A Goodly Heritage

If Jesus Christ, who is principally meant by the seed of the woman, had an enmity to Satan, then all Christ's seed must be possessed with the same spirit. For when the seed of the woman was to break the serpent's head it was necessary that those that would enjoy the fruit of that conquest should be enemies to the nature of the devil, and the works of the devil, otherwise they could not join with that interest which overthrows him. It is unreasonable to think the head should have an enmity, and the members an amity; and we cannot have an enmity to that which is the same with our nature, without a change of disposition. It is not a verbal enmity that is here meant. While we pretend to hate him we may do his pleasure, and Satan is never troubled to be pretendedly hated and really obeyed. As wicked men do the will of God's purpose, while they oppose the will of his precept, so they do the devil's will many times while they think they cross it; there must be a contrary nat

Why do we not pray? What are the hindrances to prayer? This is not a curious nor trivial question. It goes not only to the whole matter of our praying, but to the whole matter of our religion. Religion is bound to decline when praying is hindered. That which hinders praying, hinders religion. He who is too busy to pray will be too busy to live a holy life. Other duties become pressing and absorbing and crowd out prayer. Choked to death, would be the coroner’s verdict in many cases of dead praying, if an inquest could be secured on this dire, spiritual calamity. This way of hindering prayer becomes so natural, so easy, so innocent that it comes on us all unawares. If we will allow our praying to be crowded out, it will always be done. Satan had rather we let the grass grow on the path to our prayer-chamber than anything else. A dosed chamber of prayer means gone out of business religiously or what is worse, made an assignment and carrying on our religion in some other name than Go

What, then, does the lordship of Christ over the Sabbath signify? Simply this: that an institution which is of the nature of a boon to man properly falls under the control of Him who is the King of grace and the administrator of divine mercy. He is the best judge how such an institution should be observed; and He has a right to see that it shall not be perverted from a boon into a burden, and so put in antagonism to the royal imperial law of love. The Son of man hath authority to cancel all regulations tending in this direction emanating from men, and even all by-laws of the Mosaic code savoring of legal rigor, and tending to veil the beneficent design of the fourth commandment of the decalogue. He may, in the exercise of His mediatorial prerogative, give the old institution a new name, alter the day of its celebration, so as to invest it with distinctively Christian associations congenial to the hearts of believers, and make it in all the details of its observance subservient to t

Oh! you men and women who have been wearily seeking in the world for love that cannot change, for love that cannot die and leave you; you who have been made sad for life by irrevocable losses, or sorrowful in the midst of your joy by the anticipated certain separation which is to come, listen to this One who says to you: ‘I will never leave thee, and My love shall be round thee for ever’; and recognise this, that there is a love which cannot change, which cannot die, which has no limits, which never can be cold, which never can disappoint, and therefore, in it, and in His presence, there is unending gladness. He is with us as the source of our joy, because He is the Lord of our lives, and the absolute Commander of our wills. To have One present with us whose loving word it is delight to obey, and who takes upon Himself all responsibility for the conduct of our lives, and leaves us only the task of doing what we are bid—that is peace, that is gladness, of such a kind as none else

O love of God, how strong and true! Eternal, and yet ever new; Uncomprehended and unbought, Beyond all knowledge and all thought. O love of God, how deep and great! Far deeper than man’s deepest hate; Self-fed, self-kindled like the light, Changeless, eternal, infinite. O heavenly love, how precious still In days of weariness and ill, In nights of pain and helplessness, To heal, to comfort, and to bless! O wide-embracing, wondrous love! We read thee in the sky above, We read thee in the earth below, In seas that swell, and streams that flow. Refrain: We read thee best in Him who came To bear for us the cross of shame; Sent by the Father from on high, Our life to live, our death to die. We read thy power to bless and save, E’en in the darkness of the grave; Still more in resurrection light We read the fullness of thy might. O love of God, our shield and stay Through all the perils of our way! Eternal love, in thee we rest, For ever safe, for ever blest. —  Horatiu

The “Law of God” expresses the mind of the  Creator , and is binding upon all rational creatures. It is God's unchanging moral standard for regulating the conduct of all men. In some places “the Law of God” may refer to  the whole  revealed  will  of God, but in the majority it has reference to the Ten Commandments; and it is in this restricted sense we use the term. This Law was impressed on man's moral nature from the beginning, and though now fallen, he still shows the work of it written in his heart. This law has never been repealed, and in the very nature of things, cannot be. For God to abrogate the moral Law would be to plunge the whole universe into anarchy. Obedience to the Law of God is man's  first  duty. That is why the first complaint that Jehovah made against Israel after they left Egypt was, “How long refuse ye to keep My  commandments  and My  laws”  (exodus16:27). That is why the first statutes God gave to Israel were the Ten Commandments, i.e. the mora

 The only cheerful Christianity is a Christianity that draws its gladness from deep personal experience of communion with Jesus Christ. There is no way of men being religious and happy except being profoundly religious, and living very near their Master, and always trying to cultivate that spirit of communion with Him which shall surround them with the sweetness and the power of His felt presence. We do not want Pharisaic fasting, but we do want that the reason for not fasting shall not be that Christians like eating better, but that their religion must be joyful because they have Christ with them, and therefore cannot choose but sing, as a lark cannot choose but carol. ‘Religion has no power over us, but as it is our happiness,’ and we shall never make it our happiness, and therefore never know its beneficent control, until we lift it clean out of the low region of outward forms and joyless service, into the blessed heights of communion with Jesus Christ, ‘Whom having not seen we l

To  be humble is to have a low estimate of one’s self. It is to be modest, lowly, with a disposition to seek obscurity. Humility retires itself from the public gaze. It does not seek publicity nor hunt for high places, neither does it care for prominence. Humility is retiring in its nature. Self-abasement belongs to humility. It is given to self-depreciation. It never exalts itself in the eyes of others nor even in the eyes of itself. Modesty is one of its most prominent characteristics. In humility there is the total absence of pride, and it is at the very farthest distance from anything like self-conceit. There is no self-praise in humility. Rather it has the disposition to praise others. “In honour preferring one another.” It is not given to self-exaltation. Humility does not love the uppermost seats and aspire to the high places. It is willing to take the lowliest seat and prefers those places where it will be unnoticed. The prayer of humility is after this fashion: “Never

Law has no tenderness, no pity, no feeling. Tables of stone and a pen of iron are its fitting vehicles. Flashing lightnings and rolling thunders symbolise the fierce light which it casts upon men’s duty and the terrors of its retribution. Inflexible, and with no compassion for human weakness, it tells us what we ought to be, but it does not help us to be it. It ‘binds heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne,’ upon men’s consciences, but puts not forth ‘the tip of a finger’ to enable men to bear them. And this is true about law in all forms, whether it be the Mosaic Law, or whether it be the law of our own country, or whether it be the laws written upon men’s consciences. These all partake of the one characteristic, that they help nothing to the fulfilment of their own behests, and that they are barbed with threatenings of retribution. Like some avenging goddess, law comes down amongst men, terrible in her purity, awful in her beauty, with a hard light in her clear grey eyes—in the

The world does not know where that Christian life comes from. If you are a Christian, you ought to bear in your character a certain indefinable something that will suggest to the people round you that the secret power of your life is other than the power which moulds theirs. You may be naturalised, and you may speak fairly well the language of the country in which you are a sojourner, but there ought to be something in your accent which tells where you come from, and betrays the foreigner. We ought to move amongst men, having about us that which cannot be explained by what is enough to explain their lives. A Christian life should be the manifestation to the world of the supernatural. They ‘know not whence it cometh nor whither it goeth.’ No; that new life in its feeblest infancy, and before it speaks, if I may so say, is, by its very existence, a prophet, and declares that there must be, beyond this ‘bank and shoal of time,’ a region to which it is native, and in which it may gro

John Chapter 1.     The other Gospels begin with Bethlehem; John begins with ‘the bosom of the Father.’ Luke dates his narrative by Roman emperors and Jewish high-priests; John dates his ‘in the beginning.’ To attempt adequate exposition of these verses in our narrow limits is absurd; we can only note the salient points of this, the profoundest page in the New Testament. The threefold utterance in  verse 1  carries us into the depths of eternity, before time or creatures were. Genesis and John both start from ‘the beginning,’ but, while Genesis works downwards from that point and tells what followed, John works upwards and tells what preceded—if we may use that term in speaking of what lies beyond time. Time and creatures came into being, and, when they began, the Word ‘was.’ Surely no form of speech could more emphatically declare absolute, uncreated being, outside the limits of time. Clearly, too, no interpretation of these words fathoms their depth, or makes worthy sense, whic

It was well for the church that her first ministers needed this lesson on prayer; for the time comes in the case of most, if not all, who are spiritually earnest, when its teaching is very seasonable. In the spring of the divine life, the beautiful blossom-time of piety, Christians may be able to pray with fluency and fervor, unembarrassed by want of words, thoughts, and feelings of a certain kind. But that happy stage soon passes, and is succeeded by one in which prayer often becomes a helpless struggle, an inarticulate groan, a silent, distressed, despondent waiting on God, on the part of men who are tempted to doubt whether God be indeed the hearer of prayer, whether prayer be not altogether idle and useless. The three wants contemplated and provided for in this lesson — the want of ideas, of words, and of faith — are as common as they are grievous. How long it takes most to fill even the simple petitions of the Lord’s Prayer with definite meanings! the second petition, e.g., “T

 The sovereignty of this choice is clearly taught when Paul declares that God commended His love toward us in that  while we were yet sinners   Christ died for us , and that Christ died for the ungodly   . Here we see that His love was not extended toward us because we were good, but in spite of the fact that we were bad. It is God who chooses the person and causes him to approach unto Him . Arminianism takes this choice out of the hands of God and places it in the hands of man. Any system which substitutes a man-made election falls below the Scripture teaching on this subject. In the darkest days of Israel's apostasy, as in every other age, it was this principle of election which made a difference between mankind and kept a remnant secure. "Yet will I leave me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him," . These seven thousand did not stand by their own strength; it is expressly said that God res

 Nothing can act  beyond its own principle and nature . Nothing in the world can raise itself to a higher rank of being than that which nature has placed it in; a spark cannot make itself a star, though it mount a little up to heaven; nor a plant endue itself with sense, nor a beast adorn itself with reason; nor a man make himself an angel. Thorns cannot bring forth grapes, nor thistles produce figs because such fruits are above the nature of those plants. So neither can our corrupt nature bring forth grace, which is a fruit above it.  Effectus non excedit virtutem suae causae  [the effect cannot exceed the power of its cause]: grace is more excellent than nature, therefore cannot be the fruit of nature. It is Christ's conclusion, "How can you, being evil, speak good things?" Matthew. 12:33, 34. Not so much as the buds and blossoms of words, much less the fruit of actions. They can no more change their natures, than a viper can do away with his poison. Now though this

 Walking with God will make death sweet.  It was Augustus’ wish that he might have a  euthanasia,  a quiet, easy death without much pain. If anything makes our pillow easy at death it will be this, that we have walked with God in our generation. Do we think walking with God can do us any hurt? Did we ever hear any cry out on their deathbed that they have been too holy, that they have prayed too much, or walked with God too much? No, that which has cut them to the heart has been this, that they have not walked more closely with God; they have wrung their hands and torn their hair to think that they have been so bewitched with the pleasures of the world. Close walking with God will make our enemy (death) be at peace with us. When King Ahasuerus could not sleep, he called for the book of records, and read it (Esther 6:1). So when the violence of sickness causes sleep to depart from our eyes and we can call for conscience (that book of records) and find written in it, ‘On such a day we

 It is  holy . God’s love is not regulated by caprice, passion, or sentiment, but by principle. Just as His grace reigns not at the expense of it, but "through righteousness" (Romans. 5:21), so His love never conflicts with His holiness. "God is light" (1 John 1:5) is mentioned before "God is love" (1 John 4:8). God’s love is no mere amiable weakness, or effeminate softness. Scripture declares, "whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth" (Hebrews. 12:6). God will not wink at sin, even in His own people. His love is pure, unmixed with any maudlin sentimentality.  It is  gracious . The love and favour of God are inseparable. This is clearly brought out in Romans 8:32-39. What that love is from which there can be no "separation," is easily perceived from the design and scope of the immediate context. It is that goodwill and grace of God which determined Him to give His Son for sinners. That love wa

God's  love;  it is a love for  nothing in us.  The love that one creature bears to another is still for something in them; but the love of God, if it be his love, a love that is proper unto him, must needs be free: and that not only for this reason, which is usually given, and is a true one too, because that his love is from everlasting, and nothing in the creature in time can be the cause of what is in God from everlasting; but for this reason likewise, because that only God can be moved by what is in himself, he can love no otherwise but from himself. The creatures love because things are lovely, and there must be motives to draw out that love that is in them; but when God loves, he loves as from his own heart. There is nothing in us, no, not in Christ, that should move God to love us; though indeed to bestow those things that God bestows upon us, so Christ is the moving cause. 'Jacob have I loved,' saith he, and that before he had done any good or evil. So that, as no

 Sorrow and trouble may revive inward trouble. Affliction in itself is a part of the law's curse, and may revive something of bondage in the hearts of God's children, which is good and useful so far as it quickeneth us to renew our reconciliation with God. Spirits entendered by religion are more apprehensive of God's displeasure under afflictions: Numbers. 12:14, 'If her father had spit in her face, should she not be ashamed?' If it humble under the mighty hand of God, it is well; but when it filleth us with perplexities and amazement, like wild bulls in a net, or produceth uncomely sorrow, roaring like bears, or mourning as men without hope, it is naught. .  Let us take notice how affliction worketh. There is a double extreme, slighting the hand of God, or fainting under it, Hebrews. 12:5; we must beware of both. There must be a sense, but it must be kept within bounds; without a sense there can be no improvement; to despise them is to think them fortuitous.

"All the  paths  of the Lord are mercy and truth unto those who keep his covenant and obey his decrees." Psalm 25:10 "All the paths." It is no small effort of faith to say so, when blessings are blown upon, and schemes crossed, and fellow-pilgrims, (it may be beloved spouses in our spiritual joys) are mysteriously removed, to say, "All- ALL is mercy! All- ALL is well!" But they are "the paths of the Lord" -His choosing; and, be assured, He will "lead His people by a right way." It may not be the way of their own selecting. It may be the very last they would have chosen. But when He leads His sheep, "He goes before them." The Shepherd portions off our pasture-ground. He guides the footsteps of the flock. He will lead them by no rougher way than He sees needful. Does a father give his child his own way? If he did, it would be his ruin. Will God surrender us to our own truant wills, which are often bent on nothing so much as

"....  I am just returned from a public service , wherein a minister from the country has given us a display of privileges , glaring and overloaded , with little of the spirituality of those privileges , and nothing at all of the difficulty or conflict connected with them , and without calling us to almost any account , excepting gross despisers who may be presumed to be absent . How often , and with how many different notes , is the lullaby sung , the result of which is a sleeping sanctuary , joined with the silly simpering smile of an assumed enjoyment of things really unknown and unfelt , and joined with ill-nature and malignity against any untoward wight (i.e. person ) who may be hardy enough to attempt to break in upon the sweet dream ! But there is One who walks with fiery eyes in the midst of the candlesticks , and who though a Lamb is also a Lion , able to sound an awakening alarm in his own holy mountain , and who can , when he pleases , bring to view the spectacle

"For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly."  Romans 5:6 My soul bind up this sweet and precious scripture, and carry it about with you in your bosom, and in your heart, that it may help you at any time, and at all times, when your strength seems gone, and there is no power left. Was it not when the whole nature of man was without strength, that Christ was given of the Father? And was it not equally so, when Christ came to seek and save that which was lost? And was it not in due time when Christ died for the ungodly; due time in his resurrection, due time in his ascension, "when he ascended up on high, led captivity captive, and received gifts for men, yea, even for the rebellious, that the Lord God might dwell among them?" Go further yet, my soul, as it concerns yourself--was it not due time indeed. when Jesus passed by and saw you in your loathsome state of sin, cast out to perish, and when no eye pitied you, that the

Do you keep Christ in your power or lie in His ? Strange question you will say ; How could we keep Christ in our power although we would ?True, you cannot ascend into heaven and drag Messiah from his throne ;but those who are determined to have Christ at their disposal take not the power but the word , and make it lie where it will disturb them least . Some persecutors , when the victim is beyond their reach, dress and execute his effigy . Thus some who are called Christians treat Christ . They keep a lifeless image which bears his name , having it outside the door while they entertain company within , and subjecting it to a thousand indignities . The name and the garb they will endure , but not the life or power . The same persons who bow the knee and cry , Hosanna ! before the Christian religion , crucify Christ because he claims to be a King . The struggle of rebellion is painful ; but simple , trustful , loyal obedience is sweet. Those who have surrendered without reserve to the R

.  Whosoever is enlightened in the world, has it communicated from Christ; as Ps. cxlv. 14, 'The Lord upholds all that fall, and raises up all those that are bowed down;' as many as are upheld and raised, are upheld and raised by God' He does indeed 'shine in darkness,' his light breaks out upon men, but they are not the better for it, because 'the darkness comprehends it not'; as when there is but one schoolmaster in a town, we usually say, he teaches all the boys in the town; not that every individual boy comes to school, but as many as are taught, are taught by him. I embrace the former, because the evangelist seems to begin with his person, as God; his office, as mediator; and then descends to his incarnation; and it is a sense which puts no force upon the words. And I suppose that every man is added, to beat down the proud conceits of the Jews, who regarded the Gentiles with contempt, as not enjoying the privileges conferred upon themselves; but the ev