God of my Fathers

Let us be thankful to God for a crucified Redeemer. There is nothing in heaven or earth such an amazing wonder as this; nothing can vie with it for excellence. All love and thankfulness is due to God, who hath given us his Son, not only to live, but to die for us a death so shameful, a death so accursed, a death so sharp, that we might be repossessed of the happiness we had lost. All love and thankfulness is due to Christ, who did not only pay a small sum for us as our surety, but bowed his soul to death to raise us to life, was numbered among transgressors, that we might have a room among the blessed. Our crimes merited our sufferings, but his own confession made him a sufferer for us; for us he sweat those drops of blood, for us he trode the vine-press alone, for us he assuaged the rigour of divine justice, for us, who were not only miserable, but offending creatures, and overwhelmed with more sins to be hated than with misery to be pitied. He was crucified for us by his love, who deserved to die by his power, and laid the highest obligation upon us, who had laid the highest disobligements upon him. His death is the ground of all our good; whatever we have is a fruit that grew upon the cross. Had he not suffered, we had been rejected for ever from the throne of God; salvation had never appeared but by those groans and agonies. By this alone was God pleased, and our souls for ever pleasured; without it, he had been for ever displeased with us, we had been odious and abominable in his sight, and could never have seen his face. Nothing is such an evidence of his love as his cross; the miracles he wrought, and the cures he performed in the time of his life, were nothing to the kindness of his death, wherein he was willing to be accounted worse than a murderer in his punishment, that he might thereby effect our deliverance. If he had given us the riches of this world and a greater; had he given us the honour of angels, and made us barons of heaven, without exposing himself to the cross to accomplish it, it had been a testimony of his affection, but destitute of so endearing an emphasis. The manner of procuring is more than a bare kindness in bestowing it; he testified his resolution, not only to give us glory, but to give it us whatsoever it should cost him, and would stick at nothing rather than we should want it. The angels in heaven in their glittering lustre, are the monuments of his liberality, but not of so supreme an affection as is engraven on the body of his cross