Character of Jesus

The Bliss of Living Near to God

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God Leave a comment

And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus – Ephesians 2:6

The new life that made us sympathetic with God and holy angels and holy men and with everything that is from above, has also made us capable of great pleasure. Life is usually capable of pleasure, but the new life is capable of the highest conceivable pleasure. I am certain that no ungodly man has any conception of the joy which often fills the believer’s spirit. If worldlings could only know the bliss of living near to God, and of basking in the light of His countenance, they would throw their wealth into the sea, and ten thousand times as much, if they might but get a glimpse of this joy that can never be bought, but which God gives to all who trust His dear Son… Oh, the thrill of joy that has sometimes gone through our spirits! We could almost have died with delight at times when we have realized the glorious things that God has prepared for them that love Him. This joy we never knew till we received the new life.

But I must add that we are also capable of acute pain to which we were strangers once. God has made our conscience quick as the apple of the eye; He has made our soul as sensitive as a raw wound, so that the very shadow of sin falling on the believer’s heart will cause him great pain…The heart itself then, is broken, and bleeds at ten thousand wounds. Yet this is one of the results of our possessing the new life; and I will say this, the sharpest pang of spiritual life is better than the highest joy of carnal life. When the believer is at his worst, he is better than the unbeliever at his best; his reasons for happiness are always transcendently above all the reasons for joy that worldlings can never know. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2267.cfm

No God?

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, The Holy Spirit Leave a comment

And you hath He quickened… – Ephesians 2:1

Beloved brethren and sisters in Christ, I think that you and I can say, that to us the surest fact in all the world is that there is a God. No God? I live in Him. Tell a fish in the sea there is no water. No God? Tell a man who is breathing that there is no air. No God? I dare not come downstairs without speaking to Him. No God? I would not think of closing my eyes in sleep unless I had some sense of His love shed abroad in my heart by the Holy Ghost. “Oh!” says one, “I have lived fifty years, and I have never felt anything of God.” Say that you had been dead fifty years; that is nearer to the mark. But if you had been quickened by the Holy Spirit fifty minutes, this would have been the first fact in the front rank of all fact, God is, and He is my Father, and I am His child. Now you become sentient to His frown, His smile, His threat, or His promise. You feel Him; His presence is photographed upon your spirit; your very heart trembles with awe of Him, and you say with Jacob, “Surely God is in this place.” That is one result of spiritual life.

The life of Christ, the life of God, is infused into us in that moment when we are quickened from our death in sin. What a wonderful thing it is to have become sympathetic with God! What He desires, we desire. His glory is the first object of our being. He loves His Son, and we love His Son. We desire to see His kingdom come as He does, and we pray for His will to be done on earth, even as it is in heaven. We wish that death did not remain, the old nature hampering us; but, in perfect proportion as the new life is really in us, we now run parallel with God. The holiness which He delights in we aspire after. Not with equal footsteps, but with tottering gait, we follow in that selfsame path that God has marked out for Himself. “My soul followeth hard after Thee; Thy right hand upholdeth me.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2267.cfm

The New-born Child of God

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God 2 Comments

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God… – Ephesians 2:19

When a man is born into the kingdom of God, he has to learn everything; and consequently, if he is wise, he questions older and wiser believers about this and about that. I pray you that are instructed, and have become fathers, never laugh at babes in grace, if they ask you the most absurd questions. Encourage them to do so, let them tell you their difficulties. You, by God’s grace are a man; this little one is but a new-born babe; hear what he has to say. You mothers, do this with your little children. You are interested, you are pleased, you are amused, with what they say. Thus ought instructed saints to deal with those who have been newly quickened. They come to us, and ask, “What is this? What is that? What is the other?” It is a time of asking, a time of enquiring. It is well, also, if it is a time of sitting at Jesus’ feet, for there is no other place so safe to a new-born believer as the feet of Jesus.

Do you remember when the new life came into you? I do. I remember the first week of that new life, and how, on the second Sabbath, I went to the place where I had heard the gospel to my soul’s salvation, thinking that I would attend there. But, during that week, I had made a great many experiments, and tumbled down a great many times, and the preacher took for his text, “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” I thought, “Yes; I know all about that; that is my case.” When the preacher said that Paul was not a Christian when he wrote those words, though I was only seven days old in divine things, I knew better than that, so I never went there any more. I knew that no man but a Christian ever could or would cry out against sin with that bitter wail; and that, if the grace of God was not with him, he would rest satisfied and contented; but that, if he felt that sin was a horrible thing, and he was a wretched man because of it, and must be delivered from it, then he surely must be a child of God, especially if he could add, “Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2267.cfm

Quickened from Above

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God, The Father, The Holy Spirit Leave a comment

And you hath He quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins… – Ephesians 2:1

No man ever made himself to live. No preacher, however earnest, can make one hearer to live. No parent, however prayerful, no teacher, however tearful, can make a child live unto God. “You hath HE quickened,” is true of all who are quickened. It is a divine spark, a light from the great central Sun of light, the great Father of Lights. Is it so with us? Have we had a divine touch, a superhuman energy, a something which all the learning and all the wisdom and all the godliness of man could never work in us? Have we been quickened from above? If so, I daresay that we remember something of it. We cannot describe it; no man can describe his first birth; it remains a mystery. Neither can he describe his new birth; that is still a greater mystery, for it is a secret inward work of the Holy Ghost, of which we feel the effect, but we cannot tell how it is wrought.

If a person had never lived before, and had come into life a full-grown man, everything would be as strange to him as it is to a little child; and everything is strange to a new-born man in the spiritual realm into which he is born. He is startled a hundred times. Sin appears as sin; he cannot understand it. He had looked at sin before but had never seen it to be sin. And Christ appears now so glorious to him; he had heard of Christ before and had some apprehensions of Him; but now he is surprised to find that the One who he said had no form nor comliness is, after all, altogether lovely. To the new-born soul everything is a surprise. He makes no end of blunders; he makes many miscalculations because everything is new to him. He that sitteth upon the throne saith, “Behold, I make all things new;” and the renewed man says, “My Lord, it is even so.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2267.cfm

Quickened

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God, The Father, The Holy Spirit 1 Comment

“And you hath He quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins… God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ.” – Ephesians 2:1, 4

Here is the point. God has quickened us, who were dead in trespasses and sins, spiritually dead. We were full of vigour towards everything which was contrary to the law or the holiness of God, we walked according to the course of this world; but as for anything spiritual, we were not only somewhat incapable, and somewhat weakened; but we were actually and absolutely dead. We had no sense with which to comprehend spiritual things. We had neither the eye that could see, nor the ear that could hear, nor the power that could feel… We have many who are lovely, amiable, morally admirably, like him whom the Saviour looked upon and loved; yet they are dead for all that. We have others who are drunken, profane, unchaste; they are dead, not more dead than the others; but their death has left its terrible traces more plainly visible. Sin brings forth death, and death brings forth corruption. Whether we were corrupt or not, is not a question that I need to raise here; let everyone judge concerning himself. But dead we were, most certainly. Even though trained by godly parents, though well instructed in the gospel scheme, though saturated with the piety that surrounded us, we were dead, as dead as the harlot of the street, as dead as the thief in the jail.

Now, the text tells us that, though we were dead, yet Christ has come, and by His Spirit He has raised us out of the grave…If you have been quickened, even though your life be feeble, you may cry to the living God with the “Abba, Father,” which never comes from any lip but that which has been touched and quickened by the Holy Spirit. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2267.cfm

A Real, Total, Radical Change

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation Leave a comment

Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk… And he leaping up stood, and walked, and entered with them into the temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God. – Acts 3:6, 8

For a soul to come to Jesus, is the grandest event in its history. It is spiritually dead till that day; but it then begins to live, and a saved man may reckon his age from the time in which he first knew the Lord. That day of first knowing Christ is important in the highest degree, because it affects all the man’s past career; it sheds another light on all the years that have gone by If he has lived in sin, as no doubt he has, the transaction of that day blots out all the sin. The day in which a man comes to Christ, that very day his transgressions and iniquities are blotted out, even as the thick clouds are driven from the sky when God’s strong wind chases them away. Is not that a grand day in which our sins are cast into the depths of the sea so that henceforth it can be said of them, “They may be sought for, but they shall not be found; yea, they shall not be, saith the Lord”? I say that the day in which a soul comes into contact with Christ is the greatest day of its history, because all the past is changed by it; and as for the present, what a different life does a man begin to live on the day in which he finds the Lord! He commences to live in the light instead of being dead in the darkness; he begins to enjoy the privileges of liberty, instead of suffering the horrors of slavery; he is started on the way to heaven, instead of continuing on the road to hell. He is such a new creature that he cannot tell how changed he is. One said to me, “Sir, the change in me is of this kind; either the whole world is altered, or else I am.” So is it when we are brought to know Christ; it is a real, total, radical change…Oh! happy, happy day, when the miraculous hand of Christ takes away the infirmities of the soul and makes the lame man to leap as a hart and causes the tongue of the dumb to sing! ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2375.cfm

His Wife’s Prayers

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, prayer, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God Leave a comment

Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives… – 1 Peter 3:1

…as of one born out of due time. – 1 Corinthians 15:8

Up in one of the northern counties of England, there was a woman, a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, whose prayer went up continually for her husband; but he never entered the house of God, and despised her for doing so. She was accustomed to go to her usual place of worship alone, so far as any human companions were concerned, yet she was not quite alone, for there was a dog that always went with her. This dog curled himself up under the seat, and lay quite still during the service, and then walked home with his mistress. The first Sunday after she was dead, the poor dog went off to the meeting-house as usual, and curled himself up in his old place. He did the, same the next Sunday, and the husband, noticing the dog start out so regularly, was struck by its action, and wondered where the dog went now that his mistress was gone; so he thought he would go and see. The dog went before him to his mistress’s old seat, and curled himself up; the man went in after the dog, and sat down in his wife’s place, and God helped the minister, that day, to show him that his good works and self-righteousness in which he had always trusted, would not be sufficient for his salvation, and he preached to him the full salvation of Christ Jesus, and the man believed and lived. Was not he also “born out of due time,” for his wife’s prayers for him were all over and she was gone? Yet was he brought to Christ.~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2663.cfm