salvation

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

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

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

Heart-work Carried Out Into Life-work

Sherry Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God 1 Comment

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace, by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. -Hebrews 12:28

Sirs, you may say what you will about what you dream you have felt, you may write what you please about what you fancy you have experienced; but if your own outward life be unjust, unholy, ungenerous, and unloving, you shall find no credit among us as to your being in Christ: “Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord.” The moment you know a man who is drunk on a Saturday night, and then enjoys So-and-so’s preaching on a Sunday; the moment you know a man who can tell you what a child of God should be, and then appears himself exactly what he should not be, just quit his company, and let him go to his own place, and where that is, Judas can tell you. Oh, beware of such high-fliers, with their waxen wings, mounting up to the very sun,-how great shall be their fall when He that searches all hearts shall open the book, and say, “I was an hungred, and ye gave Me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no drink. Inasmuch as ye did it not. to one of the least of these My brethren, ye did it not to Me.”

Heart-work, carried out afterwards into life-work,-this is what the Lord wants. You may perish as well with true doctrines as with false, if you pervert the true doctrine into licentiousness. You may to go to hell by the cross as surely as you may by the theatre, or by the vilest of sin. You may perish with the name of Jesus on you lips, and with a sound creed sealed on your very bosom, for “except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” “Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

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

Pursue Holiness

Sherry Christian Life, promises, repentance, salvation, Sovereignty of God, The Holy Spirit 1 Comment

Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord – Hebrews 12:14

There has been a desperate attempt made by certain Antinomians to get rid of the injunction which the Holy Spirit here means to enforce. They have said that this is the imputed holiness of Christ. Do they not know, when they so speak, that, by an open perversion, they utter that which is false? I do not suppose that any man in his senses can apply that interpretation to the context, “Follow peace with all men, and holiness.” Now, the holiness meant is evidently one that can be followed like peace; and it must be transparent to any ingenuous man that it is something which is the act and duty of the person who follows it. We are to follow peace; this is practical peace, not the peace made for us, but “the fruit of righteousness which is sown in peace of them that make peace.” We are to follow holiness,-this must be practical holiness; the opposite of impurity, as it is written, “God hath not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness.” The holiness of Christ is not a thing to follow; I mean, if we look at it imputatively. That we have at once; it is given to us the moment we believe. The righteousness of Christ is not to be followed; it is bestowed upon the soul in the instant when it lays hold of Christ Jesus. This is another kind of holiness. It is, in fact, as every one can see who chooses to read the connection, practical, vital holiness which is the purport of this admonition. It is conformity to the will of God, and obedience to the Lord’s command. It is, in fine, the Spirit’s work in the soul, by which a man is made like God, and becomes a partaker of the divine nature, being delivered from the corruption which is in the world through lust. No straining, no hacking at the text can alter it. There it stands, whether men like it or not… and it means no other than what it says: “Without holiness,”-practical, personal, active, vital holiness,-“no man shall see the Lord.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

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