The Father

Seeing God in Christ

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

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… – Ephesians 1:3

When we see God in connection with Christ, we see God through Christ; when we see God in Christ, then our hearts are all aflame, and we burst out with, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The infinite Jehovah, who can conceive Him? “Our God is a consuming fire.” Who can draw near to Him? But in the Mediator, in the Person of the God, the Man, in whom we find blended human sympathy and divine glory, we can draw nigh to God. There it is that we get our hands upon the golden harp-strings and resolve that every string shall be struck to the praise of God in Christ Jesus.

But note carefully that God is described here as the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. When Jesus knelt in prayer, He prayed to our God. When Jesus leaned in faith upon the promises, He trusted in God that He would deliver Him. When our Saviour sang on the Passover night, the song was unto God. When He prayed in Gethsemane, with bloody sweat, the prayer was unto our God. Jesus said to Mary at the sepulchre, “Go to My brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father, and your Father; and to My God, and your God.” How we ought to bless God when we think that He is the God whom our Redeemer blesses! This is the God who said of Christ, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Delightful thought! When I approach Jehovah, I approach the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. Surely, when I see His blood-stained footprints there on the ground before me, though I put my shoe off from my foot, for the place is holy ground, yet I follow with confidence where my Friend, my Saviour, my Husband, my Head has been before me; and I rejoice as I worship the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2266.cfm

Blessing God’s Children Blesses Him

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

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me. – Matthew 25:40

There is a way of blessing God which, I trust, we shall all endeavour to practise; and that is by the doing good to His children. When they are sick, visit them. When they are downcast, comfort them. When they are poor, relieve them. When they are hard pressed by outward adversaries, stand at their side, and help them. You cannot bless the Head, but you can bless the feet; and when you have refreshed the feet, you have refreshed the Head. He will say, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto Me.” If they be naked, and you clothe them; if they be sick, and you visit them; if they be hungry, and you feed them; you do in this respect bless God. David not only said, “Thou art my Lord: my goodness extendeth not to Thee;” but added, “but to the saints that are in the earth, and to the excellent in whom is all my delight.” You can be good to them, and in that respect, you may be blessing God. He has done so much for us, that we would fain do something for Him; and when we have reached the limit of our possibilities, we long to do more. We wish that we had more money to give, more talent to use, more time that we could devote to His cause; we wish that we had more heart and more brain; sometimes we wish that we had more tongue, and we sing, –

“Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing
My great Redeemer’s praise!”

This word “blessed” is an attempt to break the narrow circle of our capacity. It is an earnest endeavour of a burning heart to lay at God’s feet crowns of glory which it cannot find: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2266.cfm

Praises to Jehovah!

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

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… – Ephesians 1:3

We bless God when we say concerning the whole of His character, “Amen. This God is our God for ever and ever.” Let Him be just what the Bible says He is; we accept Him as such. Sternly just, He will not spare the guilty. Amen, blessed be His name! Infinitely gracious, ready to forgive. Amen, so let it be! Everywhere present, always omniscient. Amen, so again do we wish Him to be! Everlastingly the same, unchanging in His truth, His promise, His nature. We again say that we are glad of it, and we bless Him. He is just such a God as we love. He is indeed God to us, because He is really God, and we can see that He is so, and every attribute ascribed to Him is a fresh proof to us that Jehovah is the Lord. Thus, we bless Him by adoration.

Praise Him also in your speech. Break the silence; speak of His glory. Invite others to cry with you, “Hallelujah!” or “Hallels unto Jah!” “Praise to Jehovah!” Ascribe ye greatness unto our God. Oh, that all flesh would magnify the Lord with us!

This language is the utterance of assent to all the blessedness that is ascribed to the Lord. After hearing how great He is, how glorious He is, how happy He is, we bless Him by saying, “Amen; so let it be! So would we have it! He is none too great for us, none too blessed for us. Let Him be great, glorious and blessed, beyond all conception.” Amen. This God is our God for ever and ever. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2266.cfm

How Can We Bless God?

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

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessing in heavenly places in Christ: according as He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love.”-Ephesians 1:3-4

It should be our life to bless Him who gave us our life. It should be our delight to bless Him who gives us all our delights. So says the text, and so let us do: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

But how can we bless God? Without doubt the less is blessed of the Greater. Can the Greater be blessed by the less? Yes, but it must be in a modified sense. God blesses us with all spiritual blessings; but we cannot give Him any blessings. He needs nothing at our hand; and if He did, we could not give it. “If I were hungry,” saith the Lord, “I would not tell thee: for the world is Mine, and the fulness thereof.” God has an all-sufficiency within Himself and can never be thought of as dependent upon His creatures, or as receiving anything form His creatures which He needs to receive. He is infinitely blessed already; we cannot add to His blessedness. When He blesses us, He gives us a blessedness that we never had before; but when we bless Him, we cannot by one iota increase His absolutely infinite perfectness. David said to the Lord, “My goodness extendeth not to Thee.” This was as if he had said, Let me be as holy, as devout, and as earnest as I may, I can do nothing for Thee; Thou art too high, too holy, too great for me to be really able to bless Thee in the sense which Thou dost bless me. How, then, do we bless God? We say with David, “Bless the Lord, O my soul,” and we say with Paul, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” We can bless God by praising Him, extolling Him, desiring all honour for Him, ascribing all good to Him, magnifying and lauding His holy name. Well, we will do that. Sit still, if you will, and let your heart be silent unto God; for no language can ever express the gratitude that, I trust, we feel to Him who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in Christ Jesus. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2266.cfm

For Our Soul’s Benefit

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

For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. – 2 Corinthians 5:21

If sin had been blotted out so readily, and nothing more said of it, what effect would that have had on us in the future? I think that everyone who has felt the burden of sin, and has stood at the foot of the cross, and heard the cries of the great Sacrifice, and read God’s wrath against sin written in crimson lines upon the blessed and perfect person of the innocent Savior-every such person feels that sin is an awful thing. You cannot trifle with transgression after a vision of Gethesmane. You cannot laugh at it, and talk about the littleness of its demerit, if you have once stood on Golgotha, and heard the cry, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” The death of the Son of God upon the cross is the grandest of all moral lessons, because it is a lesson that affects the very soul of the man and changes his whole idea of sin. The cross straightens him from the desperate twist which sin gave him at the first. The cure of the first Adam’s fall is the second Adam’s death-the second Adam’s grace, which comes to us through His great sacrifice. We love sin till we see that it killed our best Friend, and then we loathe it evermore. I say, again, that if the great Father did forgive you, and said, “There is nothing in it; go your way, it is all over;” you would have lacked that grandest source of sanctified life which now you find in the wounds of Him who has made sin detestable to you, and has made perfect obedience, even unto death, the subject of you soul’s admiration. Now you long to be unto the great Father, in your measure, what your great Redeemer was to Him when He magnified the law and made it honorable. This is no mean benefit. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2207.cfm

Christ’s Unknown Sufferings

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

For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin… – 2 Corinthians 5:21

God cannot look where there is sin with any pleasure, and though as far as Jesus is personally concerned, He is the Father’s beloved Son in whom He is well pleased; yet when He saw sin laid upon His Son, He made that Son cry, “My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?” It was not possible that Jesus should enjoy the light of His Father’s presence while He was made sin for us; consequently, He went through a horror of great darkness, the root and source of which was the withdrawing of the conscious enjoyment of His Father’s presence. More than that, not only was light withdrawn, but positive sorrow was inflicted…What were the pangs, which Christ endured? I cannot tell you. You have read the story of His crucifixion. Dear friends, that is only the shell, but the inward kernel who shall describe? I doubt not that the Godhead within gave a peculiar sensitiveness to the holiness of Christ’s nature, so that sin must have become even more abhorrent to Him than it would have been to a merely perfect man. His griefs are worthy to be described according to the Greek Liturgy as “unknown sufferings.” The height and depth, the length and breadth of what Jesus Christ endured no heart can guess, nor tongue can tell, nor can imagination frame; God only knows the griefs to which the Son of God was put when the Lord made to meet upon Him the iniquity of us all. To crown all there came death itself. Death is the punishment for sin…whatever over and beyond natural death was intended in the sentence, “In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die,” Christ felt. Death went through and through Him… “He became obedient to death, even to the death of the cross.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0694.cfm

Christ Volunteered to Bear Our Sins

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

…the LORD hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all. – Isaiah 53:6

It has been asked, Was it just that sin should thus be laid upon Christ? We believe it was rightly so, first because it was the act of Him who must do right, for “the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” Jehovah, He against whom the offense was committed, and who has ordained that the sin of the people spoken of should be laid upon Christ. To impugn this, then, would be to impugn the justice of Jehovah, and I pray that none of us may have the hardihood to do that. Shall the potsherd venture to strive with the potter? shall the thing formed contend with the Creator of all things? Jehovah did it; and we accept it as being right, caring not what men may think of Jehovah’s own deed. Remember, moreover, that Jesus Christ voluntarily took this sin upon Himself. It was not forced upon Him; He was not punished for the sins of others with whom He had no connection and against His will; but He His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree, and while bearing it said, “No man taketh My life from Me, but I lay it down of Myself.” It was according to His own eternal agreement made with the Father on our behalf; it was according to His own expressed desire, for He had a baptism to be baptized with, and He was straitened until it was accomplished; and therefore whatever of injustice might be supposed, it is removed by the fact that He who was mainly concerned in it was Himself voluntarily placed in such a position. But I would have you remember, beloved, that there was a relationship between our Lord and His people, which is too often forgotten, but which rendered it natural that He should bear the sin of His people. Why does the text speak of our sinning like sheep? I think it is because it would call to our recollection that Christ is our Shepherd. It is not, my brethren, that Christ took upon Himself the sins of strangers. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/0694.cfm