prayer

God Seeks Holy Hearts

Sherry Character of Jesus, Christian Life, prayer, repentance, Sovereignty of God, The Holy Spirit Leave a comment

Stop bringing useless offerings. Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons and Sabbaths, and the calling of solemn assemblies— I cannot stand iniquity with a festival. I hate your New Moons and prescribed festivals. They have become a burden to me; I am tired of putting up with them. – Isaiah 1:12–13

If you are hypocrites, if your hearts are not right with God, you may multiply your church-goings, and your chapel-goings, and your sacraments; but all these are only a provoking of God to anger. There is nothing in it all that He could possibly accept; He cannot endure it. He says, “It is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.”

When men are committing crimes, when they are oppressing the poor, when they are living in the daily practice of injustice, when they indulge in secret drunkenness, when their whole life is a lie, they may do what they will, but God will not hear their prayers. While we keep sin in our hearts, it is in vain for us to stretch out our hands unto God. He is a holy God, and He seeks holy hearts and holy lives; and nothing short of these can be acceptable to Him.

(Lord), when our church gathers next, we ask that we may be in the Spirit, and know the fullness of His quickening power. May we do nothing after the dead manner of formality. May there be no dead hymn, nor dead prayer. Lord, give the preacher life. Oh, give the hearers life. Oh! may we know living worship, not the bowing of heads alone, but of hearts, and the closing not alone of the eyes to things that can be seen, but the closing of the eyelids of the thought to everything worldly. Amen. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://spurgeonbooks.com

Death Bed Repentance- Is It Sincere?

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, confession of sin, prayer, promises, repentance, salvation 2 Comments

Verily I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with Me in paradise. – Luke 23:43

Heaven and hell are not places far away. You may be in heaven before the clock ticks again, it is so near. Could we but rend that veil which parts us from the unseen! It is all there, and all near. “To-day,” said the Lord; within three or four hours at the longest, “shalt thou be with Me in paradise;” so near is it. A statesman has given us the expression of being “within measurable distance.” We are all within measurable distance of heaven or hell; if there be any difficulty in measuring the distance, it lies in its brevity rather than in its length.

Surely, if anything beyond faith is needed to make us fit to enter paradise, the thief would have been kept a little longer here; but no, he is, in the morning, in the state of nature, at noon he enters the state of grace, and by sunset he is in the state of glory. The question never is whether a death-bed repentance is accepted if it be sincere: If it be so, if the man dies five minutes after his first act of faith, he is as safe as if he had served the Lord for fifty years. If your faith is true, if you die one moment after you have believed in Christ, you will be admitted into paradise, even if you shall have enjoyed no time in which to produce good works and other evidences of grace. He that reads the heart will read your faith written on its fleshy tablets, and He will accept you through Jesus Christ, even though no act of grace has been visible to the eye of man. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2078.cfm

None Excluded-He Will Save You

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, confession of sin, prayer, promises, repentance, salvation Leave a comment

And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with Me in paradise. Luke 23:43

I want you to notice that the last companion of Christ on earth was a sinner, and no ordinary sinner. (The thief) had broken even the laws of man, for he was a robber. One calls him “a brigand”; and I suppose it is likely to have been the case. The brigands of those days mixed murder with their robberies: he was probably a freebooter in arms against the Roman government, making this a pretext for plundering as he had opportunity. At last, he was arrested, and was condemned by a Roman tribunal, which, on the whole, was usually just, and in this case was certainly just; for he himself confesses the justice of his condemnation (v.41). The malefactor who believed upon the cross was a convict, who had lain in the condemned cell, and was then undergoing execution for his crimes. A convicted felon was the person with whom our Lord last consorted upon earth. What a lover of the souls of guilty men is He! What a stoop He makes to the very lowest of mankind! To this most unworthy of men the Lord of glory, ere He quitted life, spoke with matchless grace. He spoke to him such wondrous words as never can be excelled if you search the Scriptures through: “To-day shalt thou be with Me in paradise.” …You may come to him, whoever you may be; for this man did. Here is a specimen of one who had gone to the extreme of guilt, and who acknowledged that he had done so; he made no excuse and sought no cloak for his sin; he was in the hands of justice, confronted with the death-doom, and yet he believed in Jesus, and breathed a humble prayer to Him, and he was saved on the spot…None of you are excluded from the infinite mercy of Christ, however great your iniquity: if you believe in Jesus, He will save you. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2078.cfm

This Blessed Unmannerliness

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

Love…endures all things. – 1 Corinthians 13:7

What did our Lord say, “I will make you fishers of men.” If you go out fishing for souls you will have to endure all things, for it will come to pass that some whom you have been seeking for a long time will grow worse instead of better. Endure this among the “all things.” Those whom you seek to bless may seem to be altogether unteachable, they may shut their ears and refuse to hear you; never mind, endure all things. They may grow sour and sullen, and revile you in their anger, but be not put about by them; let them struggle till they are wearied, and meanwhile do you quietly wait, saying to yourself, “I must save them.” A warder who has to take care of insane persons will frequently be attacked by them, and have to suffer hard blows; but what does he do? Strike the patient and make a fight of it? No, he holds him down and pins him fast; but not in anger, for he pities him too much to be angry with him. Does a nurse with a delirious patient take any notice of his cross words, and grumbling, and outcries? Not she. She says, “I must try to save this man’s life,” and so with great kindness she “endureth all things.” If you were a fireman, and found a person in an upper room, and the house was on fire, would you not struggle with him rather than let him remain in the room and burn. You would say, “I will save you in spite of yourself.” Perhaps the foolish body would call you names, and say, “Let me alone, why should you intrude into my chamber?” But you would say, “Never mind my intrusion; I will apologize afterwards for my rudeness, but you must be out of the fire first.” I pray God give you this blessed unmannerliness, this sweet casting of all things to the wind, if by any means you may save some. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1617.cfm

Posthumous Salvations

Sherry Attributes of God, Christian Life, prayer, Sovereignty of God 1 Comment

It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. – Ecclesiastes 7:2

There have been many, many instances in which earnest Christian people have sought the conversion of their relatives or friends; they have prayed for them, and wept over them, and pleaded with them, but all their efforts have been unsuccessful; yet, after their death, the memory of their holy zeal has touched the conscience of the one who would not yield before, and brought him to Christ. I wish, dear friends, that your godly mother, who is in heaven, and who died leaving her son unsaved, might seem to come to you just now. I ask for no apparition, but that she may be consciously present to your mind, and that her dying words may ring in your ear, for perhaps the remembrance of what she said may be blessed to you even now. When I am taken away, I can but wish that any true and faithful word that I have spoken may still continue to speak to you from my grave. When good Mr. Payson died, he begged that his people might come and see him before he was interred; and those who did so read these words on his bosom, “Remember the word which I have spoken unto you being yet present with you.” It was thus his desire, you see, that he should have posthumous spiritual children, that they should be born to God even though they should seem to be born out of due time. Ah! you wives, who have been praying for your husbands these many years, never give them up, because they may be brought to Christ when you yourselves will be in heaven. Mothers and fathers, never cease pleading for your children, for they, too, may be brought to Jesus when you are among the angels…Persevere in prayer, you who are seeking the salvation of others. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

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

Converted

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

“One born out of due time.”-1 Corinthians 15:8

It was necessary that Paul, as an apostle, should have seen the Lord. He was not converted at the time of Christ’s ascension; yet he was made an apostle, for the Lord Jesus appeared to him in the way, as he was going to Damascus to persecute the saints of God. When he looked upon himself as thus put in, as it were, at the end of the apostles, he spoke of himself in the most depreciating terms, calling himself, “one born out of due time.” Those who are acquainted with the Greek tongue know what a despicable term Paul here applied to himself,-as though he was scarcely a man at all,-at any rate, as the very last of the family, “born out of due time;” and not only the last, but also the very least, for he says, “I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” 

Paul proved that he was a true citizen of the New Jerusalem because he became, of all men, most zealous for Christ, zealous for the gospel, zealous for the winning of souls; he seemed to try to do all he could to undo the mischief he had wrought in the days of his unregeneracy, and to work with both his hands and all his heart to establish and extend the kingdom which once he tried to overthrow. O God, by Thy great mercy, cause another Paul to be born in this house of prayer! Thou canst do it; wilt Thou not bring to Thyself, by the power of the Eternal Spirit, some wild, threatening, blustering, blaspheming hater of Christ, lay him at the dear feet of the Crucified, and cause him to look up and live? Pray for this, dear Christian people. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

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

Keep to Christ

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, prayer, Sovereignty of God 1 Comment

“…wherever my lord the king shall be, whether for death or for life, there also will your servant be.” – 2 Samuel 15:21

Our Master is to be found wherever there is anything to be done for the good of our fellow-men. The Lord Jesus Christ is to be found wherever there is work to be done in seeking after His lost sheep. Some people say that they have very little communion with Christ, and when I look at them, I do not wonder. Two persons cannot walk together if they will not walk at the same pace. Now, my Lord walks an earnest pace whenever He goes through the world, for the King’s business requires haste; and if His disciples crawl after a snail’s fashion they will lose His company. If some of our groaning brethren would go to the Sunday-school, and there begin to look after the little children, they would meet with their Lord who used to say, “Suffer the little children to come unto Me.” If others were to get together a little meeting, and teach the ignorant, they would there find Him who had compassion on the ignorant, on those that are out of the way. Our Master is where there are fetters to be broken, burdens to be removed, and hearts to be comforted, and if you wish to keep with Him you must aid in such service.

Our point must be to resolve in God’s strength to keep to Christ in all weathers and in all companies, and that whether in life or death. Ah that word “death” makes it sweet, because then we reap the blessed result of having lived with Christ. We shall go upstairs for the last time and bid good-bye to all, and then we shall feel that in death He is still with us as in life we have been with Him.  ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1512.cfm