The Father

When Christ Blesses Our Offerings

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

And Jesus took the loaves, and when He had given thanks He distributed them to the disciples, and the disciples to those sitting down; and likewise of the fish, as much as they wanted. – John 6:11

Christ gave thanks for these trifles because He saw whereunto they would grow. Do you not think that, having thanked the Father, He also thanked the boy? And in after years these words of gratitude would be ample recompense for such a tiny deed. Like the woman who cast in the two mites to the treasury, he gave his all, and doubtless was commended for the gift. Though high in glory to-day, Christ is still grateful when such offerings are made to Him; still He thanks His Father when, with timid trembling hands, we offer to Him our best, our all, however small; still is His heart gladdened when we bring Him our scanty store that it may be touched by His dear hand and blessed by His gracious lips…He blesses our offerings, not for their worth, but because His power will yet make them worthy of His praise. May the Lord thus bless every talent that you have! May He bless your memory; may He bless your understanding; may He bless your voices; may He bless your hearts; may He bless your heads; may He bless you all and evermore! When He puts a blessing into the little gift and into the little grace that we have, good work begins, and goes on to perfection.

When the loaves had been blessed they were increased by Christ. Peter takes one, begins to break it, and as he breaks it, he has always as much in his hand as he started with. “Here, take a bit of fish, friend,” says he. He gives a whole fish to that man, he has a whole fish left. So he gives it to another, and another, and another, and goes on scattering the bread and scattering the fish everywhere, as quickly as he can; and when he has done, he has his hands just as full of fish and as full of bread as ever. If you serve God you will never run dry. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/2216.cfm

There is Hope for Hopeless Souls

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

All that the Father giveth Me shall come to Me; and him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out. – John 6:37

“Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out”-for no reason, and in no way, and on no occasion, and under no pretense, and for no motive. “I will not not cast him out,” says the original. “Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out.” You say it is too good to be true that there can be pardon for you: this is a foolish measuring of God’s corn with your bushel, and because it seems too good a thing for you to receive, you fancy it is too good for God to bestow. Let the greatness of the good news be one reason for believing that the news is true, for it is so like God. I think this good news should arouse those who have almost gone to sleep through despair. The sailors have been pumping the vessel, the leaks are gaining, she is going down, the captain is persuaded she must be a wreck. Depressed by such evil tidings, the men refuse to work; and since the boats are all stove in and they cannot make a raft, they sit down in despair. Presently the captain has better news for them. “She will float,” he says; “the wind is abating too, the pumps tell upon the water, the leak can be reached yet.” See how they work; with what cheery courage they toil on, because there is hope! Soul, there is hope! There is hope! THERE IS HOPE! To the harlot, to the thief, to the drunkard.

“There is no hope,” says Satan. Liar that thou art, get thee back to thy den; for thee there is no hope; but for fallen man, though he be in the mire of sin up to his very neck, though he be at the gates of death, while he lives there is hope. There is hope for hopeless souls in the Savior. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1000.cfm

The Most Obscure Saints Are Well Cared For

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, promises, salvation, The Father 2 Comments

How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare. – Luke 15:17

If we could call forth from his seat a weak believer in God, who is almost unknown in the church, one who sometimes questions whether he is indeed a child of God, and would be willing to be a hired servant so long as he might belong to God, and if I were to ask him, “How, after all, has the Lord dealt with you?” what would be his reply? You have many afflictions, doubts and fears, but have you any complaints against your Lord? When you have waited upon Him for daily grace, has He denied you? When you have been full of troubles, has He refused you comfort? When you have been plunged in distress, has He declined to deliver you? The Lord Himself asks, “Have I been a wilderness unto Israel?” Testify against the Lord, ye His people, if ye have aught against Him. Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, whosoever there be in God’s service who has found Him a hard task-master, let him speak. Amongst the angels before Jehovah’s throne, and amongst men redeemed on earth, if there be any one that can say He hath been dealt with unjustly or treated with ungenerous churlishness, let him lift up his voice! But there is not one. Even the devil himself when he spoke of God and of his servant Job, said, “Doth Job serve God for nought?” Of course he did not: God will not let His servants serve Him for nought; He will pay them superabundant wages, and they shall all bear witness that at His table there is “bread enough and to spare.” Now, if these still enjoy the bread of the Father’s house, these who were once great sinners, these who are now only very commonplace saints, surely, sinner, it should encourage you to say, “I will arise and go to my Father,” for His hired servants “have bread enough and to spare.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1000.cfm

Made Fit for Heaven by the Holy Spirit

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, promises, salvation, The Father, The Holy Spirit 3 Comments

The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life. – Job 33:4

Sinner, thou needest a new life and thou needest holiness, for both of these are necessary to make thee fit for heaven. Is there a provision for this? The Holy Spirit is provided and given in the covenant of grace; and surely in Him there is enough and to spare. What cannot the Holy Spirit do? Being divine, nothing can be beyond His power. Look at what He has already done. He moved upon the face of chaos and brought it into order (Genesis 1:2); all the beauty of creation arose beneath His moulding breath. We ourselves must confess with Elihu, “The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life.” Think of the great deeds of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, when men unlearned spake with tongues of which they knew not a syllable aforetime, and the (tongues like as) flames of fire upon them were also within them, so that their hearts burned with zeal and courage to which they hitherto had been strangers. Think of the Holy Spirit’s work on such a one as Saul of Tarsus. That persecutor foams blood, he is a very wolf, he would devour the saints of God at Damascus and yet, within a few moments, you hear him say, “Who art Thou, Lord?” and yet again, “Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?” His heart is changed; the Spirit of God has newly created it; the adamant is melted in a moment into wax. Many of us stand before you as the living monuments of what the Holy Ghost can do, and we can assure you from our own experience, that there is no inward evil which He cannot overcome, no lustful desire of the flesh which He cannot subdue, no obduracy of the affections which He cannot melt. Is anything too hard for the Lord? Is the Spirit of the Lord straitened? Surely no sinner can be beyond the possibilities of mercy when the Holy Spirit condescends to be the agent of human conversion. O sinner, if thou perish, it is not because the Holy Spirit lacks power, or the blood of Jesus lacks efficacy, or the Father fails in love; it is because thou believest not in Christ, but dost abide in wilful rebellion, refusing the abundant bread of life which is placed before thee. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1000.cfm

Bread Enough and to Spare

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

And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! – Luke 15:17

Ah! the master proof that in Christ Jesus there is “bread enough and to spare,” is the cross. Will you follow me a moment, will you follow Him, rather, to Gethsemane? Can you see the bloody sweat as it falls upon the ground in His agony? Can you think of His scourging before Herod and Pilate? Can you trace Him along the Via Dolorosa of Jerusalem? Will your tender hearts endure to see Him nailed to the tree, and lifted up to bleed and die? This is but the shell; as for the inward kernel of His sufferings no language can describe it, neither can conception peer into it. The everlasting God laid sin on Christ, and where the sin was laid there fell the wrath. “It pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief.” Now He that died upon the cross was God’s only begotten Son. Can you conceive a limit to the merit of such a Savior’s death? I know there are some who think it necessary to their system of theology to limit the merit of the blood of Jesus: if my system of theology needed such a limitation, I would cast it to the winds. I cannot, dare not, allow the thought to find a lodging in my mind; it seems so near akin to blasphemy. In Christ’s finished work I see an ocean of merit; my plummet finds no bottom, my eye discovers no shore. There must be sufficient efficacy in the blood of Christ, if God had so willed it, to have saved not only all this world, but ten thousand worlds, had they transgressed the Maker’s law. Once admit infinity into the matter, and limit is out of the question. Having a divine person for an offering, it is not consistent to conceive of limited value; bound and measure are terms inapplicable to the divine sacrifice. The intent of the divine purpose fixes the application of the infinite offering but does not change it into a finite work. In the atonement of Christ Jesus there is “bread enough and to spare;” even as Paul wrote to Timothy, “He is the Savior of all men, specially of those that believe.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1000.cfm

Look Into His Heart

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

Who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. – Titus 2:14

Oh, when I think of sin, I cannot understand how a sinner can be saved; but when I think of God, and look into His heart, I understand how readily He can forgive. “Look into His heart,” saith one; “how can we do that?” Hath He not laid bare His heart to you? Do you enquire where He has done this? I answer, yonder, upon Calvary’s cross. What was in the very center of the divine heart? What, but the person of the Well-beloved, His only begotten Son? …He spared not His Son, but He spares the sinner; He poured out His wrath upon His Son and made Him the substitute for sinners, that He might lavish love upon the guilty who deserved His anger. O soul, if thou art lost, it is not from any want of grace, or wisdom, or power in the Father; if thou perish, it is not because God is hard to move or unable to save. If thou be a castaway, it is not because the Eternal refused to hear thy cries for pardon or rejected thy faith in Him. On thine own head be thy blood, if thy soul be lost.

Jesus who came from heaven for our redemption was…very God of very God, in the beginning with the Father. And does such a One come to redeem? Is there room to doubt as to His ability, if that be the fact? I do confess this day, that if my sins were ten thousand times heavier than they are, yea, and if I had all the sins of this crowd in addition piled upon me, I could trust Jesus with them all at this moment now that I know Him to be the Christ of God. He is the mighty God, and by His pierced hand the burden of our sins is easily removed; He blotteth out our sins, He casts them into the depths of the sea. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1000.cfm

God’s Mercy Endureth For Ever

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

For thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive; and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon Thee. – Psalm 86:5

Whosoever shall rightly consider the Father will at once perceive that there can be no stint to mercy, no bound to the possibilities of grace. What is the nature and character of the Supreme? “Is He harsh or loving?” saith one. The Scripture answers the question, not by telling us that God is loving, but by assuring us that God is love. God Himself is love; it is His very essence. It is not that love is in God, but that God Himself is love. Can there be a more concise and more positive way of saying that the love of God is infinite? You cannot measure God Himself; your conceptions cannot grasp the grandeur of His attributes, neither can you tell the dimensions of His love, nor conceive the fullness of it. Only this know, that high as the heavens are above the earth, so are His ways higher than your ways, and His thoughts than your thoughts. His mercy endureth for ever. He pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of His heritage. He retaineth not His anger for ever, because He delighteth in mercy. “Thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive: and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon Thee.”

If divine love alone should not seem sufficient for your salvation, remember that with the Father to whom the sinner returns, there is as much of wisdom as there is of grace. Is thy case a very difficult one? He that made thee can heal thee. Are thy diseases strange and complex? He that fashioned the ear, can He not remove its deafness? He that made the eye, can He not enlighten it if it be blind? No mischief can have happened to thee, but what He who is thy God can recover thee from it. Matchless wisdom cannot fail to meet the intricacies of thy case. “Thy mercy is great above the heavens.” “The Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1000.cfm