Eternity Depends On Time

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the YouTube recording's caption track, read through the transcript panel — published in summary form; watch the full sermon at the source.

Because of the Times 2000 · The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA Topics: Second Coming · Missions and Evangelism · Prayer

Two lives, one difference.

She is presented mid-sentence by another voice, thanks the house warmly, and opens with Wellington and Napoleon: born the same year, on islands, fatherless boys, schoolmates in France, colonels within a day of each other, commanders of great armies — almost identical lives, until Waterloo made one the victor and the other the defeated. So it is with us, she says: similar in faith, in doctrine, in New Testament identity — until the appointed day. What we do in time determines what we will be in eternity.

The judgment seat.

Her sermon lives at that day. She stages it: not an angel, not Gabriel, but the Lord himself looking each soul in the eye — the fruitful hearing his welcome, surrounded by the souls they won; the unprofitable hearing the indictment of a servant who buried what he was given — the name, the word, the blood, the Spirit — and brought no profit on heaven's investment. Lazy Christians, lazy pastors, lazy churches, she calls them: spectators who rode it out, who will stand stripped on the sidelines of the golden age. Her position in the kingdom, she insists, is not her salvation — that cannot be earned — but it does depend on her use of God-given resources for God-given goals. (The welcome and the indictment are her performed dramatisation of Matthew 25, voiced in the Lord's person and expanded in her own words; both movements are priced with the dominical family in the packet, as is the "I was hungry" reckoning she returns to near the close.)

What then?

The spine of the middle is a litany she drives like a hammer: when the factories have turned out their last work, the banks their last dividend, the choir its last anthem, this Bible lies closed on the pulpit and the pews stand empty — what then, when you are asked for your balance? Millions, she says, are falling into hell while she speaks, people who could have been saved: everyone who calls on the Lord's name shall be saved, but they cannot call on one they have never heard of, and more than eighty percent of Holy Ghost believers have never shared their faith with a living soul, never given to missions, never had a missionary in their church. She sets against that Mickey Mangun, slipping big bills to the boys who came up the night before so they could eat — that, she says, will stand at the judgment seat. (The call-on-the-name wording rides inside her missions argument in adapted form and is priced in the packet, with the highways-and-hedges clause of the same movement.)

How long is eternity?

She reaches for the old preachers' pictures: a rock a hundred miles high and wide, a little bird sharpening its beak on it once in a thousand years — when the rock is worn away, not one day of eternity will have passed; a steel ball worn out by an eagle's touch once a century; a sparrow emptying the Atlantic into the Pacific a drop at a time. Against the pictures she sets the doctrine plainly, with C. S. Lewis named and agreed with: hell is real, Jesus taught more about it than heaven, and his unbearable thought was that Judas was lost.

Time, the vapor.

What is time? Genesis opens with it; Revelation ends it ("time shall be no more"). It is one of God's greatest gifts and terribly short: friendships, family circles, achievements, possessions, even a king's crown — all transient, all taking wings. Livingstone, who left his heart in Africa, would value nothing except in its relation to the kingdom and the winning of souls; Corrie ten Boom, named in her telling, held the whole world like a loose garment. And the question arrives while you are still figuring it out: what is your life? A breath, a shadow, a vapor a couple of feet above your head — invest it in what lasts. (The Bible wordings inside this movement — the vapor, the moth-eaten garments, the passing fashion of the world — are an unattributed weave and are priced as one item in the packet; the two books she names as books are priced with it as a book-named pair.)

Daniel's conclusion.

Babylon did not last, and neither did Rome — but Daniel did, the captive boy made great because he gave himself to prayer, fasting, souls, and the study of the Scriptures, until every heathen king he served acknowledged his God. His book's conclusion is her text for soul winners: shine as the brightness of the firmament, and turn many to righteousness, as the stars for ever and ever — he had caught a glimpse of things eternal; he knew eternity depends on time. (Daniel is expressly framed as the sentence's speaker in the act, and the entry ships on that footing; the soul-winning clause she splices onto its head is Proverbs' wording and is priced separately in the packet, the divergence recorded.)

Scriptures: Daniel 12:3

Paul, and the chain of witnesses.

The early church traded time for eternity and shook an empire; then Paul fills the frame — Athens first, standing on Mars Hill to declare the unknown God to a city given to idolatry, the mighty God in Christ, whose name the whole world needs to know. Then she performs his farewell in his own voice: one eye on the judgment seat, one on the lost world; jails, whippings, shipwreck could not hold him; and at the block, free from the blood of all men, sending one last word to Demas, who loved this present world and was narrowed by it — this world passes away, but the one who does the will of God abides forever. John is named over that sentence in the act, and Peter after him, with the heavens passing away in noise and fervent heat: nothing in time lasts, so grab eternity instead. The panel's own gap falls inside this movement and stands as a gap. (Paul's performed farewell — the blood-of-all-men line, the cross resolve, the Demas message — is priced with the Pauline family in the packet, and the Mars Hill wording with it as an adapted rendering; Daniel's text above and the two apostles' wordings here are the record's named-speaker entries.)

Scriptures: 1 John 2:17; 2 Peter 3:10

Nothing in time lasts; one soul outweighs it all.

The temple's stones are all coming down — not one left on another, on Jesus' own word to his disciples. Kings and kingdoms pass; only what is done for Christ endures. Then the scales: Elvis's billion records, the billions of the richest men alive — and Jesus' question, expressly attributed in her telling, of what a man profits gaining the whole world and losing his soul. One soul, she says, outweighs the wealth of six continents; the Talmud she quotes agrees that a single saved life is a world entire. So her vows are made in the open: her one little vapor to the church that lasts, to souls, to the study of this book, to spreading the gospel, to prayer without ceasing — life on the foundation, built on the rock, with materials chosen as if Rome would be eternal. (The temple wording and the soul wording are expressly attributed in the act and are priced together in the packet with the dominical family; the rock material and the without-ceasing clause are priced there too.)

Prayer, and the ones who slept.

Prayers never die, she says — kept in golden vials on the golden altar. The greatest thing a life can be given to is desperate, fervent, prevailing prayer, the kind Jesus prayed with strong crying and tears; the house of prayer he cleansed the temple to restore — "it is written" — is the church's calling. Then Gethsemane: three men taken into the holiest chamber of his last night, asked only to watch and pray a little while, and all three asleep. Something sovereign is happening at because of the times 2000, she warns — better never to have come than to come and leave unchanged; don't weary in well-doing, don't be snared, watch and pray always. Heaven keeps a special reward, she says, for the prayer warriors inside the sacred portals — and the others will only watch, and remember that they slept. (The golden-vials paraphrase, the temple wording under its written frame, and the Gethsemane fragments are all priced in the packet.)

"I was hungry."

The judgment seat returns, now as a mirror: the King unrecognised in the lowly family the church was ashamed of, the crippled it was not courteous to, the deaf and mute couple it was too busy for, the blind boy crossing the street — "when you've done it unto one of the least of these." She folds her own ledger into the appeal: in less than six weeks she will turn seventy-four, her husband eighty-one a week later, and they will have been married fifty-seven years — still active, still running, eighteen-hour days packed into fleeting years, and the legacy she intends is people who live eternally.

The cup.

Waterloo again for the close of the argument: Napoleon stayed safe behind the lines; Wellington rode the front where his men could see him. She borrows Anthony's cup from the platform and holds her life up in it — we have lived with this cup in our hands, on the front lines; we have fought the good fight, we have kept the faith — and tells him he can bury one like it with her. The panel goes silent for the toast and resumes with her as a young girl who perceived early that life is short and filled it with things that last — and with the little boy she carried, now grown tall and handsome, her pastor, fifty years old eight days ago, for whom she and brother Tenney and many others kept a day of prayer and fasting. The family stories tumble out — Gerald, the singing, the leaving and the coming back — all of it to one point: the piece she won't get to keep and the eternity they will. (Paul's good-fight wording, appropriated as her own testimony in that passage, is priced in the packet as its own variant.)

The subject named, and the last question.

So she names it outright: that is where she got her subject today — eternity depends on time. And then what? Live long — and then what? Raise a family, see the children settled, grandchildren, old age, a peaceful retirement — and then the curtain falls, and she lifts it: the judgment seat of Christ, your first appointment, where you will hear either "well done" or the other sentence. While the biggest drama of the ages is being wound up, some who were chosen actors went to sleep — what do you want to do about this? The panel's last gap falls inside the appeal, and her final captioned words are the indictment itself, left hanging over the house: somebody ought to be weeping now, before you are called out — wicked and slothful servant.

Summary scripture index: Daniel 12:3 · 1 John 2:17 · 2 Peter 3:10 (3 entries).