Grieving the Sovereign God

Sherry Attributes of God, confession of sin, prayer, Sovereignty of God, the unbelieving life Leave a comment

Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering..? – Romans 2:4

“What the eye does not see the heart does not rue,” is a truthful proverb; but every transgression is committed in the very presence of God, so that penitent David cried, “Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight.” Transgression is committed in the sight of God, from whose eyes nothing is hidden. Remember also, that the Lord never can forget; before His eyes all things stand out in clear light, not only the things of to-day, but all the transgressions of a life. Yet for all this He doth forbear. With evil reeking before His face, He is slow to anger, and waiteth that He may be gracious.

Some are patient because they are powerless: they bear and forbear because they cannot well help themselves; but it is not so with God. Had He but willed it, you had been swept into hell; only a word from Him and the impenitent had fallen in the wilderness, and their spirits would have passed into the realms of endless woe. In a moment the Lord could have eased Himself of His adversary; He could have stopped that flippant tongue and closed that lustful eye in an instant. That wicked heart would have failed to beat if God had withdrawn His power, and that rebellious breath would have ceased also. Had it not been for longsuffering you unbelievers would long since have known what it is to fall into the hands of an angry God. Will you continue to grieve the God who so patiently bears with you?

Here let us pause; and oh, that each one who is still unsaved would sing most sincerely the words of Watts:-

“Lord, we have long abused Thy love,
Too long indulged our sin,
Our aching hearts e’en bleed to see
What rebels we have been.

“No more, ye lusts, shall ye command,
No more will we obey;
Stretch out, O God, Thy conqu’ring hand,
And drive Thy foes away.”

~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1714.cfm

God’s Riches Despised?

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

Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering..? – Romans 2:4

Our apostle adds to goodness and forbearance the riches of “longsuffering.” We draw a distinction between forbearance and longsuffering. Forbearance has to do with the magnitude of sin; longsuffering with the multiplicity of it: forbearance has to do with present provocation; longsuffering relates to that provocation repeated and continued for a length of time. Oh, how long doth God suffer the ill manners of men! Forty years long was He grieved with that generation whose carcasses fell in the wilderness. Has it come to forty years yet with you, dear hearer? Possibly it may have passed even that time, and a half-century of provocation may have gone into eternity to bear witness against you. What if I should even have to say that sixty and seventy years have continued to heap up the loads of their transgressions, until the Lord saith, “I am pressed down under your sins; as a cart that is full of sheaves I am pressed down under you.” Yet for all that, here you are on praying ground and pleading terms with God; here you are where yet the Saviour reigns upon the throne of grace; here you are where mercy is to be had for the asking, where free grace and dying love ring out their charming bells of invitation to joy and peace! Oh, the riches of His goodness, and forbearance, and longsuffering. Three-fold is the claim: will you not regard it? Can you continue to despise it? …If God were a tyrant, if He were unrighteous or unkind, it were not so much amiss that men stood out against Him; but when His very name is love, and when He manifests the bowels of a Father towards His wandering children it is shameful that He should be so wantonly provoked…Every single minute of our life is cheered with the tender kindness of God, and every spot is gladdened with His love. I wonder that the Lord does not sweep away the moral nuisance of a guilty race from off the face of earth. Man’s sin must have been terribly offensive to God from day to day, and yet still He shows kindness, love, forbearance. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1714.cfm

God’s Forbearance

Sherry Attributes of God, Christian Life, Sovereignty of God, the unbelieving life Leave a comment

Or despisest thou the riches of His goodness and forbearance and longsuffering..? – Romans 2:4

Forbearance comes in when men, having offended, God withholds the punishment that is due to them; when men, having been invited to mercy, have refused it, and yet God continues to stretch out His hands, and invite them to come to Him. Patient endurance of offenses and insults has been manifested by God to many of you, who now hear these words of warning. The Lord knows to whom I speak, and may He make you, also, know that I am speaking to you, even to you. Some men have gone back to the very sin of which for a while they repented; they have suffered for their folly but have turned again to it with suicidal determination. They are desperately set on their own ruin, and nothing can save them. The burnt child has run to the fire again; the singed moth has plunged again into the flame of the candle; who can pity such self-inflicted miseries? They are given over to perdition, for they will not be warned. They have returned to the haunt of vice, though they seemed to have been snatched from the deep ditch of its filthiness. They have wantonly and wilfully returned to their cups, though the poison of former draughts is yet burning in their veins. Yet, despite this folly, God shows forbearance towards them.

Did you ever think what is included in the riches of forbearance. There are quick tempered individuals who only need to be a little provoked, and hard words and blows come quick and furious: but, oh, the forbearance of God when He is provoked to His face by ungodly men! By men, I mean, who hear His word, and yet refuse it! They slight His love, and yet He perseveres in it. Justice lays its hand on the sword, but mercy holds it back in its scabbard. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1714.cfm

The End of the Righteous Desired

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You who are King of kings and Lord of lords, we worship You. Before Jehovah’s awful throne we bow with sacred joy.

Sermon Text

It is a Wonder of Wonders

Sherry Attributes of God, Christian Life, Sovereignty of God, The Holy Spirit 2 Comments

Or despisest thou the riches of His goodness and forbearance and longsuffering..? – Romans 2:4

O impenitent man, you are placed in the very focus of Christian light, and yet you follow evil! Will you not think of this? Time was when a man would have to work for years to earn enough money to buy a Bible. There were times when he could not have earned one even with that toil; now the Word of God lies upon your table, you have a copy of it in almost every room of your house; is not this a boon from God? This is the land of the open Bible, and the land of the preached Word of God; in this you prove the riches of God’s goodness. Do you despise this wealth of mercy? What is more, you have been favoured with a tender conscience. When you do wrong you know it, and smart for it. What means those wakeful nights after you have yielded to a temptation? What means that miserable feeling of shame? that fever of unrest? You find it hard to stifle the inward monitor, and difficult to resist the Spirit of God. Your road to perdition is made peculiarly hard; do you mean to follow it at all costs, and go over hedge and ditch to hell?

Be it never forgotten that sin is to God much more intolerable than it is to us. He is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. Things which we call little sins are great and grievous evils to Him: they do, as it were, touch the apple of His eye. “Oh, do not,” He says, “do not this abominable thing that I hate!” His Spirit is grieved and vexed with every idle word and every sensual thought; and hence it is a wonder of wonders that a God so sensitive of sin, a God so able to avenge Himself of His adversaries, a God who knows the abundance of human evil, and marks it all, should nevertheless exhibit riches of goodness and forbearance and longsuffering. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1714.cfm

God’s Multiplied Mercies Upon the Ungodly

Sherry Attributes of God, Christian Life, Sovereignty of God, the unbelieving life Leave a comment

Or despisest thou the riches of His goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance? – Romans 2:4

Let me speak this morning to thee, O unregenerate, impenitent man: Men may be without the fear of God, and yet, for all that, God may be pleased to prosper their endeavours in business…He allows them to enjoy good health, vigour of mind, and strength of constitution: they are happy in the wife of their youth, and their children are about them. Theirs is an envied lot…I know that it is thus with many who do not love God and have never yielded to the entreaties of His grace. They love not the hand which enriches them, they praise not the Lord who daily loadeth them with benefits. How is it that men can receive such kindness, and yield no return? O sirs, you are to-day blessed with all that need requires; but I pray you remember that you might have been in the depths of poverty. An illness would have lost you your situation; or a slight turn in trade would have left you bankrupt. You are well to-day; but you might have been tossing to and fro upon a bed of sickness; you might have been in the hospital, about to lose a limb. Shall not God be praised for health and freedom from pain? You might have been shut up in yonder asylum, in the agonies of madness. A thousand ills have been kept from you; you have been exceedingly favoured by the goodness of the Most High. Is it not so? And truly it is a wonderful thing that God should give His bread to those that lift up their heel against Him, that He should cause His light to shine upon those who never perceive His goodness therein, that He should multiply His mercies upon ungodly men who only multiply their rebellions against Him and turn the gifts of His love into instruments of transgression…I wonder that the Lord does not sweep away the moral nuisance of a guilty race from off the face of earth. Man’s sin must have been terribly offensive to God from day to day, and yet still He shows kindness, love, forbearance. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1714.cfm

A Hypocrite’s Judgement

Sherry Christian Life, Sovereignty of God, The Holy Spirit Leave a comment

“Or despisest thou the riches of His goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?”- Romans 2:4

Observe that the apostle singled out an individual (Romans 2:1) who had condemned others for transgressions, in which he himself indulged. This man owned so much spiritual light that he knew right from wrong, and he diligently used his knowledge to judge others, condemning them for their transgressions. As for himself, he preferred the shade, where no fierce light might beat on his own conscience and disturb his unholy peace. His judgment was spared the pain of dealing with his home offenses by being set to work upon the faults of others. He had a candle, but he did not place it on the table to light his own room; he held it out at the front door to inspect therewith his neighbours who passed by. Paul looks this man in the face and says… “Thinkest thou this, O man, that judgest them which do such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?” Well did the apostle aim that piercing arrow; it hits the center of the target and strikes a folly common to mankind.

The punishment which is due to sin the guilty reckon to be surely impending upon others, but they scarce believe that it can ever fall upon themselves. A personal doom for themselves is an idea which they will not harbour: if the dread thought should light upon them they shake it off as men shake snow-flakes from their cloaks…Do men indeed believe that they alone shall go unpunished? No man will subscribe to that notion when it is written down in black and white, and yet the mass of men lives as if this were true; I mean the mass of men who have sufficient light to condemn sin in others. They start back from the fact of their own personal guiltiness and condemnation and go on in their ungodliness as if there were no great white throne for them, no last assize, no judge, no word of condemnation, and no hell of wrath. Alas, poor madmen, thus to dream! O Spirit of Truth save them from this fatal infatuation. ~ C.H. Spurgeon

https://www.blueletterbible.org/comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1714.cfm