more I bring this message to you and beseech you to listen to it, before your feet stumble on the dark mountains, and death comes to put its seal on your everlasting fate. You have long been wandering away from God, mocking His judgments and despising the compassionate counsels which He has given you in His Word and by His servants.
If you persist in this thoughtless and rebellious course, you may never again hear a warning to flee from the wrath to come, and it is but a short time before you must go to that place where God forgets to be gracious and His mercy is clean gone for ever. But if you will be persuaded, if you will repent and believe and obey the gospel – long and obstinately as you have been fighting against the authority of God and resisting the calls of His pity – I am warranted to assure you of acceptance and salvation. This is because the blood of atonement, on which He beseeches you to rely, cleanses from all sin, and His mercy reaches far enough to embrace even the chief of sinners. Be reconciled to Him then by the death of His Son. Cast yourselves upon His unmerited but never-failing love. Lay hold of salvation as His free gift. Let His redeeming grace be your confidence, your rejoicing and your hope during the short evening of your pilgrimage, that it may bear you comfortably through the agonies of your departure and carry you away, as trophies of its riches and its power, to the glories of a better world.
Even if you are young and healthy, do not count on the years and the opportunities of a lengthened life. Whenever you are saved, it must be by grace. And if the grace of God is now bringing you salvation, offering it to you and pressing it upon you, why will you delay accepting it, as if it were not as valuable and necessary at this moment as it may become at some future time? The longer you defer embracing it, the more hardened you will become against the influences of the grace which confers and applies it, and the more difficult it will be to prevail on you to renounce the sins which now prevent you from receiving it, and to acquiesce in the only method by which you can become partakers of it. What security do you have that you will be spared till that chosen hour when you may have decided that you will seek its blessings, the hour after which you will never desist from the pursuit till they become yours?
You have, you can have no such security. Sickness of body, insanity of mind, sudden and unexpected death may come upon you, and eternally shut out your hope of making even one effort of reliance on that grace of God, by which alone you can be saved. It may eternally shut out your hope of ever again hearing the doctrine which we have been urging you to receive. “Now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation”. Listen to the voice of God today, and do not harden your heart. Do not let the sun go down on again on