salvation

The Lord Meets You Where the Truth Is

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, confession of sin, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. – 1John 1:9

When a sinner feels he has no natural fitness for receiving the grace of God; when a broken spirit cries, “Oh, what a wretch I am! Not only my past sin but my present feelings disqualify me for the love of God; I seem to be made of hell-hardened steel,” he is confessing that sin is in him…If you feel you are desperately bad, remember you are worse than you think you are. Your case is in itself desperate, hopeless, damnable! If you feel that you are lost, you do not feel it too strongly, you are in the true light where God will meet with you. The Lord will not consent to parley with you on the ground that you are not much of a sinner, and that after all your sin is not a great evil. No, He will meet you where the truth is and nowhere else; when you confess that you are unworthy of His pity, you are owning the truth, and when you feel guilty, you feel what is really fact; on this footing of truth, sad truth though it be, the Lord will meet with you through the atoning blood. It is in your vileness that sovereign grace o’er sin abounding will come to you and cleanse you, and therefore the sooner you come to the honest truth the better for you, for the sooner will you obtain joy and peace through believing in Christ. The text means just this—Treat God truthfully, and He will treat you truthfully. Make no pretensions before God, but lay bare your soul, let Him see it as it is, and then He will be faithful and just to forgive you your sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. Mark the beauty of that expression; God will deal with you in faithfulness. His nature is mercy, and you naturally expect that if you confess your sin to a merciful God, He will deal mercifully with you and be faithful to His nature; and He will be so…The blood of Jesus Christ has made a full atonement, and God will be faithful to that atonement. He will deal with you on the grounds of the covenant of grace, of which the sacrifice of Jesus is the seal, and therein also He will be true to you.

Honest Dealing with God by C. H. Spurgeon

Sin Daily Confessed and Pardoned

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, confession of sin, prayer, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. – 1John 1:8-10

But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin. – 1 John 1:7

Our only safe course—and may the Spirit of God grant us grace to follow it—is to come to God as we actually are, and ask Him to deal with us, in Christ Jesus, according to our actual condition. If we are to walk with God at all it must be in the light, and if we once walk in the light with Him our condition will tally with the description of verse seven; we shall see sin in ourselves and daily feel the blood of Jesus Christ cleansing us therefrom. Only on the footing of sin daily confessed and pardoned can there be any fellowship between us and the eternal God this side heaven, for that footing is the only one consistent with the facts of the case. Let us daily ask the Lord to keep us in a truthful spirit, admitting the truth, both concerning ourselves and our Lord, feeling its power, and desiring to be taught still more of it. Let us pray Him to deal with us not according to our suppositions but according to the fact and let us entreat Him never to allow us to rejoice in fancied blessings, such as might satisfy our proud, half-stupified conscience, but to give to us the real blessings of genuine forgiveness, and effectual cleansing from all unrighteousness.

Honest Dealing with God by C. H. Spurgeon

Stay Focused on Following Jesus

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

He has saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works, but by His own purpose and by the grace He granted us in Christ Jesus before time began. – 2 Timothy 1:9

Dear Friends…let us come to the principal point and keep to it. And that point is this—that the main business of our life is to follow Jesus. And to effect this, we had better avoid all idle speculations—and indeed, questions not altogether idle had better be left alone that we may keep to the one main business of our life. I can truly say to every one of you that the main thing you have to do in this world is first to follow Christ until you find Him as your Savior or, in other words, the first thing for you to do is to look to Him, to trust in Him. 

Give up all speculating, I beseech you—give up reading books merely for the sake of curiosity, and, in God’s name, get to work for Him! The graves are filling, our cemeteries are filling, and Hell is filling too! Meanwhile, the dupes of Satan are compassing sea and land to do all the mischief that they can. If you really are what you say you are, the servant of Him who wept over Jerusalem—if you are bought with the blood He shed on Calvary’s Cross—I charge you to consecrate yourself, this very hour, to that form of Christian work to which your Master calls you and follow Him through evil report and good report! Follow Him in the path of duty and let nothing turn you aside from your lifework of glorifying God! May God bless you all, for Jesus’ sake! Amen.

Following the Risen Christ by C. H. Spurgeon

We Must be Like Jesus

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

Then said Jesus unto His disciples, If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. – Matthew 16:24

When sin is pardoned and the eternal safety of the soul is ensured, the next thing is to seek the purity of the soul and to secure a character that shall be worth having throughout eternity. There is no character which is worth having which is not fashioned according to the Character of Christ. He is absolute perfection! In Him is nothing redundant and from Him nothing is omitted which ought to be there. To be perfect, we must be like Jesus. “Looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith,” we are to conquer this sin and to overcome that passion and, in the power of God’s Spirit, to cultivate this tender Grace and that other bolder virtue! The one thing we are to aim at is to tread in Christ’s footsteps, to do what He did and, as far as He is imitable by us, to do it as He did it and to be as He was in the midst of the sons and daughters of men. If I am a Christian, I am not to be following Calvin, or Arminius, or any other earthly leader—I am to mold my doctrinal opinions, my thoughts, words, character and acts after the model of Christ’s!

The same Law applies to the whole of our life-service. If we would do what we were created to do—if, being trees of God’s planting, we are to bear the fruit He meant us to bear, we must follow Jesus Christ! We are sent into the world, under Him, upon the great errand of seeking the lost—

“‘Tis all our business here below
To cry, ‘Behold the Lamb!’”

—some from the pulpit, but every Christian from some place or other. To each individual Believer, Christ has given a position which nobody else can so well occupy and from that position he can influence some other person or persons whom God will bless through him.

Following the Risen Christ by C. H. Spurgeon

Your Most Important Concern

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, prayer, promises, repentance, salvation

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved… – Acts 16:31

Procrastination often comes in to cause the solemnities of the Gospel to seem less serious. “There is plenty of time,” we say. “We are quite young as yet and we have many years in which to think of these things.” Where the sere and yellow leaf is beginning to fall, there is something else to put away thoughts of eternity. There is another daughter to be married, so a few more hundreds of pounds must be saved up for her. And then when you have retired to your country house, you will think about “making your peace with God”—as if it were nothing to you that you are “condemned already” because you have “not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God,” and as if it were a matter of no importance to be an enemy of God and to be unsaved for 50 or 60 years of sin—as if it were a small thing to have the leprosy of sin still eating into your immortal spirits!

We live in vain if we do not live unto God and if we do not live by faith in Jesus Christ, the one and only Savior. “Live in vain,” did I say? It were better for you, dear Hearers, and for me, that we had never been born if we should live and die without faith in Jesus Christ! You may neglect your business, you may neglect what you will—but do not neglect your souls. First, first, FIRST—beyond and before everything else—must be the matter of your own personal salvation! On board a vessel that is going down, a man may forget his luggage and many precious treasures that he has with him. It is for his life that he is concerned. Even Satan spoke the truth for once when he said, “Skin for skin, yes, all that a man has will he give for his life.” Let it be so with you in the highest sense. Make your soul your first care, for what shall it profit you if you gain the whole world and lose your own soul? So the first thing for you to do is to follow Christ for life, for salvation—looking to Him by faith, in obedience to the Apostolic command, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.”

Following the Risen Christ by C. H. Spurgeon

Farewell, Dead World!

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

If ye then be risen with Christ… – Colossians 3:1

Beloved, we are at this time wholly raised from the dead in a spiritual sense. Let us think of this, for our Lord did not have His head quickened while His feet remained in the sepulcher. He rose a perfect and entire Man, alive throughout. Even so have we been renewed in every part. We have received, though it is but in its infancy, a perfect spiritual life—we are perfect in Christ Jesus. In our inner man our eyes are opened, our ears are awakened, our hands are active, our feet are nimble—our every faculty is there, though as yet immature and needing development and having the old dead nature to contend with. Moreover, and best of all, we are so raised that we shall die no more! Oh, tell me no more the dreary tale that a man who has received the Divine Life may yet lose Grace and perish!

With our Bibles in our hands we know better. “Christ being raised from the dead dies no more, death has no more dominion over Him” and, therefore, He that has received Christ’s life in him shall never die. Has He not said, “He that believes in Me, though he were dead yet shall he live; and whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die”? This life which He has given us shall be in us, “a well of water, springing up unto everlasting life.” He has said, “I give unto My sheep eternal life and they shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of My hand.” On the day of our quickening, we bid farewell to spiritual death and to the sepulcher where we slept under sin’s dominion! Farewell, you deadly love of sin! We have done with you! Farewell, dead world, corrupt world! We have done with you! Christ has raised us. Christ has given us eternal life! 

Following the Risen Christ by C. H. Spurgeon

When the Eternal Life Enters the Soul

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

It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual. – 1 Corinthians 15:44-46

This change, from the natural to the spiritual, is such as only God Himself could have worked and yet we have experienced it. To God be the glory! So that by virtue of our rising in Christ we have received life and have become the subjects of a wondrous change— “old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” In consequence of our receiving this life and undergoing this change, the things of the world and sin become a tomb to us. To a dead man a sepulcher is as good a dwelling as he can want. You may call it his bedchamber if you will, for he lies within it as unconscious as if he were sleeping. But the moment the dead man lives, he will not endure such a bedchamber! He calls it a dreary vault; a loathsome dungeon; an unbearable morgue and he must leave it at once!

So when you and I were natural men and had no spiritual life, the things of this life contented us. But it is far otherwise now. A merely outward religion was all that we desired—a dead form suited a dead soul. Judaism pleased those who were under its yoke in the very beginning of the Gospel. New moons and holy days and traditional ordinances and fasting and feasting were great things with those who forgot their resurrection with Christ! All those things make pretty furniture for a dead man’s chamber! But when the Eternal Life enters the soul, these outward ordinances are flung off—the living man tears off his grave clothes and demands such garments as are suitable for life!

Following the Risen Christ by C. H. Spurgeon