezes of the divine favour. But toward the rest of us those out of Christ as we look out over the boundless ocean of eternity, there come no vessels, but dismantled wrecks, with, no cargoes but the livid corpses of lost opportunities, over which are hovering the vultures of eternal despair, driven madly towards us by the fastrising blasts of the indignation of a holy and an outraged God. That is what it costs not to be a Christian. 4. In the next place, not to be a Christian costs the sacrifice of the highest manhood and the highest womanhood.Have you ever thought of it, that we have all fallen away from God's ideal of manhood and womanhood through sin? Paul puts it in his tremendous way, "We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God;" all fallen short of God's ideal of manhood; and the only way back to it is by the acceptance of those regenerating and transforming powers that there are in Jesus Christ; or, to put it into ordinary language, by regeneration through Christ. And the best that any man or woman can attain to out of Christ is to be a mere caricature of manhood or womanhood as God created men and women to be. Is there a man in this audience tonight so lost to all that is noble, to all that is good, to all that is truly manly, that he is willing to be a mere caricature of manhood as God created man to be? Is there a woman here tonight so lost to all that is true, to all that is womanly, that she is willing to be a mere caricature of womanhood as God created woman to be? That is what it costs not to be a Christian; and, men and women, if there were no other argument but that, I would come to Christ tonight. 5. In the next place, not to be a Christian costs the sacrifice of God's favour.We have all sacrificed God's favour through sin. The only way back to God's favour is by the acceptance of the Sinbearer whom God has provided. How plain the Bible makes that. Turn to John iii. 36: