Years ago, when I was just a boy, I used to attend a Bible camp every summer. The lady who ran the camp was sent by an organization in Chicago to evangelize our people there in the mountains of East Tennessee. One Sunday  night she came to the church my family was attending, and she was allowed to make a little talk. She explained that "God has no hands, except your hands; he has no feet except your feet," and so on. I was about eleven years old, and looked more like I was seven. I was very small for my age. I looked down at those little tiny hands, and those little tiny feet, and I thought, "If God does not have any hands except these hands, and no feet except these feet, he must be a very small god."

     I hear people talk about how God is doing the best he can, and he would do a lot better if he could just get better organized, if he could get better financed. He would do a lot better, if we would just help him. If people were not so tight with their money, they could hire a few more preachers, and send a few more missionaries, and God would do ever so much more than he is doing now.

     Back when the mission program first got started, they used to quote figures as to how much it cost to keep a missionary on the field long enough to convert one soul. The first figure I ever heard quoted came from an old publication which dated almost from the beginning of that effort. At that time they figured that it cost just over five dollars. Five dollars was a lot more money then than it is now. At that time common laborers worked for about fifty cents a day. You can imagine how that was used to get people to turn loose of their money in the prospect of saving people from hell.  With inflation the way it is, suppose that in today's money it takes one thousand dollars to keep a missionary on the field long enough to save one soul. Let me ask you, if your money (whether it is five dollars or one thousand dollars) would help to save any person from eternal damnation, how could you in good conscience spend that money for anything else? Suppose you spend ten thousand dollars on a car trade. At today's prices you will probably spend a lot more than that. But, if you would, you probably could have spent a thousand dollars on that old jalopy you were driving, and you could have made it last another year. You could have given that other nine thousand dollars to the mission program and that would have kept a missionary on the field long enough to save nine people from eternal damnation. How could you bear to ride around in that shiny automobile, knowing that because you spent so much money on a car trade, nine people are going to burn in the flames of eternal damnation?

     But perhaps you did not spend ten thousand dollars.  Perhaps you bought an old, old car and you spent a lot less. The principle is the same. You could walk, if you had to. It would be better to walk to work than to spend money on any car trade that would have saved somebody from eternal hell. It would be better for most of us if we did more walking. You need your exercise, so you make a point of walking two miles every day, but then along in the afternoon, your wife tells you that she needs a loaf of bread, so you get in the car and drive a quarter of a mile to the grocery store. It does not make a lot of sense. If giving money is what it takes to save souls from hell, there are a lot of ways we could save money to give to the program. But money will not get people into heaven, and it will not keep them out. I Pet. 1:18,19, "Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot."

     How could you bear to spend money for anything? You spend twenty dollars for a new shirt. Fifty of those add up to a thousand dollars. Would it not be better to wear a shirt till it falls apart? If somebody's eternal destiny depends on your money, should you not give every penny you can get your hands on to the program. A church spends thousands of dollars for new pews. For about ten dollars apiece they could have bought folding chairs.  They may spend undreds of thousands of dollars for a new meeting house. If they were really serious, they could just rent a meeting hall, and put all of that money into the program.

     Consider some poor ignorant native in some faraway land.  He has never heard the gospel. If he hears it, he might believe it, and repent, and (according to that system) be born again. Now consider some miserly, greedy, self- entered Christian in America, who has the money to give to the program so that somebody could go over there and preach to that man, but because the selfish Christian wants a shiny new car, or because he just wants to increase the balance on his bank statement, he does not give. If that is the case, it looks to me like the wrong person got punished.  I believe the person who was so tight is the one who ought to suffer --- if that system is right. Think about it. Is it fair that one person should burn in the flames of eternal damnation, because somebody else was stingy with his money.

     Years ago I had a conversation with a good brother who believed that system. He was sure that a person must hear the gospel and respond to it in order to be born again. I presented some of the challenges that we have been considering. I asked him about some native in the jungles of the South Pacific, who had never heard the gospel. According to that system he has never had a chance to be born again. What will his destiny be if the preacher never reaches him? The brother decided that anybody in that condition would live in heaven, because he did not know any better.   He had never had a chance to be saved, so he would be saved by his ignorance. After all, how could God send anybody to hell, if he had never had a chance?

     But think about that for a moment. Here is a poor native who has never heard the gospel. If he dies in that condition, he will live in heaven, because he never had a chance. But now, the preacher reaches him. He presents him with the gospel message.  He does not like what he hears, and he says, "Away with any such message; I don't believe a word of it." He has had his chance, and missed it. Now if he dies, he will be forever lost, because he heard the gospel message and rejected it. He was better off before the preacher talked to him. If that notion is right, we would do better to call all the missionaries home, and allow the rest of the world to live and die in their ignorance, and be saved by their not knowing any better. In fact, if that notion is right, we would probably do well to close all the churches here in America, and let our neighbors get to heaven the same way.

     "The legs of the lame are not equal." There is no way you can make sense out of that system. It is too self- contradictory.  And there is no way that you can present it in such a way as to show that God is in any way fair in his dealings with mankind.  Those who accuse the doctrine of salvation by the sovereign grace of God with being an unfair system have it all wrong. It is the contrary system that is unfair.