Unchanging Needs in a Changing World

. . . grace to help in time of need.--Heb. 4: 16.

Our era has been marked by many radical changes. I can scarcely realize the changes that have taken place in my lifetime. In the days of my youth, we had no telephones, no electric lights, no automobiles, no airplanes, no radios, no televisions.

The end is not yet. Almost every day brings some new change. Who can tell what changes will come through the development and use of atomic energy? Or as the result of the social, political and economic revolution now going on throughout the world?

This is indeed an age of change. But the deep down things have not changed. Human appetites and passions, human ambitions and longings. Human weaknesses and shortcomings have undergone no change.

I never met a sinless person, and I don’t expect to meet one today. Men are still tempted, and still yield to temptation. We still experience the same disappointments and frustrations, and suffer the same sorrows and heartaches, as people did centuries ago. And this means that we belong to the same human stock as that of our fathers before us, that human nature is still the same, and the human heart.

There are the same old needs. And there is the same gospel to meet these needs. Science cannot meet them. Science has added much to our comforts, but it cannot comfort sorrowing hearts. It has removed many evils from society, but it cannot remove sin from human life. There is no substitute for God. No findings of science, no ideology, no philosophy can take the place of the gospel.

Human beings are in every essential the same in every century of human history.

With all the changes and improvements science has made, men still need God; they still need Christ, the Savior from sin; they still need His keeping, sustaining and comforting grace. “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.”

We live in a state of constant and unceasing change. There is only one thing sure--today’s God will be tomorrow’s God--today’s Savior will be tomorrow’s Savior.