salvation

This Promise is Ours

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

…And I will cause showers to come down in their season; they will be showers of blessing. -Ezekiel 34:26

“I will give thee showers of blessing.” The word is in the plural. All kinds of blessings God will send. The rain is all of one kind when it comes; but grace is not all of one kind, or it does not produce the same effect. When God sends rain upon the church, He “sends showers of blessing.” There are some ministers who think, that if there is a shower on their church, God will send a shower of work. Yes, but if He does, He will send a shower of comfort. Others think that God will send a shower of gospel truth. Yes, but if He sends that, He will send a shower of gospel holiness. For all God’s blessings go together. They are like the sweet sister graces that danced hand in hand. God sends showers of blessings. If He gives comforting grace, He will also give converting grace; if He makes the trumpet blow for the bankrupt sinner, He will also make it sound a shout of joy for the sinner that is pardoned and forgiven. He will send “showers of blessing.”

Well, then, if the promise is ours, the precept is ours, as much as the promise. Ought we not to ask God to continue to make us a blessing?… Only let us together strive, without variance. Let us labor for Jesus. Never did men have so fair an opportunity, for the last hundred years. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0028.cfm

Plenteous Grace

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

And yet He has not left Himself without witness, doing good, giving to you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness.” -Acts 14:17

“I will give them showers.” What would the ground do without showers? You may break the clods, you may sow your seeds; but what can you do without the rain? Ah! you may prepare your barn, and sharpen your sickles; but your sickles will be rusted before you have any wheat, unless there are showers. They are needed. So is the divine blessing.

If God gives a blessing, He usually gives it in such a measure that there is not room enough to receive it. Where are we going to hold God’s blessing that we have obtained already? …Plenteous grace! Ah! we shall want plenteous grace, my friends; plenteous grace to keep us humble, plenteous grace to make us prayerful, plenteous grace to make us holy, plenteous grace to make us zealous, plenteous grace to make us truthful, plenteous grace to preserve us through this life, and at last to land us in heaven. We cannot do without showers of grace. How many are there here that have been dry in a shower of grace? ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0028.cfm

Our Influence

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

That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. -Galatians 3:14

None of us can bless others unless God has first blessed us. We need divine workmanship. “I will make them a blessing by helping them, and by constraining them.” God makes His people a blessing by helping them. What can we do without God’s help? I stand and preach to thousands, or it may be hundreds; what have I done, unless a greater than man has been in the pulpit with me? I work in the Sabbath Schools; what can I do, unless the Master is there, teaching the children with me? We want God’s aid in every position; and once give us that assistance, and there is no telling with how little labor we may become a blessing. Ah! a few words sometimes will be more of a blessing than a whole sermon. You take some little prattler on your knee; and some few words that you say to him he remembers, and makes use of in after years. I knew a gray-headed old man, who was in the habit of doing this. He once took a boy to a certain tree, and said, “Now, John, you kneel down at that tree, and I will kneel down with you.” He knelt down and prayed, and asked God to convert him and save his soul. “Now,” said he, “perhaps you will come to this tree again; and if you are not converted, you will remember that I asked under this tree that God would save your soul.” That young man went away, and forgot the old man’s prayer; but it chanced as God would have it that he walked down that field again, and saw a tree. It seemed as if the old man’s name was cut in the bark. He recollected what he prayed for, and that the prayer was not fulfilled; but he dare not pass the tree without kneeling down to pray himself; and there was his spiritual birthplace. The simplest observation of the Christian shall be made a blessing, if God help him. “His leaf also shall not wither”-the simplest word he speaks shall be treasured up; “and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.”~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0028.cfm

Blessed to Be a Blessing

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

And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing -Genesis 12:2

 The object of God, in choosing a people before all worlds, was not only to save that people, but through them to confer essential benefits upon the whole human race. When He chose Abraham, He did not elect Him simply to be God’s friend, and the recipient of peculiar privileges; but He chose Him to make Him, as it were, the conservator of truth. He was to be the ark in which the truth should be hidden. He was to be the keeper of the covenant in behalf of the whole world; and when God chooses any men by His sovereign, electing grace, and makes them Christ’s, He does it not only for their own sake, that they may be saved, but for the world’s sake. For, know ye not that “ye are the light of the world;”-“A city set upon a hill, which cannot be hid?” “Ye are the salt of the earth;” and when God makes you salt, it is not only that ye may have salt in yourselves, but that like salt ye may preserve the whole mass. If He makes you leaven, it is that, like the little leaven, you may leaven the whole lump. Salvation is not a selfish thing; God does not give it for us to keep to ourselves, but that we may thereby be made the means of blessing to others; and the great day shall declare that there is not a man living on the surface of the earth but has received a blessing in some way or other through God’s gift of the gospel. The very keeping of the wicked in life, and granting of the reprieve, was purchased with the death of Jesus; and through His sufferings and death, the temporal blessings which both we and they enjoy are bestowed on us. The gospel was sent that it might first bless those that embrace it, and then expand, so as to make them a blessing to the whole human race.

In thus speaking of the church as a blessing, we shall notice three things. First, here is divinity-“I will make them a blessing;” secondly, here is personality of religion-“I will make them a blessing;” and thirdly, here is the development of religion“-“and the places round about my hill.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0028.cfm

Showers of Blessing

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

“And I will make them and the places round about My hill a blessing; and I will cause the shower to come down in his season; there shall be showers of blessing.”- Ezekiel 34:26

I think we do not attach sufficient importance to the restoration of the Jews. We do not think enough of it. But certainly, if there is anything promised in the Bible, it is this. I imagine that you cannot read the Bible without seeing clearly that there is to be an actual restoration of the children of Israel. “Thither they shall go up; they shall come with weeping unto Zion, and with supplications unto Jerusalem.” May that happy day soon come! For when the Jews are restored, then the fulness of the Gentiles shall be gathered in; and as soon as they return, then Jesus will come upon Mount Zion to reign with His ancients gloriously, and the halcyon days of the Millennium shall then dawn; we shall then know every man to be a brother and a friend; Christ shall rule, with universal sway.

This, then, is the meaning of the text; that God would make Jerusalem and the places round about His hill a blessing. (P)erhaps, in a more enlarged sense…it applies to the Church of Jesus Christ, and to this particular church with which you and I stand connected. “I will make them and the places round about My hill a blessing; and I will cause the shower to come down in its season; there shall be showers of blessing.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0028.cfm

Our Full Acquittal and Discharge

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

He is not here: for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. Matthew 28:6

Behold His empty tomb, O true believer: it is a sign of thine acquittal, and thy full discharge. If Jesus had not paid the debt, He ne’er had risen from the grave. He would have lain there till this moment if He had not cancelled the entire debt, by satisfying eternal vengeance. O beloved, is not that an overwhelming thought?

“It is finished, it is finished,
Hear the rising Saviour cry.”

The heavenly turnkey came, a bright angel stepped from heaven and rolled away the stone; but he would not have done so if Christ had not done all: he would have kept Him there, he would have said, “Nay,nay, Thou art the sinner now; Thou hast the sins of all Thine elect upon Thy shoulder, and I will not let Thee go free till Thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.” In His going free I see my own discharge.

“My Jesus’ blood’s my full discharge.”

As a justified man, I have not a sin now against me in God’s book. If I were to turn over God’s eternal book, I should see every debt of mine receipted and cancelled.

“Here’s pardon for transgressions past,
It matter not how black their cast,
And O my soul, with wonder view,
For sins to come, here’s pardon too.
Fully discharged by Christ I am,
From Christ’s tremendous curse and blame.”

~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0018.cfm

I Am Nothing but Christ is All

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

Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. -Luke 12:32

“This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief.” “Yes, but,” another one says, “I am afraid I am not elect.” Oh! dear souls, do not trouble yourselves about that. If you believe in Christ you are elect. Whoever puts himself on the mercy of Jesus is elect; for he would never do it if he had not been elect. Whoever comes to Christ, and looks for mercy through His blood, is elect, and he shall see that he is elect afterwards; but do not expect to read election till you have read repentance. Election is a college to which you little ones will not go till you have been to the school of repentance. Do not begin to read your book backwards, and say Amen before you have said your paternoster. Begin with “Our Father,” and then you will go on to “Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory;” but begin with “the kingdom,” and you will have hard work to go back to “Our Father.” We must begin with faith. We must begin with-

“Nothing in my hands I bring.”

As God made the world out of nothing, He always makes His Christians out of nothing; and he who has nothing at all to-night, shall find grace and mercy, if he will come for it.

Let me close up by telling you what I have heard of some poor woman, who was converted and brought to life, just by passing down a street, and hearing a child, sitting at a door, singing-

“I am nothing at all
But Jesus Christ is all in all.”

That is a blessed song; go home and sing it; and he who can rightly apprehend those little words, who can feel himself vanity without Jesus, but that he has all things in Christ, is not only not far from the kingdom of heaven, but he is there in faith, and shall be there in fruition, when he shall wake up in God’s likeness. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0025.cfm