Morning, September 25
“Just, and the justifier of him which believeth.”
Romans 3:26
Charles Spurgeon
Being
justified by faith, we have peace with God. Conscience accuses no
longer. Judgment now decides for the sinner instead of against him.
Memory looks back upon past sins, with deep sorrow for the sin, but yet
with no dread of any penalty to come; for Christ has paid the debt of
his people to the last jot and tittle, and received the divine receipt;
and unless God can be so unjust as to demand double payment for one
debt, no soul for whom Jesus died as a substitute can ever be cast into
hell. It seems to be one of the very principles of our enlightened
nature to believe that God is just; we feel that it must be so, and this
gives us our terror at first; but is it not marvellous that this very
same belief that God is just, becomes afterwards the pillar of our
confidence and peace! If God be just, I, a sinner, alone and without a
substitute, must be punished; but Jesus stands in my stead and is
punished for me; and now, if God be just, I, a sinner, standing in
Christ, can never be punished. God must change his nature before one
soul, for whom Jesus was a substitute, can ever by any possibility
suffer the lash of the law. Therefore, Jesus having taken the place of
the believer—having rendered a full equivalent to divine wrath for all
that his people ought to have suffered as the result of sin, the
believer can shout with glorious triumph, “Who shall lay anything to the
charge of God’s elect?” Not God, for he hath justified; not Christ, for
he hath died, “yea rather hath risen again.” My hope lives not because I
am not a sinner, but because I am a sinner for whom Christ died; my
trust is not that I am holy, but that being unholy, he is my
righteousness. My faith rests not upon what I am, or shall be, or feel,
or know, but in what Christ is, in what he has done, and in what he is
now doing for me. On the lion of justice the fair maid of hope rides
like a queen.
My Utmost for His Highest
September 25th
The “go” of relationship
And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Matthew 5:41
Oswald Chambers
The
summing up of Our Lord’s teaching is that the relationship which He
demands is an impossible one unless He has done a supernatural work in
us. Jesus Christ demands that there be not the slightest trace of
resentment even suppressed in the head of a disciple when he meets with
tyranny and injustice. No enthusiasm will ever stand the strain that
Jesus Christ will put upon His worker, only one thing will, and that is a
personal relationship to Himself which has gone through the mill of His
spring-cleaning until there is only one purpose left—‘I am here for God
to send me where He will.’ Every other thing may get fogged, but this
relationship to Jesus Christ must never be.
The
Sermon on the Mount is not an ideal, it is a statement of what will
happen in me when Jesus Christ has altered my disposition and put in a
disposition like His own. Jesus Christ is the only One Who can fulfil
the Sermon on the Mount.
If
we are to be disciples of Jesus, we must be made disciples
supernaturally; as long as we have the dead-set purpose of being
disciples we may be sure we are not. “I have chosen you.” That is
the way the grace of God begins. It is a constraint we cannot get away
from; we can disobey it, but we cannot generate it. The drawing is done
by the supernatural grace of God, and we never can trace where His work
begins. Our Lord’s making of a disciple is supernatural. He does not
build on any natural capacity at all. God does not ask us to do the
things that are easy to us naturally; He only asks us to do the things
we are perfectly fitted to do by His grace, and the cross will come
along that line always.
Evening, September 25
“Who of God is made unto us wisdom.”
1 Corinthians 1:30
Charles Spurgeon
Man’s
intellect seeks after rest, and by nature seeks it apart from the Lord
Jesus Christ. Men of education are apt, even when converted, to look
upon the simplicities of the cross of Christ with an eye too little
reverent and loving. They are snared in the old net in which the
Grecians were taken, and have a hankering to mix philosophy with
revelation. The temptation with a man of refined thought and high
education is to depart from the simple truth of Christ crucified, and to
invent, as the term is, a more intellectual doctrine. This led
the early Christian churches into Gnosticism, and bewitched them with
all sorts of heresies. This is the root of Neology, and the other fine
things which in days gone by were so fashionable in Germany, and are now
so ensnaring to certain classes of divines. Whoever you are, good
reader, and whatever your education may be, if you be the Lord’s, be
assured you will find no rest in philosophizing divinity. You may
receive this dogma of one great thinker, or that dream of another
profound reasoner, but what the chaff is to the wheat, that will these
be to the pure word of God. All that reason, when best guided, can find
out is but the A B C of truth, and even that lacks certainty, while in
Christ Jesus there is treasured up all the fulness of wisdom and
knowledge. All attempts on the part of Christians to be content with
systems such as Unitarian and Broad-church thinkers would approve of,
must fail; true heirs of heaven must come back to the grandly simple
reality which makes the ploughboy’s eye flash with joy, and gladens the
pious pauper’s heart—“Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.”
Jesus satisfies the most elevated intellect when he is believingly
received, but apart from him the mind of the regenerate discovers no
rest. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” “A good
understanding have all they that do his commandments.”
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