Time Running Out, Pt. 1

Joe Crews: Do you know something? In the last 20 years, over 1500 Americans have become instant millionaires by winning a state lottery, the one lady, a New Jersey, by the way, won it twice. She got over a million dollars one time and over $2 million the other time and they said the chances of that was about one and, what 28 trillion or something like that, unbelievable, but anyway, [inaudible 00:00:24]

Speaker 1: The piling up of wealth is just one of the marks of our affluent age. Amazing Facts Speaker, Joe Crews looks at all the signs of our current social problems in his crusade topic, "Time Running Out".

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Joe Crews: A recent issue of Time Magazine spotlighted the flock of new young Americans who have become millionaires almost overnight. You know, one of the most astonishing things about this affluent age of ours is this massive piling up of wealth by these newcomers on the American scene. Now I can hear somebody saying, well, so what? This is just a mark of our great material progress and advancement, our security as a 20th century nation, and yet friends I wonder how secure we really are.

Oh, I know the appearance of things is very impressive indeed. I'm sure the walls of ancient Babylon seem no more strong and permanent that the great towering walls of our skyscraper cities and I'm sure no former generation ever accumulated so much hoarded wealth as we can now boast of.

What does it mean to you that we're living in an age now when some man can't even estimate their own worth, they don't know how much money they have. They've never been able to compute it and yet friends this is exactly what the Bible says is going to happen at the very end of time. In fact, do you know, the Bible says that when this happens when men gather their riches and pilot their wealth very very quickly, this is a sign, this is a mark according to the Bible that time is running out and that Jesus is coming very soon.

Turn with me in your Bible now to the book of James, I'm going to read from chapter five and the first few verses. James 5 and the first few verses it says, "Go to now you rich man weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your governments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered, and the rust of them should be a witness against you and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days." For the what? For the last days, it says.

Now, notice according to the prophecy or the Bible, at the very end of time, men are going to put up their money and accumulated and gather it together. This is happening all around us. Do you know something? in the last 20 years, over 1500 Americans have become instant millionaires by winning a state lottery. In other words, they happen to have the lucky ticket that brought them a million dollars in hand just like that, overnight in a moment of time.

That is rather interesting friends. One lady in New Jersey, by the way, won it twice she got over a million dollars one time at over two million dollars the other time and they said the chances of that was about one and what, 28 trillion or something like that. Unbelievable. Anyway, it's happening and the prophecies are being fulfilled.

When I was living in Bangalore, India several years ago, one of the richest man in the world lived not too far away. He was a Nizam of Hyderabad. He's dead now, you might have heard of that man. He had palaces just filled with trunks of money, bank notes, all kinds of riches and wealth. One morning I picked up the Madrasa mail newspaper and read a very interesting story about something that had happened to the Nizam of Hyderabad.

He had walked into one of the rooms of his palace and opened up a trunk there that had contain the equivalent of $8 million. When he opened it up, there was nothing there but a little dust and a rat hole in the corner, you see a rat had known its way in there and carried every bit of that $8 billion right down the rat hole.

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This man didn't worry about that, that was only one trunk in one palace in one country and he had those palaces all over the world, he didn't worry about that at all. Anyway, friends, the love of money has created a very, very paradoxical situation in the world today. When I was living in India, I went down into one of the deepest gold mines in the world, The Kolar Gold Fields. It went down over a mile, I went down halfway there and got claustrophobia, believe me, and I watched those miners as they packed away digging out the glittering ore then hauling it up to the surface on their baskets.

At the time I wondered, "Now, what's going to happen to this? Where will this gold end up?" Then I came back to this country and went to Louisville, Kentucky to pastor a church there and just 25 miles south of Louisville was Fort Knox, Kentucky. I found out friends, what they were doing with all this gold they were digging up out of the ground over in India, they were putting it back in the ground on the Fort Knox Kentucky.

We live in a crazy world, don't we? It's a mixed-up confused world but this is a kind of age it is and this is exactly the way the Bible describes it as being full of confusion and this is only one aspect of the of the problem, the unparalleled pace of the scientific development, that's something else. We pick up the newspapers here every few days and read about some new scientific-technological breakthrough about space travel or exploration of outer space.

We've had our problems, of course, with the shuttle, but I'm sure all of you realize that we have sent these man-made vehicles out there to already visit five of our planets. I remember we were having a crusade somewhere when the fourth planet was visited, that was Saturn, I believe, and everybody was so excited thinking they were going to find out at last what those rings are of Saturn.

Well, we still don't know exactly what they are. I remember that they were telling us that it took seven years for that vehicle to get there and to circle around that planet. It took an hour and a half for the message to get back from there by radio and people could sit there in their living rooms and watch this picture of the planet taken pretty close up by that camera way out in space. A byproduct of all of this frenzied research and the science friends has brought forth for our enjoyment, a lot of gadgets and miracle processes and wonder drugs and all the rest of it.

That brings us to another text of the Bible that describes these last days that we're now living in. Please come with me in your Bible now to Daniel chapter 12, and will read verse 4. Daniel 12. This is going back to the Old Testament now and we're looking at verse 4 of Daniel 12. "But thou, oh, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, even to the time of the end," Even to when? The time of the end.

Now, remember a moment ago we read and the book of James about the last days. Here we're reading about the time of the end. What's going to happen in those days of the time of the end friends. It says, "Many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased." This says that there's going to be an explosion of knowledge down at the end of time. Have you read anything about that? Have you read anything about man's knowledge growing and growing and increasing, friends? Why listen, they've never seen anything like it.

Many of the products today, were not known just a few years ago. Tremendous surge of invention and technology, and it's causing men to travel, it says, they're going to run to and fro and knowledge will be increased. I believe this is talking about spiritual knowledge, primarily but I think it's also talking about physical, all kinds of knowledge, perhaps the inventions that we see taking place today.

I don't know whether you realize it or not but in the last 50 years, our world has simply been revolutionized as a result of things that have been invented and developed. I can remember my dear father talking about the first horseless carriage that came rattling into our part of the country over in North Carolina where I grew up, here in North Carolina, where I grew up. I'm usually preaching somewhere out west or across the country and I'm telling them all about wonderful North Carolina. So I'm telling you now that it was not too many miles away from here that I grew up in a tobacco patch, all right.

My father told about that first horseless carriage it came along and the dust was flying and the chickens were running in squawking in all directions, I thought the end of the world was coming. Well, now that wasn't too many years ago, my father saw that and I can remember very, very clearly when the first electricity came out to our house in the country. My brother and I ran through the house, flipping those switches to see the lights come on because we had carried lamps from room to room in order to get light from place to place.

Friends things have happened very, very quickly. In 1900, there was not even a single highway in the world for an automobile to travel over and the average American traveled 200 miles in a year, today the average American goes 10,000 miles and his own automobile. Some changes have taken place very obviously. Anybody who has lived to be 60 years of age now have seen more changes take place than all the thousand years before that. Did you know that? Really. Little children know more about scientific knowledge and development than their grandparents learned in a whole lifetime. Everything was pretty static there for a long time.

If we could back to, say, 1860, that wasn't too long ago. 1860, not only was there no automobile, no electricity, no telephone, there was not even a bicycle, bless your heart. It would be like a different planet. Not just a different age, but a different world, a different planet. Everything went on just exactly the same. Communication, transportation, until about 140 or 145 years ago, and then suddenly, everything began to develop. Inventions were made and people began to travel, they started running to and fro by train and plane and bus and air and water, running to and fro exactly like the Bible said down at the end of time. It happened overnight, almost.

If we could go back in the book of Genesis, for example, to Pharaoh. The description we have there of Pharaoh, how fast do you think Pharaoh could travel, friends, when he went from place to place? He traveled as fast as the horses could pull his chariot along. You come down about 5,000 years to the time of George Washington, the father of our country, and how fast could George Washington get around over the face of the earth? Only as fast as the horses pulled his carriage. There was no change. Then suddenly everything broke lose, inventions.

In fact, back in 1898, the American cruiser, Charleston, pulled into the island port of Guam and began to shell the old Spanish port there. The Spanish governor sent his messengers out there with their little [unintelligible 00:12:12] flags to give back a wig wag message, and they signaled and said, "We're sorry, we can't return your salute. Our powder is all wet." He didn't know his country was at war with the United States. We were shelling them an honest, but he didn't know about it. The information had to come by slow boat, and the boat hadn't arrived yet.

Now, if something happens, my friends, here in an electronic tick, it is placed all around the world and everybody knows about it. That's what I say. The Bible says at the end of time, these things are going to develop, and the people will travel and information will grow and grow and explode, and that's the way it's been. It didn't happen slowly, it happened very quickly.

In fact, there was a man I employed at the United States Patent office back there in 1844 by the name of Henry Ellsworth. He resigned from his position in the patent office, and the reason he gave is, friends, was that everything had been invented now they could be invented. He was getting out of it. He sat down with a candle there and his old quill in hand and wrote out his resignation. He was getting out of this business, nothing else to be invented. You can imagine what's happened since 1844, friends. Millions of inventions have been registered with the United States Patent office.

Now let's come to the words of our Lord here in the Gospel of Luke Chapter 21. Notice another great sign that will be prevalent at the very end of this age. We'll begin reading here in Luke 21:25. "And there shall be signs in the sun and in the moon and in the stars, and upon the earth, distress of nations with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring." That sounds familiar, doesn't it? The sea and the waves roaring, the wind blowing, a lot of noise, a lot of confusion, and the elements. My friends, we see all of these calamities and catastrophes taking place in nature in a larger degree on a more distractive way than we've ever seen them before. Talk about your volcanoes and tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes and mudslides and all the rest of it. These things are proliferating. We know about it. We read about it in the papers.

The Bible says that this will happen, men will be perplexed over, that they'll be frightened to death over it because the next verse says, men's hearts failing them for fear and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth while the powers of heaven shall be shaken. Then shall they see the son of man come in a cloud with power and great glory.

Notice something here. Right at the very end of time, it said men's hearts will be terrified. I don't believe that this is talking about the common ordinary kind of fear that you and I knew when we were children. There has always been a certain amount of fear in the world. I was afraid of a terrible electric storm on a dark night when I was a little boy. I was afraid of the cemetery on a dark night having to walk by it. This is not what the bible is talking about. This is not what Jesus meant.

Listen, friends, the fears of today have never been felt before. Let me tell you what the cheap fears of men are today. Number one, that computers will start controlling people. Then that we're going to destroy the oxygen in the atmosphere with spray cans. Then that we're going to poison all the soil by burying nuclear waste in it. Then that scientists are going to start manipulating genes and cloning people. These are some of the cheap fears of today. Let me tell you something, they weren't even known 20 years ago.

None of these things were really issues before the world in those days just a few years ago, but now people are terrified. They're afraid this is going to happen. That also maybe a great bomb will come dropping down over heavens that will wipe out entire states and maybe even nations. Yes, this is the fear that we're talking about, friends, and it's doing something to our society too. You know what it's doing? Even the little children today are emotionally disturbed because of the atmosphere of fear that they see. They really are.

In New York City, a special committee was appointed to look into the needs of the 1.5 million public school children in New York City. A study was made of the emotional condition and health of these boys and girls in the City of New York. When they came back with the report, it shook up the whole country, because their report was that one-half of these 1.5 million public school children were in need of professional help. In other words, they were mixed up. They were emotionally disturbed and they needed some sort of professional help.

Friends, don't you think that this kind of fear is not being translated into the lives and hearts of people all across this land and around the world? It is causing the suicide rates to increase at a tremendous pace. You may say, Brother, Joe, the suicide, that's taking place because we've got all these poverty. We've got pockets of poverty in the cities, and these poor people who are living in these places, in these big cities, and they don't have enough food even or anything like this. This is the problem when people take their own life because they don't have enough to eat maybe. Don't you believe it, friends. That's not the reason for the problem today.

In fact, in Los Angeles county of [unintelligible 00:17:57], this is one county in California, one medical doctor every month takes his own life. That's only in one county of one state. Friends, we need to know that this is not just a problem that's afflicting a few people, but it's reaching from high to low because everybody's hearts are filled with fear over this thing that's happening.

In fact, I had a crusade in Denver, Colorado, and when I was there for that particular crusade, and this was a few years ago, I know the papers came out with an announcement that one-third of the student body in that particular University of Colorado were receiving some sort of professional counseling. One-third of the student body in that one large state university. I think this reflects a lot of the confusion that has been reveled and expressed all across the land.

Now let's go to another great sign that the Bible speaks of, and this is found now in the book of Timothy. In 2nd Timothy 3, and we'll read verses 1, 2 and 3. "This know also that in the last days, perilous times shall come." That word perilous means dangerous. You think we're living in dangerous times now? We'll come back to this point in a few moments, but I want you to follow that with me now to verse 4 where it's giving a list there of 19 outstanding sins that would mark the final moments of this earth's history. It says they are traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof from such turn away.

Friends, this says that the world would have an inordinate love for pleasure at the very end of time. Have you seen anything like that in the world around you? Have you seen people preoccupied with having a good time and trying to find something to be exciting and to stimulate their senses. I can tell you right now that the world is filled with this kind of thing, it really is. People are rushing madly here and there trying to satisfy themselves with things. Why are they doing it, Prince? I'll tell you why, because they've turned away from the real well of truth, God's word and they're out there looking for happiness at the empty cisterns of this world and they'll never find it.

Young people today, you know where they've been looking for happiness and fulfillment. They've been looking for it in drugs and free sex and all the rest of it. They're not finding it and I'm happy to tell you that a lot of those young people are turning now to the one place where it can be obtained. They're looking to the Word of God now and we have a lot of young people coming to our crusades today and they're looking into the Bible to find the answers because friends this is the only answer.

You will never find any joy or peace or pleasure or happiness or fulfillment outside of knowing Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior. This is the only way you will find nothing but more emptiness, more frustration, if you're looking anywhere, except here in the book of God. This is not a Christian country anymore, and I want to talk about that for a little while.

Tonight, I want you to see my friends that nobody is going to find any real happiness. Even in a world and the country of freedom and plenty such as the United States of America, you still will not find the fulfillment that you're looking for. There's joy, there's peace, and there's real happiness only in one thing, and that is the book of God and in having a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.

If you have not found that, my friend you ought to be looking for it, and you ought to be determined tonight that by His grace you will discover your Lord and Savior before going to your bed tonight. You should do that because there's only one place to find and that is on your knees, confessing your sins, receiving Christ as your Lord and Savior. If you've not done it, I recommend it to you.

Even before you go to bed tonight, you get on your knees and ask God to give you that kind of experience on those of you who are by your television sets tonight. Today, you also kneel there and accept Christ as your Lord and Savior and then write and let me know let me share something with you that will be of encouragement to you. The only place that will ever find true joy, true fulfillment is on our knees receiving Christ as our Lord and Savior.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Joe, for that powerful message. Time is indeed running out friends, the signs are everywhere. Aren't they? I think you'd like to have a copy of today's message in print and I'll tell you how to get it in a moment. First I'd like to have you hear our college quartet the messengers sing that grand old hymn, The Story of Jesus will Never Grow Old. Tell me the old, old story. Messengers.

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Messengers: The story of Jesus will never grow old, grow old. Tell me the story of Jesus, write on my heart every word. Tell me the story most precious, sweetest that ever was heard. Tell how the angels call us, bend as they bow of His birth, singing glory to God in the highest, he sent good tidings to us. Tell me the old, old story, tell me the old, old story, tell me the old, old story of Jesus and His love.

Jesus and His love, I love to tell the story, how wonderful it is, than all the golden fancies, that all our golden dreams and where they sing our glory, I see the new, new song. Tell me the old, old story that I love so much. I love to tell the story, it will be my winning glory, to tell the old old story of Jesus and His love. Jesus and His, tell me the old, old story of love.