A Goodly Heritage

So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." – Luke 11:9 Wherever there is true prayer, there is importunity. Wherever the Lord brings trials upon the soul, he pours out upon it the spirit of grace and supplications. He thus encourages and enables the soul to be importunate with him. The blessings and benefits of perseverance and importunity in prayer the Lord has brought prominently before us in two parables--one, of the man in bed with his children, who would not get up and relieve his friend, but yet was overcome by his importunity. And the other, of the woman, who had a legal issue, and went before the judge, who feared not God, neither regarded man; yet by her continual going to him, overcame him at last by her importunity (Luke 11:5-8; 18:1-7). Thus importunity and perseverance form the very character of true prayer. If the child of God has a burden--if he is laboring under a strong temptation--if his s...

"Therefore, as sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin; and so death passed to all men, because all sinned."  Romans 5:12 What an amount of sorrow and misery beyond all calculation, and indeed beyond all conception, there is in this wretched world—this valley of tears, in which our present earthly lot is cast! Sin is the source of all the evil which, is now, or ever has been in the world, for  that one sin  introduced every other sin with it. Sin brought in its train every iniquity that has ever been—conceived by the imagination—uttered by the lips—or perpetrated by the hands of man. In a moment man's whole nature underwent a change—stricken down by sin as by palsy or leprosy. His  understanding  became darkened—his  judgment  corrupted—his  conscience  deadened—his  affections  alienated—and all that warm current of purity and innocency which once flowed in a clear stream towards God, became thickened...

"I will cry unto God most High; unto God who performs all things for me."  Psalm 57:2 In the word "most High," there is something to my mind very expressive. It is to "God most High" that prayers go up from broken hearts, in all parts of the world where the Lord has a quickened people. "Unto God most High" every eye is pointed, every heart is fixed, and every breath of living prayer flows. Jesus sits in glory as "God most High," hearing the sighs and cries of his broken-hearted family, where they dwell in the utmost corners of the earth; and he is not only sitting on high to hear their cries, but also to bestow upon them the blessings which he sees suitable to their case and state. Now when shall we thus come "unto God most High?" When we are pleased and satisfied in SELF? when the world smiles? when all things are easy without and within? when we are in circumstances for which our own wisdom, strength, and righteousnes...

"By grace you are saved."  Ephesians 2:5 Oh! the volumes of blessed truth that are couched in these few words; thrown in out of the Apostle's full heart as if to give a moment's vent to his love of salvation by grace! Mercy, love, and grace are all in the bosom of God toward his saints; and yet they differ from each other. But how? Mercy  regards the criminal;  love  regards the object;  grace , perhaps, is a blending of the two--the union of mercy and love. God loves the holy unfallen angels;  there  is an object of love in which there is no mixture of mercy; for having never sinned, mercy they do not need. Again, God showed no mercy to the fallen angels; there we have justice and wrath, without mercy; but in the case of the saints of God, the election of grace, we have not only mercy and love, but we have the joint attribute, that uniting mercy and love in one stream flows onward to the Church, as the river of the water of life; the pure crystal...

"Hear now, O Joshua the high priest, you, and your fellows that sit before you--for they are men wondered at."  Zechariah 3:8 A saved sinner is a spectacle for angels to contemplate. As the Apostle says, "We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels and to men." The ancients used to say that "a good man struggling with difficulties was a sight for the gods to look at." We may say, with all Christian truth, that the mysteries of redemption are "things the angels desire to look into;" and among the mysteries of redemption, what greater than a redeemed sinner? That a man who deserves, by sin original and sin actual, nothing but the eternal wrath of God, should be lifted out of perdition justly merited into salvation to which he can have no claim, must indeed ever be a holy wonder. And that you or I should ever have been fixed on in the electing love of God, ever have been given to Jesus to redeem, ever quickened by the Spirit to feel o...

There is a 'time to dance' , not with carnal revelry , not with those amusements that the devil has invented in order to drown souls in eternal perdition ; but to dance as David danced before the ark . Not as the daughter of Herodias danced , but as Miriam on the shore of the Red Sea . Not the dancing of the children of Israel round the golden calf , but of " the virgin of Israel who go fotrth in the dances of them that make merry ." [Jer. 31. 4.]The dancing of which the Psalmist speaks ,"Thou hast turned my mourning into dancing ";that is , to dance with inward joy , to leap in one's soul at the presence of the Lord , as the infant John leaped in his mother's womb , to dance before the Lord with solemnity of spirit , and yet feeling such powerful emotions within , as though the heart would dance in ones bosom .    Have you never felt , when the Lord dropped a sweet word of consolation into your conscience , what emotions filled your bosom beyond ut...