A Goodly Heritage

Death swallowed up in victory D. Moore, M. A. I.  THE TEXT SETS CHRIST BEFORE US IN THE ATTITUDE OF A CONQUEROR OVER DEATH. "He shall swallow up death in victory," it is said, and again in Hosea, "O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction"; whilst still more strikingly in Timothy, we read, "But is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel." But what is the kind of death of which the advent of Christ was to be the swallowing up? Not spiritual death, for how many are lying under its power now — many who have seen the day of Christ — but who yet have neither rejoiced in its light, nor yielded to its power! Neither does it ever attain to His covenant undertakings to swallow up death eternal. This too has its permitted victims, as well as the death spiritual, the one being, in fact, both the sequence and the penalty of ...

"My God R. Macculloch. Thou art my God, who hast invited me to sacred intercourse with Thee: who hast inclined me to surrender myself and all my concerns into Thy hands, and to choose Thee for my God. Thou art my Father, who hast nourished and brought me up among Thy children. Thou art my Friend, who hast loaded me with a rich profusion of favours. Thou art the Portion that I have chosen, in the possession of which I shall enjoy the most permanent felicity. Thou art my God, and therefore my happiness shall be complete. I humbly claim from Thy all-sufficiency the supply of all my wants; from Thy wisdom, direction and conduct; from Thy power, assistance and protection; from Thy love, refreshment and consolation; from Thy mercy, forgiveness and blessing; from Thy faithfulness, stability and support; and from Thy patience, forbearance and long suffering. I cheerfully resign myself and all my interests to Thy direction and disposal; and, with dutiful affection, I consecrate all my...

As a fruit-tree, to be worth anything, brings forth fruit, so faith, to be real, brings forth works: good acts, holy deeds, right conduct, pious living. Faith without works is as dead as a skeleton; works without faith, as lifeless as a belted tree. What God hath joined, let no one put asunder. I fear, however, that sometimes our idea of what good works are, is erroneous. We are prone to regard only something religious, or something very great or conspicuous, as a good work. If some of us could only build a church, or endow a college or a theological seminary or a great hospital, or head a popular subscription list, we might think that we were doing a good work. And so we should be; if an object is good and the motive pure, and the love of man and of Christ pervade it, the act is a good work. But it does not require the condition of size to cause a deed to be holy. Dimension is not an essential property of things spiritual. Let us take the family. We have a way of speaking of our ...

The remedy for the world's wickedness Hugh M'Neils, M. A. Consider the estimate here made of man's character and its cause. The language of the text is not that of David only, but of Christ, concerning the world around us. Man's transgression possessed a language which spoke to his heart, and what it said was this, "There is no fear of God before their eyes." Christ knew what the fear of God was, for "He was heard in that he feared"; not, indeed, with the selfish, slavish fear of punishment, which is incompatible with love, and impotent to secure obedience; but that holy, filial fear which is inseparable from love, and which is a comprehensive term for all that constitutes real religion in man. We know the power of this in man's character, its practical power in giving man victory over the world, and therefore when he saw the transgressions of men he knew that the cause was — "There is no fear of God." Then he goes to the root of t...

Spiritual times and seasons J. C. Philpot. The work of grace upon the soul may be divided into two distinct operations of the Spirit of God upon the heart; the one is to break down the creature into nothingness and self-abasement before God; the other is to exalt the crucified Jesus as "God over all, blessed for ever" upon the wreck and ruin of the creature. And these two lessons the blessed Spirit writes with power upon every quickened vessel of mercy. 1.  There is, then, "a time to kill" — that is, there is an appointed season in God's eternal counsels when the sentence of death is to be known and felt in the consciences of all His elect. That time cannot be hurried, or delayed. The hands of that clock, of which the will of God is the spring, and His decrees the pendulum, are beyond the reach of human fingers to move on or put back. The killing precedes the healing, and the breaking down goes before the building up; the elect weep before they laugh, and...

The fall of the leaf H. Macmillan, D. D. At no period of the year are the sunsets so varied and beautiful as in autumn. The many-coloured woods of the year's eventide correspond to the many-coloured clouds of the sunset sky; and as the heavens burst into their brightest hues, and exhibit their loveliest transfigurations when the daylight is fading into the gloom of night, so the year unfolds its richest tints and its fairest charms when it is about to sink into the darkness and desolation of winter. The beauty of the autumnal tints is commonly supposed to be confined to the fading foliage of the trees. This is indeed the most obvious feature of the season — that which appeals to every eye, and reads its lesson to every heart. But nature here, as everywhere else, loves to reproduce in her smallest things the peculiarities of her greatest. It was a beautiful myth, created by the glowing imagination of the Greek poets, that the great god Pan, the impersonation of nature, wedded t...

God's anger If you will only remove from that word "anger" the mere human associations which cleave to it, of passion on the one hand, and of a wish to hurl its object on the other, then you cannot, I think, deny to the Divine nature the possession of that passionless and unmalignant wrath without striking a fatal blow at the perfect purity of God. A God that does not hate evil, that does not flame out against it, using all the energies of His being to destroy it, is a God to whose character there cleaves the fatal suspicion of indifference to good, of moral apathy. If I have not a God to trust in that hates evil because He loveth righteousness, then "the pillared firmament itself were rottenness, and earth's base built on stubble"; nor were there any hope that this damnable thing that is killing and sucking the life-blood out of our spirits should ever be destroyed and cast aside. It is short-sighted wisdom, and it is cruel kindness, to tamper with the...