Saturday, July 14, 2007

Dying love touches the heart!

Here is a proud sinner, boasting of his own righteousness; you cannot get his self-glorying out of him: but by-and-by he learns that the Son of God gave his life to redeem him, poured out his heart upon Calvary’s cross, the just for the unjust, to bring him to God; and now he is of another mind. No man could ever think that he deserved that the Son of God should die for him! If he
does think so, he must be out of his mind. Dying love touches the heart, and the man cries, “Lord, I am not worthy of a drop of thy precious blood; I am not worthy of a sigh from thy sacred heart; I am not worthy that thou shouldest have lived on earth for me, much less that thou shouldest have died for me.” A sense of that wondrous condescension which is the highest
commendation of God’s love, that in due time Christ died for the ungodly, brings the man down upon his knees, dissolved by the mercies of God. Now, if there is any man here who has a good hope through grace that by and by he will be with God in heaven, if he will meditate upon the beatific vision, if he will picture to himself the crown upon his head, and the palm branch in his hand, and himself enjoying the everlasting hallelujah,

“Far from a world of grief and sin, With God eternally shut in”;

why, the next thing he will do is to sit down and weep that this can be possible to him. Such a poor, useless, sinful soul as I am, can I be glorified, and has Jesus gone to prepare a place for me? Does he give me his own assurance that he will come again, and receive me to himself? Am I a joint heir with Christ, and a favored child of God? This makes us lose ourselves in adoring gratitude. Oh, sirs, we can never open our mouth again in the way of boasting; our pride is drowned in this sea of mercy. If we had a little Savior, and a little heaven, and little mercy we might still hang out our flags; but with a great Savior, and great mercy, and a great heaven we can only go in like David, and sit before the Lord, and say, “Whence is this to me?...”

This exceeding kindness of the Lord all tends to promote humility, and at the same time to help us in prayer; for if the Lord be so greatly good, we may adopt the language of the Phoenecian woman when the Master said to her, “It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.” She answered, “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” So we will go and ask our Lord to give us crumbs of mercy, and they will be enough for us poor dogs. God’s crumbs are bigger than man’s loaves, and if he gives us what to him may be a crumb, it shall be a meal to us. Oh, he is a great Giver! He is a glorious Giver! We are not equal to his least gift! We cannot estimate his least mercy, nor describe it folly, nor praise him for it sufficiently. His shallows are too deep for us; his mole-hill mercies overtop us; what shall we say of his mountain mercies?

From a sermon entitled "Humility the Friend of God," delivered June 22, 1884.

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