prayer

An Individual and Personal Word

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

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. – Ezekiel 36:26

To me there is much charm in the thought that this text is an individual and personal word. The Lord means, “I will put My spirit within you”: that is to say, within you, as individuals. “I will put My spirit within you” one by one. This must be so since the connection requires it. Now, a new heart can only be given to one person. Each man needs a heart of his own, and each man must have a new heart for himself… “And I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh” -these are all personal, individual operations of grace. God deals with men one by one in the solemn matters of eternity, sin, and salvation. We are born one by one, and we die one by one: even so we must be born again one by one, and each one for himself must receive the Spirit of God. Without this a man has nothing. He cannot be caused to walk in God’s statutes except by the infusion of grace into him as an individual.

My dear hearers, you who have long been seeking salvation, but have not known the power of the Spirit-this is what you need. You have been striving in the energy of the flesh, but you have not understood where your true strength lieth. God saith to you, “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord”; and again, “I will put My spirit within you.” …Lift up your heart in prayer to God, and ask Him to pour upon you the Spirit of grace and of supplications. Plead with the Lord, saying, “Let Thy good Spirit lead me. Even me.” Cry, “Pass me not, my gracious Father; but in me fulfil this wondrous word of thine, ‘I will put My spirit within you.'” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2200.cfm

The Loving Angry Father

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

For whom the LORD loveth He correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth. – Proverbs 3:12

Has your father treated you badly lately? I have this word to you, then; your father loves you quite as much when he treats you roughly as when he treats you kindly. There is often more love in an angry father’s heart than there is in the heart of a father who is too kind. I will suppose a case. Suppose there were two fathers, and their two sons went away to some remote part of the earth where idolatry is still practiced. Suppose these two sons were decoyed and deluded into idolatry. The news comes to England, and the first father is very angry. His son, his own son, has forsaken the religion of Christ and become an idolater. The second father says, “Well, if it will help him in trade I don’t care, if he gets on the better by it, all well and good.” Now, which loves most, the angry father, or the father who treats the matter with complacency? Why, the angry father is the best. He loves his son; therefore he cannot give away his son’s soul for gold. Give me a father that is angry with my sins, and that seeks to bring me back, even though it be by chastisement. Thank God you have got a Father that can be angry, but that loves you as much when He is angry as when He smiles upon you. Go away with that upon your mind, and rejoice. But if you love not God and fear Him not, go home, I beseech you, to confess your sins, and to seek mercy through the blood of Christ. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0213.cfm

Lord, Give Me What I Want

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, prayer, promises, Sovereignty of God, The Father 3 Comments

If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him? Matthew 7:11

“Lord, give me what I want.” If I come to a stranger, I have no right to expect he will give it me. He may out of his charity; but if I come to a father, I have a claim, a sacred claim. “My Father, I shall have no need to use arguments to move Thy bosom; I shall not have to speak to Thee as the beggar who crieth in the street: for because Thou art my Father Thou knowest my wants, and Thou art willing to relieve me. It is Thy business to relieve me; I can come confidently to Thee, knowing Thou wilt give me all I want.” If we ask our Father for anything when we are little children, we are under an obligation certainly; but it is an obligation we never feel. If you were hungry and your father fed you, would you feel an obligation like you would if you went into the house of a stranger? You go into a stranger’s house trembling, and you tell him you are hungry. Will he feed you? He says yes, he will give you somewhat; but if you go to your father’s table, almost without asking, you sit down as a matter of course, and feast to your full, and you rise and go, and feel you are indebted to him; but there is not a grievous sense of obligation. Now, we are all deeply under obligation to God, but it is a child’s obligation-an obligation which impels us to gratitude, but which does not constrain us to feel that we have been demeaned by it. Oh! if He were not my Father, how could I expect that He would relieve my wants? But since He is my Father, He will, He must hear my prayers, and answer the voice of my crying, and supply all my needs out of the riches of His fullness in Christ Jesus the Lord.~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0213.cfm

When Ye Pray, Say, Our Father…

Sherry Attributes of God, Christian Life, prayer, promises, The Father Leave a comment

When ye pray, say, Our Father… – Luke 11:2

“Lord, if I call Thee King Thou wilt say, ‘Thou art a rebellious subject; get thee gone.’ If I call Thee Judge Thou wilt say, ‘Be still, or out of thine own mouth will I condemn thee.’ If I call Thee Creator Thou wilt say unto me ‘It repenteth Me that I made man upon the earth.’ If I call Thee my Preserver Thou wilt say unto me, ‘I have preserved thee, but thou hast rebelled against Me.’ But if I call Thee Father, all my sinfulness doth not invalidate my claim. If Thou be my Father, then Thou lovest me; if I be Thy child, then Thou wilt regard me, and poor though my language be, Thou wilt not despise it.” …When I talk to my Father, I am not afraid He will misunderstand me; if I put my words a little out of place He understands my meaning somehow. When we are little children, we only prattle; still our father understands us…  So, when we come to God, our prayers are little broken things; we cannot put them together, but our Father will hear us. Oh! what a beginning is “Our Father,” to a prayer full of faults, and a foolish prayer perhaps, a prayer in which we are going to ask what we ought not to ask for! “Father, forgive the language! forgive the matter!” as one dear brother said the other day at the prayer meeting. He could not get on in prayer, and he finished up on a sudden by saying, “Lord, I cannot pray to-night as I should wish; I cannot put the words together; Lord, take the meaning take the meaning,” and sat down. That is just what David said once, “Lo, all my desire is before Thee”-not “my words” but “my desire” and God could read it. We should say, “Our Father,” because that is a reason why God should hear what we have to say. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0213.cfm

The Brotherhood in Christ

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

…Our Father… – Matthew 6:9

It does not say my Father, but our Father. It seems there are a great many in the family. “Our Father.” When you pray that prayer, remember you have a good many brothers and sisters that do not know their Father yet, and you must include them all; for all God’s elect ones, though they be uncalled as yet, are still His children, though they know it not.

When thou prayest to God put in the poor; for is he not the Father of many of the poor, rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom, though they be poor in this world. Come my sister, if thou bowest thy knee amid the rustling of silk and satin, yet remember the cotton and the print. My brother, is there wealth in thy hand, yet I pray thee, remember thy brethren of the horny hand and the dusty brow; remember those who could not wear what thou wearest, nor eat what thou eatest, but are as Lazarus compared with thee, while thou art as Dives. Pray for them; put them all in the same prayer and say, “Our Father.”

And pray for those that are divided from us by the sea-those that are in heathen lands, scattered like precious salt in the midst of this world’s putrefaction. Pray for all that name the name of Jesus, and let thy prayer be a great and comprehensive one. “Our Father, which art in heaven.” And after thou hast prayed that rise up and act it. Say not “Our Father,” and then look upon thy brethren with a sneer or a frown. I beseech thee, live like a brother, and act like a brother Help the needy; cheer the sick; comfort the faint-hearted; go about doing good, minister unto the suffering people of God, wherever thou findest them, and let the world take knowledge of thee, that thou art when on thy feet what thou art upon thy knees-that thou art a brother unto all the brotherhood of Christ, a brother born for adversity, like thy Master Himself. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0213.cfm

Oh, How God Loves Me!

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, prayer, Sovereignty of God, The Father Leave a comment

…Our Father… – Matthew 6:9

If God be my Father, He loves me. And oh, how He loves me! When God is a Husband He is the best of husbands. Widows, somehow or other, are always well cared for. When God is a Friend, He is the best of friends, and sticketh closer than a brother; and when He is a Father He is the best of fathers. O fathers! perhaps ye do not know how much ye love your children. When they are sick ye find it out, for ye stand by their couches and ye pity them, as their little frames are writhing in pain. Well, “like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.” Ye know how ye love your children too, when they grieve you by their sin; anger arises, and you are ready to chasten them, but no sooner is the tear in their eye, than your hand is heavy, and you feel that you had rather smite yourself than smite them; and every time you smite them you seem to cry, “Oh that I should have thus to afflict my child for his sin! Oh that I could suffer in his stead!” And God, even our Father, “doth not afflict willingly.” Is not that a sweet thing? He is, as it were, compelled to it; even the Eternal arm is not willing to do it; it is only His great love and deep wisdom that brings down the blow. …But, parents, although ye love your children much, and ye know it, ye do not know, and ye cannot tell how deep is the unfathomable abyss of the love of God to you. Go out at midnight and consider the heavens, the work of God’s fingers, the moon and the stars which He hath ordained; and I am sure you will say, “What is man, that Thou shouldst be mindful of him?” But, more than all, you will wonder, not at your loving Him, but that while He has all these treasures, He should set His heart upon so insignificant a creature as man. And the sonship that God has given us is not a mere name; there is all our Father’s great heart given to us in the moment when He claims us as His sons.~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0213.cfm

Sonship

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

…Our Father which art in heaven… – Matthew 6:9

Here is sonship-“Our Father which art in heaven.” How are we to understand this, and in what sense are we the sons and daughters of God? Some say that the Fatherhood of God is universal, and that every man, from the fact of his being created by God, is necessarily God’s son, and that therefore every man has a right to approach the throne of God, and say, “Our Father which art in heaven.” …I have never been able to see that creation necessarily implies fatherhood. I believe God has made many things that are not His children… He made the angels, who stand in an eminently high and holy position, are they His children? “Unto which of the angels said He at any time, thou art My son?” I do not find, as a rule, that angels are called the children of God; and I must demur to the idea that mere creation brings God necessarily into the relationship of a Father… Those who can say, “Our Father which art in heaven,” are something more than God’s creatures: they have been adopted into His family. He has taken them out of the old black family in which they were born; He has washed them. and cleansed them, and given them a new name and a new spirit, and made them “heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ;” and all this of His own free, sovereign, unmerited, distinguishing grace. And having adopted them to be His children, He has in the next place, regenerated them by the Spirit of the living God. He has “begotten them again unto a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,” and no man hath a right to claim God as his Father, unless he feeleth in his soul, and believeth, solemnly, through the faith of God’s election, that he has been adopted into the one family of which is in heaven and earth, and that he has been regenerated or born again. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0213.cfm