Sovereignty of God

The Highest Life

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, Sovereignty of God 5 Comments

I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.- John 10:10

Any man may be spiritually alive, and yet he may not know much about the higher life. There is in spiritual life a scale of degree. One man is just alive unto God; another man may be vigorous; another may be rapturously consecrated. I hope you and I will anxiously desire to get the highest form of spiritual life that is known. We do not wish to be beggars in the kingdom of Christ, but, if we can, to take our place in the House of Peers, to be princes through Jesus Christ. We need not be poor; Christ is willing to enrich us. We are not straitened in Him; we are straitened in ourselves. Now, Christ gives the promise, “Because I live,” saith He, “the highest life, far above all principalities and powers, ye shall live also this higher life with Me.” You may have it; you may obtain it, but brethren, if you want to get it, never go to Moses for it; never go to yourselves for it. Do not seek to school yourselves by rules, and regulations, and resolutions, or by a morbid asceticism, such as some men delight in; but go the living Saviour, and in the living liberty which you will enjoy in communion with Him, your soul will take unto itself wings, and mount into a clearer atmosphere: your spirit will be braced to a higher degree of robust devotion: you will draw nearer to heaven, because you have got nearer to Christ, who is the Lord of heaven. “Because I live, ye shall have life: ye shall have that life continued, and ye shall have that life yet more abundantly: I am come, not only that ye may have life, but more abundantly.” There are your Master’s words; plead them before your Master’s throne.~ 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

Jesus Lives

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, Sovereignty of God 3 Comments

Yet a little while, and the world seeth Me no more; but ye see Me: because I live, ye shall live also. – John 14:19

He always lived. There never was a time when He was not. “Before the hills were brought forth I was there,” saith He. The eternal Wisdom of God is from everlasting. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God. The same was in the beginning with God.” The life, however, which we think is intended in the text, is not His divine life, His life as Deity, but His life as man, His life as Mediator between God and man. In that life He lives. We needed not to be assured of His divine life: but seeing that, as a Mediator He died, it was necessary to assure us that as a Mediator He descended into the tomb; it is well for us to be assured that as a Mediator He rose again from His grave, and now lives at the right hand of the Father, no more to bleed and die.

Jesus Christ at this time lives in His proper manhood. He lives as to His soul: His human soul is as it was on earth. He lives as to His human body. He is a man before the throne; and I have no doubt that He wears the symbol, of course, mightily glorified, of his sufferings.

“Looks like a Lamb that had been slain.
And wears His priesthood still.”

That very Christ, who did once as a babe lie upon His mother’s breast, and who afterwards trod the waves of Gennesaret: who, after His resurrection, ate a piece of broiled fish and of honeycomb-that very Christ is now before the eternal throne. In very soul and body the man Christ Jesus is there. He lives. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

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

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

Behold How He Loves His Lord

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

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

Did anybody ever say of any one of us here, “Behold how he loves Christ”? If someone did say that of you, my brother or sister, was it true? I think I hear your answer, ” Oh, I do love Him! He knows all things, and He knows that I love Him.” But do you love Him so fervently that strangers or even your more intimate acquaintances would say of your love to Jesus what the Jews said of His love to Lazarus, “Behold how He loved him”? “I wish,” says one, “I could do so.” Then listen while I tell you of what some saints have done to show how they have loved their Lord.

There have been those who have suffered for Christ’s sake. They have lain in damp dungeons, and have refused to accept liberty at the price of treachery to their Lord and His truth. They have been stretched upon the rack, yet no torture could make them yield up their fidelity to God. If you have read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, you know how hundreds of brave men and women, and children too, stood at the stake, gloriously calm, and often triumphantly happy, and were burnt to death for Christ’s sake, while many of those who looked on learnt to imitate their noble example, and others who heard their dying testimonies, and their expiring songs, (not groans,) could not help exclaiming, “Behold how these martyrs love their Master!”

There have been others, who have shown their love to their Lord by untiring and self-sacrificing service. They have laboured for Him, at times, under great privations and amid many perils, some as missionaries in foreign lands, and others with equal zeal in this country. Their hearts were all aglow with love for their dear Lord and Saviour, and they spent their whole time and strength in seeking to win souls for Him, so that those who knew them could not help saying, “Behold how they love their Lord!” Some of us can never hope to wear the ruby crown of martyrdom, yet we may be honoured by receiving the richly-jewelled crown from the hand of Christ ~ C.H. Spurgeon

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

Heaven is Our Home (Maranatha!)

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

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. -John 14:3

He has made us long for heaven, and given us at least a measure of preparation for it. We are expecting that, one of these days, if the chariot and horses of fire do not stop at our door, our dear Lord and Saviour will fulfil to us His promise, “if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there ye may be also,” To a true believer in Jesus, the thought of departing from this world, and going to be “for ever with the Lord,” has nothing of gloom associated with it. This earth is the place of our banishment and exile; heaven is our home. We are like the loving wife who is sundered by thousands of miles of sea and land from her dear husband, and we are longing for the great re-union with our beloved Lord, from whom we shall then never again be separated. I cannot hope to depict the scene when He shall introduce us to the principalities and powers in heavenly places, and bid us sit with Him in His throne, even as He sits with His Father in His throne. Surely then the holy angels, who have never sinned, will unite in exclaiming, “Behold, how He loved them!” It is a most blessed thought, to my mind, that we may be up there before the hands of that clock complete another round; and if not so soon as that, it will not be long before all of us who love the Lord will be with Him where He is, and then the last among us shall know more of His love than the greatest of us can ever know while here below. Meanwhile, we have much of the joy of heaven even while we are upon this earth; for, as Paul wrote to the Ephesians, “God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”~ C.H. Spurgeon

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