To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death… – Luke 1:79

Have you in your despair made a league with death, and a covenant with hell? Thus saith the Lord, “Your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand;” for the Lord has come forth, and visited you in the person of His dear Son to deliver the captive, and save those who are appointed unto death. Knowing your guilt, the Lord visits you and bids you look up. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” Look and live; look, and be delivered at once, even from the horrible deathshadow which now broods over you. I do delight to think of this tender mercy of God to those who are lost. There are lost that shall be found, and last that shall be first. You seem forgotten of God, left out of the register of hope, but yet to you has Jesus come-“to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.” Is not this tender mercy? If he had not come to shine on such I should never have been saved. A gospel for the cheerful would never have met my case; I wanted a gospel for the despairing. I know some here who must have perished if the gospel had only been suitable to those who are of good character, and have the beginnings of natural religion within them. Only a sinner’s Savior would have suited some of you, or, indeed, any of us. As the good Samaritan did to the wounded man, “he came where he was,” so did Jesus come to us in our ruin. The benefactor of the wounded did not stand and say to him, “Come here, and get on my beast, and he shall carry you to the inn.” But he went to him when he was lying half dead, and therefore helpless; and he poured the oil and wine into his wounds while the poor wretch could not move an inch, nor stir hand or foot. He bound up his wounds, and then set him on his own beast, and took him to the inn. This is tender mercy; and in this fashion Jesus deals with us. He does everything for us from the very beginning. He is Alpha, even as He must be Omega. Does not this show the tender mercy of our God, that He does come to us in the darkness, and under the grim shadow of death, and there and then reveals His love to us?~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1907.cfm

To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. – Luke 1:79

Our God visits us when we are in darkness; when we are in such darkness as to know nothing, see nothing, believe nothing, hope nothing; even then the Lord’s mercy comes to us. Is not this tenderness? “Educate a man up to a certain point,” says one, “and then we may hope that God’s grace will visit him.” Educate him by all means, but have hope that God may visit even those who have no education of any sort. “Follow the advance of civilization,” cries one, “and do not risk your missionaries among barbarians.” Not so; our marching orders are, “Preach the gospel to every creature.” The gospel is to precede and produce civilization. To them that sit in darkness, the Lord is pleased to send the Dayspring from on high. To send light where there is light is superfluous. Have we not a proverb about sending coals to Newcastle? God sendeth not grace to us because we have already something which may be viewed as prevenient and preparatory; but the prevenient and the preparatory are of His grace, and He comes in love to bring these with Him, to those who as yet know nothing of His light and life. They are in the dark, and He creates their day.

Did you notice that it is said “to those that sit in darkness?” This is more than being in the dark. The man who sits in darkness does so because he feels that his case is hopeless, and therefore he forbears all further action. A poor benighted traveler has wandered this way and that to find a track, but it is so dark that he cannot perceive his road; and so at last he embraces the rock for want of a shelter, crouching to the earth in despair. It is a part of the tender mercy of our God that He visits those who despond and are motionless in a dread inactivity. Those who have lost hope are lost indeed, and such the Savior has come to save. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1907.cfm

To give knowledge of salvation unto His people by the remission of their sins… – Luke 1:77

Permit me to read the text to you-“To give knowledge of salvation unto His people by the remission of their sins,” from which it appears that God comes to visit us when we are in our sins. If the plan of salvation were that we were to get out of our sins, and then God would come to us, it might be full of mercy, but it would not be tender mercy. Let it never be forgotten that “When we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” “God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” I feel always at home when I get upon this blessed topic of the visits of God to undeserving, ill-deserving, hell-deserving sinners. His saving visits spring from grace, pure grace, altogether unmixed with any merit or claim on our part. God comes to us as the morning, which does not wait for man, nor tarry for the sons of men. I cannot bear the spirit which I see spreading among us in reference to almsgiving. It should not be indiscriminate, but it should be bounteous. Many cry, “We shall give help only to the deserving.” If God were to adopt that rule, where would you and I be? It has even been muttered in an undertone that, with regard to hospitals, no doubt they are used by persons who ought to provide for themselves, and so help to support struggling medical men. It may be so; but I like not the hard and niggardly spirit which suggests such criticisms. Talk not so; this is fit chatter for barbarians. Those who know the tender mercy of God will recollect that, when we ourselves had no good about us whatsoever, his tender mercy visited us, even as the sun ariseth upon the just and upon the unjust. He giveth with gladness to those who have no deservings of any kind. He will not mar the magnificence of His goodness by asking our pitiful pence of merit as a payment for it; but He giveth freely, according to the riches of His grace. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1907.cfm

For the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost. – Luke 19:10

To this day we are visited of God in other respects, but with equal mercy. The proclamation of the gospel in a nation, or to any individual, is a visit of God’s mercy. Whenever you come and hear the gospel, be you sure of this, whether you receive it or not, the kingdom of God has come nigh unto you. Even if you stop your ears, and will have none of it, yet God has visited you in tender mercy, in that by the gospel He tells you that there is a way of salvation, that there is a plan for the remission of sin. It is a monstrosity-what if I say a miracle?-of iniquity, that men having sinned, and God having done so much to work out a way of remission of those sins, men should refuse to accept God’s pardoning love. Oh, my hearers, Why are you so besotted? Wherefore do you hate your own souls? Surely, the devils themselves would at the first have scarce believed it, that there could exist a race of creatures so hardened as to refuse the love which visits them in grace. This is what devils never did. Men sin not only against God, but against their own interest, when they turn aside from the wooings of disinterested goodness, and refuse salvation through Him who loved us even to the death. That which God has so tenderly and heartily wrought out in the gift of His dear Son to die for us ought to be received with eagerness. Will not you receive it? …Jesus seeks you, will you not seek Him?~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1907.cfm

And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of His servant David…That He would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve Him without fear -Luke 1:69,74

Remember that He not only took our nature, but He dwelt among us in this world of sin and sorrow. This great Prince entered our abode-what if I call it this hut and hovel?-wherein our poor humanity finds its home for a season. This little planet of ours was made to burn with a superior light among its sister stars while the Creator sojourned here in human form. He trod the acres of Samaria, and traversed the hills of Judea. “He went about doing good.” He mingled among men with scarcely any reservation; being through His purity separate from sinners as to His character, yet He was the visitor of all men. He was found eating bread with a Pharisee, which perhaps is a more wonderful thing than when He received sinners, and ate with them. A fallen woman was not too far gone for Him to sit on the kerb of the well, and talk to her; nor were any of the poor and ignorant too mean for Him to care for them. He was bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, and His visit to us was therefore of the most intimate kind. He disdained no man’s lowliness; He turned aside from no man’s sin.

But remember that He visited us not merely to look upon us, and to talk with us, and to teach us, and set us a high and divine example, which were incomparably gracious, if it went no further; but He so visited us that He went down into our condemnation, that He might deliver us from it…He did not come into our nature, and yet keep Himself reserved from all the consequences of our sin; nor come into our world, and yet maintain a status superior to the usual denizens of it; but He came to be a man among men, and to bear all that train of woes which had fallen upon human nature through its departure from the ways of God. Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows, because the Lord hath laid upon Him the iniquity of us all. Our Lord so visited us as to become our surety and our ransom. This was a wonderful piece of tender mercy indeed. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1907.cfm