Aug 26
31
The Lord reigns!
(John Newton)
“The Lord reigneth! He is clothed with majesty! The Lord is clothed with strength, wherewith He has girded Himself!” Psalm 93:1
“The Lord reigneth! Let the people tremble!” Psalm 99:1
The Lord reigns! He who once bore our sins and carried our sorrows-is seated upon a throne of glory and exercises all power in heaven and on earth! Thrones, principalities and powers bow before Him. Every being and event are under His rule. His providence pervades and manages the whole, and is as minutely attentive to every part-as if there were only that single object in His view.
From the tallest archangel, to the meanest ant or fly-all depend on Him for their being, their preservation and their powers! He directs the sparrows where to build their nests, and to find their food. He overrules the rise and fall of nations; and bends, with an invincible energy and unerring wisdom-all events! So that, while many intend otherwise-in the outcome their designs all concur and coincide in the accomplishment of His holy will. He restrains with a mighty hand the still more formidable efforts of the powers of darkness; and Satan with all his hosts cannot exert their malice a hair’s breadth beyond the limits of His permission. Satan may rage-but he is a chained enemy!
This is He, who is the Redeemer and Husband of His believing people.
How happy are those whom it is His good pleasure to bless!
How safe are those whom He has engaged to protect!
How honoured and privileged are those whom He enables and warrants to claim Him as their friend and their portion!
Having redeemed them by His own blood, He sets a high value upon them! He esteems them His treasure, His jewels! He guards them as the pupil of His eye. They shall not lack, and they need not fear!
His eye is upon them in every situation,
His ear is open to their prayers, and
His everlasting arms are under them for their sure support.
On earth, He guides their steps, controls their enemies, and directs all His dispensations for their good! While, in Heaven, He is pleading their cause, preparing a place for them, and communicating down to them reviving foretastes of the glory that shall shortly be theirs!
“The Lord shall reign forever, even thy God, O Zion, unto all generations. Praise ye the Lord!” Psalm 146:10
GOD IS FAITHFUL
Jeremiah wrote, “Great is THY faithfulness.” We preach and exhort our hearers to be faithful stewards of the grace of God, faithful givers to help others, faithful in worship, prayer, and holiness. And we will be faithful by His grace and because He has given us a new heart which desires to walk with Him. But even when we fail, fall, and make a mess of things, HE IS FAITHFUL; and our hope of life and glory is not in OUR faithfulness but in HIS faithfulness. God is faithful to His Son, to His covenant, to His Word. And this was David’s comfort when he lay dying –not in his works, service, nor even his faith, but in God’s faithfulness to His covenant
(2 Samuel 23:5) .
– Henry Mahan
When Is a Man Truly Saved?
“…when it pleased God…”
(Galatians 1:15-16)
Someone asked, “When is a man truly saved?” Well, my friend, to be saved is more than to believe in one God, the demons believe that! It is more than just trembling under the preaching of the Word, Felix did that! It is not only to hold an office in the church, Judas did that! It is not submitting to the ordinance of baptism, Simon Magus did that! It is not only to weep over sin, Esau did that! It is not just respecting the preacher, Herod did that! It is not to keep company with outstanding believers, Demas did that. To be saved is to know God and Jesus Christ Whom He hath sent. It is to be a new creature in Christ Jesus, regenerated and converted by the power of God. It is to believe on Christ with the heart and confess Christ with the mouth. It is a miracle and deliverance accomplished through the preaching of the gospel and the work of God’s Spirit. ~Henry Mahan
Fear Him!
(John MacDuff)
“Who would not fear Thee, O King of nations!” Jeremiah 10:7
How reasonable it is that this glorious Being whose greatness is unsearchable, should be regarded with feelings of the profoundest reverence. It is indeed, His due – and as such He claims it from all His creatures.
“Concerning the sinfulness of the wicked: There is no fear of God before his eyes!” Psalm 36:1. To have no fear of God before our eyes, is at once the greatest injustice, and the most unutterable folly! All who have the impudence to lift up their puny arms in rebellion against Him-are engaged in a conflict, which, if persisted in, is sure to terminate in their utter destruction!
Reader, think of His incomprehensible greatness and majesty. Think of Him as the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity. . .
the heavens His throne,
the earth His footstool,
the light His garment,
the clouds His chariot,
the thunder His voice!
Viewing Him thus – it will be impossible for you to treat Him with indifference, far less with scornful disdain. If you are only brought in some measure to realise the fact of God’s greatness and majesty-you cannot fail to acknowledge that He is greatly to be feared, and to be held in reverence by all His creatures.
Just so, with all the other attributes of His nature.
Who can think of His power so mighty, so irresistible-a power that is able to crush us into atoms with infinitely greater ease than we can tread the crawling worm beneath our feet-and not fear Him?
Who can think of His knowledge, nothing being hidden from His omniscient glance, the darkness of midnight and the splendour of noon, being altogether alike to Him-and not fear Him?
Who can think of the terrors of His avenging justice-and not fear Him? Especially as when He proclaims from His exalted throne, “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand. For I lift up my hand to heaven, and say, I live for ever. If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance to mine enemies, and will reward them that hate me.” Deuteronomy 32:39-41
Our God is truly a consuming fire! It is most befitting for us, to regard Him with a reverence and godly fear.
It is not those who can deprive us of our present life, whom we should so much dread. Limited and of brief duration, is the power of all mortal foes at best.
“ And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. 5 But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, fear Him!” Luke 12:4-5
“Shew me thy ways, O Lord; teach me thy paths. Lead me in thy truth, and teach me: for thou art the God of my salvation; on thee do I wait all the day.” Psalm 25:4,5
There is one feature in true religion perhaps not much insisted upon, but not the less real and genuine; which is this, that all true religion brings the soul into vital and immediate contact with God. False religion on the other hand only sets the soul at a distance from him. We see this peculiar feature of vital godliness very much developed in the Psalms, and in other parts of Holy Scripture, where the saints of God breathe forth their desires after the Lord. The desire of their souls to get near to God, to have special dealings with the Majesty on high, to receive mercy from his gracious hands, to be blessed with manifestations of his favour, watered with the dew of his grace, and nourished as with marrow and fatness by the smiles of his countenance, shines forth very conspicuously in the Word of truth. How all these breathings after God, which you see so clearly traced out in the Psalms and other devotional parts of God’s Word, establish the truth of what I was just saying, that true religion, vital godliness, bring the soul into close and personal contact with God! In opposition to this, there is no mark stamped upon false religion more evidently and plainly than this, that it sets up a false god, an idol god; not perhaps a wood or stone representation, but a god adapted to the carnal mind, and suitable to the natural heart, in a word, such a god as we see in all ages blind, fallen man has worshiped. Thus were you to analyse and examine all false religion, whatever its name or nature, you would find this feature of death stamped upon it, that it sets up a false god for the true God, a false faith for true faith, and a false righteousness for true righteousness; and thus worships an imaginary, an idol god, instead of the true and living God, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now we may be well assured, that nothing short of the work and teaching of God in the heart can ever pull down this false god and set up in its place “the only true God, and Jesus Christ” whom he has sent (John 17:3).
J.C.Philpot
“But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory.” 1 Corinthians 2:7
There is much of deep mystery in revelation. God, considered both in Himself and in His operations, is a mystery stretching far beyond the most sublime power of finite reason. “Can you by searching find out God? can you find out the Almighty unto perfection?” and of His operations may we not exclaim with the inspired penman, “Lo! these are parts of His ways; but how little a portion is heard of Him!” Christ, too, is the great “mystery of godliness.” Whether His complex person is regarded—the union of the Divine and human natures in one—or whether we look at His work—His obedience and death constituting a full atonement to Divine justice in behalf of the sins of His people—it must be acknowledged a depth too profound for human thought adequately to fathom. What can poor finite reason accomplish here? What beams can its feeble, flickering light cast upon this world of mystery? And if ever it stands forth invested in its own native impotence, it is when it sits in judgment upon the doctrines and facts of revelation, discarding or retaining such only as are intelligible to its dwarfish capacity. “Which things,” says the apostle, “the angels desire to look into.” Mark his expressions! He represented not these celestial beings of purity and intellect as scaling the heights and diving into the depths of redemption’s mystery, but “which things the angels desire”—scarcely dare—but “desire to look into.” And yet for a fallen and unrenewed mind to sit in judgment upon God’s truth can only be exceeded in its temerity by the depravity which prompts it.
If the truth of God, in its doctrines and facts, is a mystery incomprehensible to unrenewed reason, what shall we say of the truth as experienced in the heart? If reason cannot understand the vast framework of truth, how can it comprehend the secret power by which it operates? The very fact, that to be understood it must be experienced, accounts for the difficulty. The transforming operation of the Holy Spirit upon the mind—giving it a new bias, new inclinations, turning its darkness into light, and kindling its enmity into love; the life of God in the soul, creating the man anew in Christ Jesus—that life which is hidden, ever productive of a holy life that is seen—its hopes and its fears, its defeats and its triumphs—the causes which operate to deaden it, and the spiritual nourishment by which it is supported—all, all is incomprehensible to human reason. Truly “the world knows us not.”
The cause of this incapacity of reason, in its natural state, to comprehend spiritual and experimental truth is its corruption and perversion by sin. Sin has impaired our mental faculties—enslaved, clouded, and debased our reason. We open God’s word, and it declares that since the fall the nature of man has been corrupt, and his reason blind; his understanding darkened, and his heart, the seat of his affections, polluted: “having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.” The natural man, while in that state, so far from being able to explore the wide domain of spiritual truth, hates and flees from it when proposed to his consideration, “receiving not the things of the Spirit of God, they being foolishness unto him.” This being the state of man, God’s word consequently declares it necessary that, before spiritual truth can be understood, he should be “transformed by the renewing of his mind;” that he should be restored to that sound mind, and enlightened understanding, and spiritual discernment, with which his nature was endowed when it came originally from the hand of God; in a word, that he should be born again, created anew in Christ Jesus; that old things should pass away, and that all things should become new. Then, and then only, will he be able to understand the “truth of God in a mystery.”
Octavius Winslow