The Roman's Road
1st Stop
Let me tell you a story that I heard the other day. I cannot vouch for its truth, but it will serve for an illustration for me. There were two drunken sailors who wanted to go across a narrow Scotch firth. They got into a boat and began to row, in their wild drunken way, but they did not appear to make any headway. It was not far across, so they ought to have been on the other side in a quarter of an hour, but they were not across in an hour, or even in several hours.
One of them said, “I believe the boat is bewitched.” The other one said he thought they were, and I suppose they were through the liquor they had been drinking. At last the morning light came, and one of them, who had become sober by that time, just looked over the side of the boat and then called out to his mate, “You never pulled up the anchor!” They had been tugging at the oars all night long but had not pulled up the anchor.
You smile at their folly, and I do not regret that you do so, because you can now catch the meaning of what I am saying. There is many a man who is, as it were, tugging away at the oars with his prayers, and his Bible reading, and his going to chapel, and his trying to believe. But, like those drunken sailors, he has not pulled up the anchor. That is to say, he is either holding fast to his own supposed righteousness, or else he is clinging to some old sin of his that he cannot give up.
You must pull up the anchor, whether it holds you to your sins or to your self-righteousness. That anchor, still down out of sight, fully accounts for all your lost labor and fruitless anxiety. Pull up that anchor, and there will soon be a happy end of all your troubles, and you will find God to be full of tender mercy and abundant grace even to you.71
2nd Stop
Doctors Only Rush to the Sick
Matthew 9:13; Mark 2:17; Luke 5:32; Acts 8:30–33
Preaching Themes: Repentance, Salvation
I hear the doctor’s brougham rattling down the street at a great pace, and I wonder where he is going. It never occurs to me that he is rushing to call upon a hale and hearty man. I am persuaded that he is hastening to see one who is very ill, perhaps one in dying circumstances. Otherwise he would not drive so fast.
It is just so with Jesus Christ. When he is hurrying on the wings of the wind to rescue a child of man, I am sure that the soul he visits is sick with the malady of sin, and that the Physician is making haste because the disease is developing into corruption and death. He came not “to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt 9:13).242
3rd Stop
Damned to the Uttermost
“Any man who hears the gospel and persistently refuses to believe and receive it shall be damned. All anyone needs to do to be saved, saved to the uttermost, is to believe on the Lord Jesus. It is not necessary in order to be damned that one be what the world calls a wicked person … Refusing to believe on Jesus Christ is in itself a damnable sin, and reveals a damnable state of heart.”
—R. A. Torrey
4th Stop
You know, perhaps, the story of the traveler on the prairie, when a fire in the distance could be seen. The prairie was blazing, and he knew that his only hope for life was to fight fire with fire. He searched for his matches. If he could make a ring around him and burn the grass so that when the fire came up it would have nothing to feed on, then he might escape.
He found only three matches in his box. He took one and struck it with some degree of care, but before he could light the train that he had laid, the match had gone out. He took another, and this time, very tremblingly, with much tremulous anxiety about him, struck it. There was a light; he thought he was safe, but a gust of wind blew it out.
And now all depended on the last match. He must be burned to ashes, unhelped, unpitied by a friend, if that match failed him. Down he falls, and breathes the prayer, “God help me! God help me! Grant this may succeed.” He struck it! You may guess with what care he had laid all the grass around it, and then he struck it as though he were loath to run the terrible risk; but he praised God when he saw its success, and that his life was saved.
You have only one match left, sinner; use it well. One light—one time—the time to seek the Lord. Seek him now, tonight. This moment say, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”75