The doctrine of Grace makes a man look down upon himself. 'Ah,' saith he, 'I am nothing, there is nothing in me to merit esteem. I have no goodness of my own. If saved, I cannot praise myself; I cannot in any way ascribe to myself honour; God has done it, God has done it.' Nothing makes the man so humble; but nothing makes him so glad; nothing lays him so low at the mercy seat, but nothing makes him so brave to look his fellow man in the face. It is a grand truth: would God ye all knew its mighty power!
I am obliged to refer to myself, because we must each one tell his own experience. Upon the matter of baptism, reading the Scriptures, I found that believers were baptized. I had never heard anybody preach about believer's baptism. When I read about it in the New Testament, I did not know another person in the world who thought as I did, and I came to the conclusion that it did not matter to me whether anybody agreed with me or not, my duty was plain. I was bound to obey it, for I believed it to be God's will that believers should be baptized on profession of their faith, and I fancied that I should be the first person in modern days to make such a confession. That idea made no difference to me, nor does it now. If there is anything that is taught in the Scriptures, which has not occurred to anybody else before, I should not ask whether any other person has or has not seen it. If God commands it, it is not for us to ask whether it is in the fashion, or according to the order of other people, but to obey it straightway without a question.
Why did God love Jacob and hate Esau? I can tell you why God loved Jacob; it is sovereign grace! There was nothing in Jacob that could make God love him; there was everything about him that might have made God hate him as much as He did Esau, and a great deal more. But it was because God is infinitely gracious that He loved Jacob and because He is sovereign in His dispensation of His grace that He chose Jacob as an object of that love. Jacob was loved by God simply on the footing of free grace. Why did God hate Esau? Why does God hate any man? I defy anyone to give any answer but this... because that man deserves to be hated. No reply but that can be true. If God deals severely with any person, it is because that person deserves all that he gets. Esau did not lose his birthright; he sold it. He sold it for a "mess of pottage." If any of you want to know what I preach, it is this: "I preach salvation all of grace and damnation all of sin. I give God the glory for every soul that is saved; and when I come to preach damnation, I say that damnation is of man.
Whatever subject I preach, I do not stop until I reach the Savior, the Lord Jesus, for in Him are all things.
The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains of his own.
As sure as God puts His children in the furnace of affliction, He will be with them in it.
If any man thinks ill of you, do not be angry with him, for you are worse than he thinks you to be. If he charges you falsely at some point, yet be satisfied, for if he knew you better he might change the accusation, and you would be no gainer for the correction. If you have your moral portrait painted and it is ugly, be satisfied, for it only needs a few blacker touches, and it would be still nearer the truth.
I have now concentrated all my prayers into one, and that one prayer is this, that I may die to self, and live wholly to him.
If it were Christ's intention to save all men, how deplorably has he been disappointed.
Some insist that Christ died for everybody. Why, then, are not all men saved? Because all men will not believe? That is to say that believing is necessary in order to make the blood of Christ efficacious for redemption. We hold that to be a great lie.
"Remember that our bible is a blood-stained book. The blood of martyrs is on the Bible, the blood of translators and confessors. The doctrines which we preach to you are doctrines that have been baptized in blood--swords have been drawn to slay the confessors of them. And there is not a truth which has not been sealed by them at the stake or the block, where they have been slain by hundreds."
You have heard a great many Arminian sermons, I dare say; but you never heard an Arminian prayer--for the saints in prayer appear as one in word and deed and mind. An Arminian on his knees would pray desperately like a Calvinist. He cannot pray about free will: there is no room for it. Fancy him praying, 'Lord, I thank thee I am not like those poor presumptuous Calvinists. Lord, I was born with a glorious free-will; I was born with power by which I can turn to thee of myself; I have improved my grace. If everybody had done the same with their grace that I have, they might all have been saved. Lord, I know that thou dost not make us willing if we are not willing ourselves.
When my spirit gets depressed, nothing will sustain it but the good old-fashioned Calvinistic doctrine.
There may be Arminians on earth, but they are not after they get there.
I believe the man who is not willing to submit to the electing love and sovereign grace of God has great reason to question whether he is a Christian at all, for the spirit that kicks against that is the spirit of the unhumbled, unrenewed heart.
Dear friends, you have to do nothing, and to be nothing, and to feel nothing by way of fitness for salvation, but just to come and accept, free, gratis, for nothing, the abundant mercy of God in Christ Jesus. He is the empty sinner's fulness, the dead sinner's life, the perishing sinner's salvation. I do not know any truth that can encourage poor sinful souls to pray, to repent, and to believe in Jesus except the truth that salvation is all of grace from first to last. As the apostle was saved by grace, so must it be with all the rest of us, and so may it be with you!
I now think I am bound never to preach a sermon without preaching to sinners. I do think that a minister, who can preach a sermon without addressing sinners, does not know how to preach.
Oh, Brethren, it is sickening work to think of your cushioned seats, your chants, your anthems, your choirs, your organs, your gowns, and your bands, and I know not what besides, all made to be instruments of religious luxury, if not of pious dissipation, while ye need far more to be stirred up and incited to holy ardor for the propagation of the truth as it is in Jesus.
I believe in the doctrine of election, because I am quite sure that if God had not chosen me I would never would have chosen him; and I am sure he chose me before I was born, or else he never would have chose me afterward.
Long ago I ceased to count heads. Truth is usually in the minority in this evil world.
I have my own private opinion that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and Him crucified, unless we preach what is nowadays called Calvinism. It is a nickname to call it Calvinism; Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else. I do not believe we can preach the gospel unless we preach the sovereignty of God in His dispensation of grace; nor unless we exalt the electing, unchangeable, eternal, immutable, conquering love of Jehovah; nor do I think we can preach the gospel unless we base it upon the special and particular redemption of His elect and chosen people which Christ wrought through the Cross; nor can I comprehend a gospel which lets saints fall away after they are called.
Born, as all of us are by nature, an Arminian, I still believed the old things I had heard continually from the pulpit, and did not see the grace of God. When I was comming to Christ, I thought I was doing it all myself, and though I sought the Lord earnestly, I had no idea the Lord was seeking me. I can recall the very day and hour when first I received those truths in my own soul -- when they were, as John Bunyan says, burnt into my heart as with a hot iron. One week night, when I was sitting in the house of God, I was not thinking much about the preacher's sermon, for I did not believe it. The thought struck me, "How did you come to be a Christian?" I sought the Lord. "But how did you come to seek the Lord?" The truth flashed across my mind in a moment -- I should not have sought Him unless there had come some previous influence in my mind to make me seek Him. I prayed, thought I, but then I asked myself, How came I to pray? I was induced to pray by reading the Scriptures. How come I came to read the Scriptures? I did read them, but what led me to do so? Then, in a moment, I saw that God was at the bottom of it all, and that He was the Author of my faith, and so the whole doctrine of grace opened up to me, and from that doctrine I have not departed to this day; and I desire to make this my constant confession, 'I ascribe my change wholly to God.'
There is a limit, for 'The Lord knoweth them that are His,' but in the preaching of the Gospel we are not bound by the decree which is secret, but by our marching orders, 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature; he that believeth and is baptised shall be saved.' He who bade me preach to every creature did not bid me exempt one soul from my message.
There are two great truths which from this platform I have proclaimed for many years. The first is that salvation is free to every man who will have it; the second is that God gives salvation to a people whom He has chosen; and these truths are not in conflict with each other in the least degree.
The quickest way to slay error is to proclaim the truth. The surest mode of extinguishing falsehood is to boldly advocate Scripture principles. Scolding and protesting will not be so effectual in resisting the progress of error as the clear proclamation of the truth in Jesus.
God hath a sun without a spot, a sky without a cloud, a day without a night, a sea without a wave, a world without a tear. Happy are they who, having passed through this world, have entered into rest, and ceased from their own works, as God did from his, bathing their weary souls in seas of heavenly rest."
Feelings, works, prayers, almsgivings, religious observances, are all too feeble to support a sinful soul. 'Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid—Jesus Christ the righteous.' 'Whosoever believeth in him is not condemned.' 'He is able also to save them to the uttermost who come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.' Trust Jesus and he will never fail you.
Nothing binds me to my Lord like a strong belief in his changeless love.
May I beg you carefully to judge every preacher, not by his gifts, not by his elocutionary powers, not by his status in society, not by the respectability of his congregation, not by the prettiness of his church, but this: Does he preach the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation? If he does, your sitting under his ministry may prove to you the means of begetting faith in you. But if he does not, you cannot expect God's blessings.
I would never have been saved if I could have helped it.
Prayer without faith! What sort of prayer is it? It is the prayer of a man who does not believe in God.
Public prayer is no evidence of piety. It is practiced by an abundance of hypocrites. But private prayer is a thing for which the hypocrite has no heart.
Neither when we have chosen our way can we keep company with those who go the other way. There must come with decision for truth a corresponding protest against error.
Avowed atheists are not a tenth as dangerous as those preachers who scatter doubt and stab at faith.
Where union and friendship are not cemented by truth, I say it again, we must have unity, we must pray for unity, we must love one another, we must never divide over incidentals but it is far, far, far better to be divided by truth than united in error.
If what you believe be not true, fling it away; but if it be true, let your faces be like flints and your natures like iron against all the temptations of this wicked, ever-changing age, which flies this way and that, but always away from its God. Oh, when shall it be that those who know the Lord shall stand fast, and having done all, shall still stand.
There should be patience and pity for poverty; but for laziness, give me a long whip."
We live in perilous times: we are passing through a most eventful period; the Christian World is convulsed; there is a mighty upheaval of the old foundations of faith; a great overhauling of old teaching. The Bible is being made to speak to-day in a language which to our fathers would be an unknown tongue.
What havoc false doctrine is making no tongue can tell. Assuredly the New Theology can do no good towards God or man; it has no adaptation for it. If it were preached for a thousand years by all the most earnest men of the School, it would never renew a soul, nor overcome pride in a single human heart.
I will go as far as Martin Luther, where he says, 'If any man ascribes anything of salvation, even the very least thing, to the free will of man, he knows nothing of grace, and he has not learned Jesus Christ rightly.
Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the book widens and deepens with our years.
Ah! the bridge of grace will bear your weight, brother. Thousands of big sinners have gone across that bridge, yea, tens of thousands have gone over it. I can hear their trampings now as they traverse the great arches of the bridge of salvation. They come by their thousands, by their myriads; e'er since the day when Christ first entered into His glory, they come, and yet never a stone has sprung in that mighty bridge. Some have been the chief of sinners, and some have come at the very last of their days, but the arch has never yielded beneath their weight. I will go with them trusting to the same support; it will bear me over as it has borne them.
I do not come into this pulpit hoping that perhaps somebody will of his own free will return to Christ. My hope lies in another quarter. I hope that my Master will lay hold of some of them and say, 'You are mine, and you shall be mine. I claim you for myself.' My hope arises from the freeness of grace, and not from the freedom of the will.
If your religion does not make you holy, it will damn you. It is simply painted pageantry to go to hell in.
Never, for fear of feeble man, restrain your witness.
We shall not adjust our Bible to the age; but before we have done with it, by God's grace, we shall adjust the age to the Bible.
'Sir,' said the Duke of Wellington to an officer of engineers, who urged the impossibility of executing the directions he had received, 'I did not ask your opinion, I gave you my orders, and I expect them to be obeyed.' Such should be the obedience of every follower of Jesus. The words which He has spoken are our law, not our judgements or fancies. Even if death were in the way it is--'Not ours to reason why, ours, but to dare and die;'--and, at our Master's bidding, advance through flood or flame.
God be thanked for the simplicity of the gospel. The longer I live, the more I bless God that we have not received a classical gospel, nor a mathematical gospel, nor a metaphysical gospel; it is not a gospel confined to scholars and men of genius, but a poor man's gospel, a ploughman's gospel; for that is the kind of gospel which we can live upon and die upon. It is to us not the luxury of refinement, but the staple food of life. We want no fine words when the heart is heavy, neither do we need deep problems when we are lying upon the verge of eternity, weak in body and tempted in mind. At such times we magnify the blessed simplicity of the gospel. Jesus in the flesh made manifest becomes our soul's bread. Jesus bleeding on the cross, a substitute for sinners, is our soul's drink. This is the gospel for babes, and strong men want no more.
There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a study of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity.
The fact that conversion and salvation are of God, is a humbling truth. It is because of its humbling character that men do not like it. To be told that God must save me if I am saved, and that I am in His hand, as clay is in the hands of the potter, 'I do not like it' saith one. Well, I thought you would not; whoever dreamed you would?
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