salvation

Life Incorruptible

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God, The Holy Spirit 5 Comments

And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. – 1 John 5:11

“Now Jehovah’s banner’s furled,
Sheathed His sword because ’tis done”;

Reel, ye pillars of earth! Be shaken, ye arches of the starry heavens! Pass away, O Time, and you ye rolling worlds, dissolve into your native nothingness! But the believer must live on, because Jesus lives, and until the Lord’s Christ can bow His head, till He who hath immortality can expire, till God Himself can cease to be, no soul that believed in Jesus can lose the life incorruptible which God’s own Spirit hath put within it.

I want to sing, brethren, rather than to talk with you. These are words and thoughts fit for some ancient bard, or for the spirit of some inspired prophet sent from heaven. I do but lisp where even seraphs might find their loudest songs fail in the them. Let your hearts mount! Let your souls exult! Let your spirits be glad! Do you

“Long for evening to undress,
That you may rest with God,”

and enter into His heaven? Long for the evening of death, when your toil shall be over, and the hour of your bliss shall have come.  ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/3401.cfm

A Life That Cannot Be Suspended

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

Because I live, ye shall live also – John 14:19

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. – 1 Corinthians 15:54

You are travelling along the iron road of the railway, and there comes a sudden jerk, and you stop. What is it? It is the thought of death…It is an item in the great world of life that to you who are in Him is scarcely worth consideration, because the text over-rides that, and swallows it up, as it is written “death is swallowed up in victory”: it is made as though it did not exist. “Because I live, ye shall live also.” Your continued life of happiness, of holiness, of spirituality, of consecration, and of obedience-which, indeed is your only life worth having-is guaranteed to you in the text. Death cannot interfere with it, not even by the space of a single second-nay,. I tell you not even by the space of the ticking of a clock. What, a Christian die? “Because I live, ye shall live also,” is never suspended. There is not time for it to be suspended in. Do you know what death really is? Does it take long to die? I have heard of men who have been said to be weeks in dying. Not so; they were weeks living; the dying occupied no space; that was done at once, and immediately. And so with the believer. To him death is so slight a jerk that he still keeps on upon the same line. He still lives, only there is this difference, that it is as though the railway had hitherto been running through a tunnel, and he now comes out of it into the open plain. His life below was the train in the tunnel, but when he dies, as we call it, there is a jerk, and then it comes right out of the tunnel into the fair, open, champaign country of heaven, where all is clear and bright, where all the birds are singing, and the darkness is over, and the mist and fogs are gone, and his soul is for ever blessed… ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/3401.cfm

Christ’s Promise

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

…because I live, ye shall live also. – John 14:19

Oh! dear friends! when we once get spiritual life into us, what a thousand enemies there are who try to put it out! Many and many a time has it seemed to go hard with my soul as to whether I really had a spark of life within my spirit. Temptation after temptation have I endured until it appeared as if I must yield my hold on Christ and give up my hope. There has been conflict upon conflict, and struggle upon struggle, until at last the enemy has got his foot upon the neck, and my whole being has trembled, and had it not been for Christ’s promise, “Because I live, ye shall live also,” it might have gone harder with me, and I might have despaired, and given up all hope, and laid down to die. The assurance, then, that the spiritual life of the Christian must be maintained because Christ lives, was the only power to get me the victory. Let it teach us, then, this practical lesson. Whenever our spiritual life is very weak, and we want it to grow stronger, let us get to the living Christ for the supply of His strength. When you feel you are ready to die spiritually, go to the Saviour for revived life. The text is like a hand that points us to the storehouse. You who are in the desert, there is a secret spring under your feet, and you know not where it is; this is the mysterious finger which points you to the spot. Contemplate Christ; believe in Christ; draw yourselves by faith nearer and nearer to the Lord Jesus Christ, and so shall your life receive a divine impetus which it has not known for many a day. “Because I live, ye shall live also.”~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/3401.cfm

Because Christ Lives, We Live

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, prayer, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God, The Holy Spirit 4 Comments

…because I live, ye shall live also. – John 14:19

Life is promised to Christ’s people. This does not mean their natural existence. That they have received from Adam, and, through their sin, it has become a curse to them, rather than a blessing. Should they remain unpardoned, the fact of continued existence will become to them the dreadful of calamities, since it must be an existence in God’s holy abhorrence of sin for ever; driven from every glimpse or hope of forgiveness.

The life which comes to us through Christ is of this sort-I trust you know it in your own hearts-it is life spiritual, given to us in regeneration. When the Holy Spirit quickens a dead soul, that dead soul then receives the life of Christ. No man is alive unto God spiritually, except through Christ. Because Christ lives, we live. When a dead soul gets into living contact with the living Saviour by the power of the Spirit, then it is that spiritual life begins. The very first evidence of spiritual life is trusting in Jesus, which shows that us the first symptom is alliance to Christ, the cause of the life must be somewhere here, namely, union with Christ. One of the very first outward signs is prayer-prayer to Christ, and that, again, rises from the fact that Christ gives us of His life, and then that life goes back again to Him…Do you not see, “Because I live, ye shall live”? Then no sinner ever will live spiritually apart from Christ. Though you and I cannot quicken them, yet we can preach the gospel to them, and faith cometh by hearing, and where faith is, there life is. It is no use trying to raise the dead by preaching the law to them. That is only covering them up fairly with a lie in their right hand; but preach of dying love and of rising power, to tell of pardons bought with blood, and to declare that Christ died a substitute for sinners-this is the hopeful way of bringing life to the dead. It is by such instrumentality that souls are brought to life eternal. Because Christ is alive, His elect in due time receives spiritual life by the power of the Holy Spirit, and, although once they were dead in sin, they begin to live unto righteousness.~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/3401.cfm

His Intercession for Saints and Sinners

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

Therefore He is also able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them. – Hebrews 7:25

Why, gaze awhile and you may think you see Him now. Just as the Jew saw Aaron, waving the censer, standing between the living and the dead, and staying the plague, even so is Christ standing at this hour between the living and the dead, and so moving the whole Deity to spare the guilty yet a little longer, whilst He makes intercession for them that they may live. And then comes His higher intercession for His elect, of whom He says, “I pray for them; I pray not for the world.” He lives, then, an actual life, of which you and I reap the daily fruits. Not a life of slumber and stillness, but an active, busy life, by which He continually dispenses gifts to us.

For this reason it is well to remind you, that, therefore, Jesus only lives as a man in one place. When we speak of Christ being found in every assembly of His people, we understand that of His presence in His Godhead and by His Holy Spirit, who rules on earth in this dispensation of the Spirit. But the man Christ can be but in one place, and He is now at the right hand of the Majesty on high. It is absurd, it is horrible both to faith and to reason, to say that Christ’s body is eaten, and that His blood is drunk in tens of thousands of places wherever priests choose to offer what they call “the mass.” A “mass” of profanity, indeed, it is! Our Lord Jesus Christ, as to His real, positive, corporeal presence, is not here. As to His flesh and His blood, He is not, and cannot be, here. He will be here one day, when He shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the trump of the archangel and the voice of God, but in His real person, He is now where His saints are-before the throne, whence by-and-bye He will descend. Meanwhile, His spiritual presence is our joy and our gladness, but His corporeal presence-a doctrine which our faith grasps and lays hold of-His corporeal presence is before the throne of God, and there He lives in proper flesh and blood as the Son of Man. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/3401.cfm

The Invitation for All Persons

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

“In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, if any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.”-John 7:37

Pity expressed herself most plainly, for Jesus cried, which implies not only the loudness of His voice, but the tenderness of His tones. He entreats us to be reconciled. “We pray you,” says the Apostle, “as though God did beseech you by us.” What earnest, pathetic terms are these! How deep must be the love which makes the Lord weep over sinners, and like a mother woo His children to His bosom! Surely at the call of such a cry our willing hearts will come.

Provision is made most plenteously; all is provided that man can need to quench his soul’s thirst. To his conscience the atonement brings peace; to his understanding the gospel brings the richest instruction; to his heart the person of Jesus is the noblest object of affection; to the whole man the truth as it is in Jesus supplies the purest nutriment. Thirst is terrible, but Jesus can remove it. Though the soul were utterly famished, Jesus could restore it.

Proclamation is made most freely, that every thirsty one is welcome. No other distinction is made but that of thirst. Whether it be the thirst of avarice, ambition, pleasure, knowledge, or rest, he who suffers from it is invited. The thirst may be bad in itself, and be no sign of grace, but rather a mark of inordinate sin longing to be gratified with deeper draughts of lust; but it is not goodness in the creature which brings him the invitation, the Lord Jesus sends it freely, and without respect of persons. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

http://bible.christiansunite.com/Morning_and_Evening/chme1231.shtml

Imitating Our Lord

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, prayer, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God 6 Comments

We love Him, because He first loved us. -1 John 4:19

We have known some saints who showed their love to their Lord by weeping over sinners and praying for their conversion. There have been gracious men and women, who could not sleep at night because of their anxiety about the eternal welfare of their relatives and friends, or even of lost ones who were personally unknown to them; and they have risen from their beds to agonize in prayer for sinners who were either calmly sleeping, and not even dreaming of their doom, or else at that very hour were adding to their previous transgressions. There have been others, who could not hear a blasphemous word, as they passed along the street, without feeling a holy indignation at the injury that was being done to their best Friend, and at the same time their eyes filled with tears of pity for the poor blasphemers, and their hearts poured out a stream of supplication for those who were thus ignorantly or wantonly sinning against the Most High.

Others have proved their love to their Lord by the way in which they have been given of their substance to His cause. They have not only given a tithe of all they had to the great Melchizdeck, but they have counted it a high privilege to lay all that they had upon his altar, counting that their gold was never so golden as when it was all Christ’s and that their lands were never so valuable to them as when they were gladly surrendered to Him. Alas, that there should be so few, even in the Church of Christ, who thus imitate their Lord who freely gave Himself and all He had that He might save His people! Blessed will the Church be when she gets back to the Pentecostal consecration which was the fitting culmination of the Pentecostal blessing: “all that believed were together, and had all things in common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/3228.cfm