promises

No Condemnation

Sherry Christian Life, promises, repentance, salvation, Sovereignty of God, The Holy Spirit 6 Comments

For day and night Thy hand was heavy upon me… -Psalm 32:4

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. -Romans 8:1 

I am one of those poor souls who for five years led a life of misery, and was almost driven to distraction; but I can heartily say, that one day of pardoned sin was a sufficient recompense for the whole five years of conviction. I have to bless God for every terror that ever seared me by night, and for every foreboding that alarmed me by day. It has made me happier ever since; for now, if there be a trouble weighing upon my soul, I thank God it is not such a trouble as that which bowed me to the very earth, and made me creep like a very beast upon the ground by reason of heavy distress and affliction. I know I never can again suffer what I have suffered; I never can, except I be sent to hell, know more of agony than I have known; and now, that ease, that joy and peace in believing, that “no condemnation” which belongs to me as a child of God, is made doubly sweet and inexpressibly precious, by the recollection of my past days of sorrow and grief. Blessed be Thou, O God, for ever, who, by those black days like a dreary wind, hath made these summer days all the fairer and the sweeter! The shore is never so welcome as when you mount it with the foot of a shipwrecked mariner just escaped from the sea; food never so sweet as when you sit at the table after days of hunger; water never so refreshing as when you arrive at the end of a parched desert and have known what it is to thirst.

Do you not think I have just driven the nail home here? Do you not feel in your spirit, that if Jesus would forgive you, you would do everything for Him? ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0313.cfm

Satan’s Advancement

Sherry Christian Life, prayer, promises, repentance, salvation, Sovereignty of God 4 Comments

Thou art my hiding place; Thou shalt preserve me from trouble; Thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. Selah. -Psalm 32:7

Satan is now busy upon you. He sees that God is wounding you and he does not wish that those wounds shall heal; he therefore trusteth in his fangs, and teareth open the flesh, and trieth if he cannot pour his poison into that very flesh which God has been wounding with the sword. “Now,” saith he, “that God is against him will I be against him too. God is driving him to sadness; I will drive him farther still, and urge him to despair. God has brought him to the precipice, to the edge of his self-righteousness, and bidden him look down and see the yawning gulf. Now,” says Satan, “one push more, and over he will go.” He has come forth, therefore, with all his strength, hoping that the hour of your conviction shall be also the hour of your condemnation. He will tempt you, perhaps, as he did Job, till you say, “My soul chooseth strangling rather than life.” He will seek to bring you low, like Jeremiah, until you are ready to wish you had never been born, rather than that you should suffer like this.

Oh! pray against Satan! Cry aloud to your God to deliver you from this fiend, for he is the cause of much of your distress; and if you were rid of him, it may be that your wound would soon heal, and you would find peace. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0313.cfm

God’s Smites Are of Grace

Sherry Attributes of God, Christian Life, prayer, promises, Sovereignty of God 2 Comments

For day and night Thy hand was heavy upon me… -Psalm 32:4

You tell me you are sore troubled by reason of conviction, and that your convictions of sin are attended by the most terrible and gloomy thoughts, I am not at a loss to tell you why it is.

Do you wonder, then, that when He smites, His blows fell you to the ground? Are you astonished that when He wounds, His wounds are deep and hard to heal? Besides, remember it is an angry God that you have to deal with; One who has had patience with you in your sins these thirty, forty, or fifty years, and now He has come forth Himself to compel you to throw down the weapons of your rebellion, and to take you captive by His justice, that He may afterwards set you free by His grace. Is it any marvel, then, that when an angry God-a God who has restrained His anger these many years-comes out in battle against you, you find it hard to resist Him, and that His blows bruise you and break your bones, and make your spirit feel as if it must verily die…Be not astonished at all your terrors; God on Sinai, when He came to give the law, was terrible; but God on Sinai, when He comes to bring the law into the conscience, and to strike it home, must be more terrible far.

Oh! ye need not wonder that your pains are fearful, when God thus smites you on the tenderest part of a conscience which He has made tender by His grace. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0313.cfm

Convicted

Sherry Attributes of God, Christian Life, confession of sin, prayer, promises, repentance, salvation, Sovereignty of God 3 Comments

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day, and night Thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. -Psalm 32:3-4

 David here describes a very common experience amongst convinced sinners. He was subjected to extreme terrors and pangs of conscience. These terrors were continual; they scared him at night with visions, they terrified him all day with dark and gloomy forebodings….His pain was so extreme, that when he resorted to prayer he could scarcely utter an articulate word. There were groanings that could not be uttered within his spirit; and hence he calls his prayer a “roaring all the day long.” Wherever he was, his spirit seemed to be always sighing, sending a full torrent of melancholy groans upwards towards God.  So far did this groaning proceed, that at last his bodily frame began to show evidences of it. He grew old, and that not merely in the lines of the countenance and the falling in of the cheeks, but his very bones seemed as if they partook of the suffering…here was a man who did not show merely externally, but even internally, the heavy pressure of grief, on account of sin…So intimate is the connection between the body and the soul, that when the soul suffers extremely, the body must be called to endure its part of grief…We gather from what David says in this Psalm, and indeed in all these seven penitential Psalms, that his convictions on account of his sin with Bathsheba, and his subsequent murder of Uriah, were of the deepest and most poignant character, and that the terrors he experienced were indescribable, filling his soul with horror and dismay.

…Remember, sinner, it is God that is dealing with you; when you lay dead in your sins He looked on you, and now He has begun not only to look, but to smite; He is now wounding you with the design of afterwards making you whole; He is killing you that He may afterwards make you spiritually alive. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0313.cfm

 

Trust Him to Save Thee

Sherry Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, repentance, salvation, The Holy Spirit 4 Comments

For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. -Romans 10:10

“But,” I hear someone say, “it is impossible; I have tried it, and I have broken down; I did try to get better, but I did not succeed; it is of no use, it cannot be done.” You are right, my dear friend, and you are wrong. You are right, it is of no use going about it as you did; if you went in your own strength, holiness is a thing you cannot get, it is beyond you. The depth says, “It is not in me;” and the height saith, “It is not in me.” You can no more make yourself holy than you could create a world. But you are wrong to despair, for Christ can do it; He can do it for you, and He can do it now. Believe on Him, and that believing will be the proof that He is working in you. Trust Him, and He that has suffered for thy sins, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, shall come in, and put to rout the lion of the pit. He will bruise Satan under thy feet shortly. There is no corruption too strong for Him to overcome, there is no habit too firm for Him to break. He can turn a lion to a lamb, and a raven to a dove. Trust Him to save thee, and He will do it, whosoever thou mayest be, and whatsoever thy past life may have been. “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved;”-that is, he shall be saved from his sins, and delivered from his evil practices; he shall be made a new man in Christ Jesus by the power of the Spirit, received through the medium of his faith. Believe, poor soul, that Christ is able to save thee, and He will do it. He will be as good as thy faith, and as good as His own word. May He now add His own blessing to the word I have spoken, and to the people who have heard it, for His own sake! Amen. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2902.cfm

Remorse! Remorse!! Remorse!!!

Sherry Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, the unbelieving life Leave a comment

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? – Mark 8:36

When an American doctor, who had led a loose life, came to die, he seemed to wake up from a sort of stupor, and he said, “Find that word, find that word.” “What word?” they asked. “Why,” he said, “that awful word, remorse!” He said it again,-” Remorse!” and then, gathering up his full strength, he fairly seemed to shriek it out,-“Remorse!” “Write it,” said he, “write it.” It was written. “Write it with larger letters, and let me gaze at it; underline it. And now,” said he, “none of you know the meaning of that word, and may you never know it; it has an awful meaning in it, and I feel it now. Remorse! Remorse!! Remorse!!!”

What, I ask, is the pleasure of sin contrasted with the results it brings in this life? and what, I ask, is this pleasure’ compared with the joys of godliness? Little as you may think I know of the joys of the world, yet so far as I can form a judgment, I can say that I would not take all the joys that earth can ever afford in a hundred years for one half-hour of what my soul has known in fellowship with Christ. We, who believe in Him, do have our sorrows; but, blessed be God, we do have our joys, and they are such joys -oh, such joys, with such substance in them, and such reality and certainty, that we could not and would not exchange them for anything except heaven in its fruition. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2902.cfm

Pure and Spotless Let Us Be

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

I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me. – Psalm 101:3

There are many things, in this world, that would be execrated if it were not that Christian men go to them, and the ungodly men say, “Well, if it is not righteous, there is not much harm in it, after all; it is innocent enough if we keep within bounds.” Mind! mind! mind, professor, if thine heart begins to suck in the sweets of another man’s sin, it is unsound in the sight. of God; if thou canst even wink at another man’s lust, depend upon it that thou wilt soon shut thine eye on thine own, for we are always more severe with other men than we are’ with ourselves. There must be an absence of the vital principle of godliness when we can become partakers of other men’s sins by applauding or joining with them in the approval of them. Let us examine ourselves scrupulously, then, whether we be among those who have no evidences of that holiness without which no man can see God. But, beloved, we hope better things of you, and things which accompany salvation. If you and I, as in the sight of God, feel that we would be holy if we could, that there is not a sin we wish to spare, that we would be like Jesus, -O that we could !-that we would sooner suffer affliction than ever run into sin, and displease our God; if our heart be really right in God’s statutes, then, despite all the imperfections we bemoan, we have holiness, wherein we may rejoice, and we pray to our gracious God,-

“Finish, then, Thy new creation,
Pure and spotless let us be.”

~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2902.cfm