Great God
Almighty, I come before you by the blood
of thy dear son Jesus.
You are a dreadful sovereign who knows the
end as well as the beginning.
You hold our very breath in your hands
and your eye is ever upon us as
a father watches over his children.
I ask you right now, Almighty God, to
break through our dullness and soften our hardened
hearts and give us clarity and insight into
the dreadful hour of the final judgment where
we will stand before your throne at the
beam of seat for believers.
Open our eyes as we peer into eternity
and let us see the seraphim and cherubim
as they worship you day and night, crying,
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.
The whole earth is full of his glory.
Bend our pride, great God, and break our
hearts today by your holy spirit so we
can see eternity.
Grant us enough grace, O Lord, to turn
off our TVs long enough and get off
the internet to get on our faces before
you as we agonize over the souls of
man.
Let us see a glimpse of eternity today
in a view of your judgment seat where
our very lives will be exposed and evaluated
by the King of kings and Lord of
lords.
And let the thought of it so radically
shock us that we will be transformed by
the very sight of a nail pierced king
reviewing our lives.
May our hearts burn within us as we
worship a risen Lord who sits at the
right hand of the Father and who earned
that right by way of a bloody cross.
Let us see Jesus clearly today and I
pray, O God, that you will get a
hold of someone listening to this message and
peel the bark off of them and make
them sensitive to your spirit and turn their
life upside down.
Do it, Lord, for thy sake and the
sake of eternity.
I pray these things in the strong name
of Jesus.
Amen.
In 2nd Corinthians 5 10 we read, for
we must all appear before the judgment seat
of Christ that everyone may receive the things
done in his body according to that he
hath done, whether it be good or bad.
The judgment seat of Christ for believers is
different from the great white throne judgment for
unbelievers.
It is not condemnation or damnation but commendation
and acclamation, not hellfire and punishment but heaven's
joys and its rewards.
Christ at the great white throne judgment for
unbelievers will be a dreadful judge of severity
and scrutiny who will carry out the sentencing
of the law upon all guilty lawbreakers.
And the sentence is the second death in
a lake of fire.
But at the behemoth seat for believers there
will be a paternal tenderness in the judge
as he examines and reviews our life particular
to us.
He will bring out the book of remembrance
which is our life's biography, so to speak,
and he will review every detail in it
to show where we obeyed him or disobeyed
him, delighted him or disappointed him.
But a time of review and rewards it
will be.
It is more like a flower show at
a county fair where blue ribbons are handed
out for excellence.
Yet it is a very serious event which
every believer must face to have his life
reviewed by the judge of all the earth
who has eyes of fire.
How well we ran the Christian race will
be on display that day, including our stumbles.
I was introduced to Jesus back in 1968
when a pastor who lived across the alley
behind me took an interest in an awkward
teenage boy who was growing up in a
godless home.
He invited me to have breakfast with him
and his family each Saturday morning.
It was the first time I ever saw
a man pray.
He had a spower heads and he began
praying for each member of his family and
he prayed for me.
It was the first time anyone had ever
prayed for me.
He then offered me a job in his
bible bookstore and gradually I learned what a
Christian was.
I began to attend their little church and
it was during a revival meeting one evening
that I made a public profession of Christ.
The pastor had me meet him in his
study the next morning where he prayed earnestly
for me and wept for me and thanked
God for me.
When I went home I told my parents
that I had become a Christian but they
forbade me from ever attending that church again
and cursed that pastor.
So for a time I quit going to
church and I went back into the world.
Yet that was the beginning of my Christian
journey.
One that has been filled with peaks and
valleys, highs and lows, hallmarks and blots.
Gradually I learned how to study my bible
and pray.
Many people through the years have influenced me
for God.
I ended up with a godly pastor in
Adrian Rogers who for 20 years always reminded
me of Jesus.
I sat under his teaching but eventually I
had to learn how to walk with God
on my own and that took time.
It took years.
Now that I'm an old man I can
look back on my life and reflect and
see how I lived it.
Regretfully I've wasted much of my life by
squandering it on the wrong things of this
world.
It wasn't until later in life that God
got a hold of me and altered the
course of my life through the ministry of
Dr. Stephen F.
Alford.
I'll never forget hearing Dr. Alford recite a
poem that I never had heard before.
It went like this.
Only one life will soon be passed.
Only what's done for Christ will last.
And it's true friends.
Before I met Stephen Alford all I wanted
to do was to make a lot of
money and play a lot of golf but
God used him to change the course of
my life and call me into ministry.
But when life comes at you from every
direction and at times knocks you to the
ground it's easy to lose sight of eternity.
We begin to focus our attention on our
problems and take our focus off the beam
of sea.
But the judgment seat of Christ must always
be fresh on our mind before us as
we serve God with the abilities he has
given us.
Life is brief often much shorter than we
realize and when we die and leave this
world we go into another world for all
eternity.
And the day friends is fast approaching where
we will all stand before God and give
an account to him as to how we
lived our life for him.
I look back on my life and I
see periods where I was really on fire
for God and I see other times sadly
where I turned away from God and went
my own way but it's not the length
of time that matters as much as how
we use the time God gave us.
I like what Dr. Graham Scroggie said of
Stephen.
He said Stephen's day of ministry had scarcely
begun when it was violently ended but the
greatness of one's life must not be looked
for in length of days.
Stephen means crown and early did he receive
his.
We can't work our way into heaven friends
but we can work for rewards they'll be
handed out at the judgment seat of Christ.
For we must all appear before the judgment
seat of Christ.
How marvelous it would be to see those
believers who are mighty for God as they
stand before him.
Oh look over there stand the disciples of
Jesus.
Let us hear their testimony for their Lord.
Let's see how the blood of the martyrs
was the seat of the church.
There is Peter who was crucified upside down
in Rome.
There is James who was beheaded.
There is Andrew who was crucified on a
x-shaped cross.
There is Matthew who was first impaled to
the ground and then beheaded.
There is Nathaniel who was flayed to death
by a whip to where his skin was
torn to shreds.
There is Thomas who was stabbed to death
with a spear.
There is Philip who met a cruel death
whereby he was impaled by iron hooks in
his ankles and hung upside down to die.
Look over there is the apostle John who
spent his last days in exile on a
Greek island called Patmos where he received the
book of Revelation from the risen Lord.
Oh look friends at that stack of crowns
at their feet and here comes the apostle
Paul who spread the gospel across Asia Minor.
Oh wonder how he will stack up.
Listen to his laundry list of service to
Christ and the gospel.
In labors more abundant, in stripes above measure,
in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft of
the Jews five times received I forty stripes
save one.
Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was
I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck.
A night and a day I have been
in the deep, in journeyings often, in perils
of water, in perils of robbers, in perils
by my own countrymen, in perils by the
heathen, in perils in the city, in perils
in the wilderness, in perils in the sea,
in perils among false brethren, in weariness and
painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst,
and fastings often, in cold and nakedness, besides
those things that are without, that which cometh
upon me daily, the care of all the
churches.
Paul's lacerated back must have looked like a
crossword puzzle.
Every time he laid down to sleep he
was in pain, but then to top all
this the Romans chopped off his head.
Now how have we suffered for God?
We get bent out of shape if the
line in Starbucks is too long.
Imagine seeing that long line of worthies from
Hebrews chapter 11 stand before Christ to give
their account.
Well, can you imagine, friends, the glorious review
of Wesley and Whitfield and Fanny and Moody?
But we don't have to be a big
name for Jesus.
We can be a nobody and serve him
faithfully and cheerfully, and the sufferings and trials
we encounter in life will be but crowns
of gold, silver, and precious stones on that
day.
I remember years ago when I was a
successful businessman and I was trying to live
for God at the same time by serving
him through various ministries, and I was plum
worn out.
It was two o'clock in the morning
and I couldn't sleep.
In fact, I felt like I was dying.
I was having trouble breathing, so I got
out of bed and went to my study
and plopped down before my open Bible.
And I told God how tired I was
and that if he was ready for me,
I was ready to go to him.
Then I heard a voice, not an audible
voice, but a voice nonetheless.
The voice asked me a question, What do
you do for a living?
I answered investments.
Then he said, I have an investment in
you and I will receive the dividends from
my investment.
Well, I went back to bed and I'm
still here these many years later, although I've
had a few close calls where I went
down to the river for a time or
two.
But my greatest regret is that I have
not done more for God.
How I weep over the lost opportunities and
squandered time.
Only one life will soon be passed.
Only what's done for Christ will last.
There's another poem, friends, I like, and it's
about the judgment seat.
It's entitled His plan for me.
And it goes like this.
Oh, when I stand at the judgment seat
of Christ, and he shows his plan for
me, the plan of my life, as it
might have been, had he had his way.
And I see how I blocked him here
and checked him there.
And I would not yield my will.
Would there be grief in my savior's eyes?
Grief though he loves me still?
Would he have me rich and I stand
there poor, stripped of all but his grace?
While memory runs like a haunted thing down
the paths I cannot retrace.
Lord of the years that are left of
me, I give them to the hand.
Take me and break me and mold me
to the pattern that thou has planned.
I like that poem.
But every time I read it, it shames
me.
Years ago, my wife and I built our
dream home.
We met with a builder and an architect
and together we designed a blueprint of our
dream house.
But without that blueprint, we would have made
terrible construction errors, errors, both costly and bothersome.
If the builder had strayed from the blueprint,
we would not be living in the house
we had planned.
It would have been a different house altogether.
God has a heavenly blueprint for our life
and it is laid out just according to
his plan.
And at the judgment seat of Christ, he
is going to roll out that blueprint before
us and point to it and say, just
according to plan.
We want to live our life in light
of the judgment seat so we can hear
him say, just according to plan.
For there is a common day of review
where our life will be tested as we
give an account to Jesus, as we stand
before him and he examines the things we
have done in the body, whether it be
good or bad, and it passes beneath his
intense scrutiny.
We get a sense of this from 1
Corinthians chapter 3.
1 Corinthians chapter 3, beginning in verse 11,
reads, For the foundation can no man lay
than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
Now if any man build upon this foundation
gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, every
man's work shall be made manifest, for the
day shall declare it, because it shall be
revealed by fire, and the fire shall try
every man's work of what sort it is.
If any man's work abide, which he hath
built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.
If any man's work shall be burned, he
shall suffer loss, but he himself shall be
saved, yet so as by fire.
This striking passage of scripture illustrates the great
review of our lives at the judgment seat
for believers, how every act we did in
the body will be reviewed as God shines
his holy spotlight on the record of our
life.
Our words, our deeds, our motives will all
pass before the one who has eyes of
fire as he looks at the whole expanse
of our life since we became a Christian.
He will examine our prayer life.
He will peer into our personal life.
He will look at how we managed the
time he gave us, how we used the
money he entrusted to us, how we witnessed
for him to the lost in our community,
how we served him with the talents and
abilities which he gave us.
We will have to give an account for
the sins of commission as well as the
sins of omission.
We will have to give a reason why
we didn't spread the gospel more in our
generation.
Why did we neglect to tell others about
Jesus?
Why did we spend so much time on
things of this world to the neglect of
things of eternal worth?
Why didn't we pray more?
Why didn't we intercede more on behalf of
the lost and perishing?
Why did we let our neighbors and family
members go to hell because of the lack
of prayer for them than the difference to
them?
Why didn't we give more?
Why didn't we weep more over our own
sins and the sins of our nation?
When we were with others, did we make
them thirsty for Jesus or did we just
fill them with more of this world?
Will we stand there before him who bled
and died on a cross for us and
make excuses on that day?
Will we stand there in the radiance of
the gold, silver, and precious stones that represent
our lives and that reflect his glory?
Or will we stand there bankrupt, knee-deep
in the ashes of a wasted life and
then bend down to scoop up those ashes
and then place them into his nail pierced
hands?
Only one life will soon be passed.
Only what's done for Christ will last.