Text 966, 84 rader
Skriven 2006-03-19 08:20:20 av Bob Hoffman (8:8/2)
Ärende: Becoming Fit for Glory
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Becoming Fit for Glory
Faith's Checkbook

March March 19

Becoming Fit for Glory "The LORD will give grace and glory" (Psalm
84:11). Grace is what we need just now, and it is to be had freely. What can be
freer than a gift? Today we shall receive sustaining, strengthening,
sanctifying, satisfying grace. He has given daily grace until now, and as for
the future, that grace is still sufficient. If we have but little grace the
fault most lie in ourselves; for the LORD is not straitened, neither is He slow
to bestow it in abundance. We may ask for as much as we will and never fear a
refusal. He giveth liberally and upbraideth not. The LORD may not give gold,
but He will give grace: He may not give gain, but He will give grace. He will
certainly send us trial, but He will give grace in proportion thereto. We may
be called to labor and to suffer, but with the call there will come all the
grace required. What an "end" is that in the text -- "and
glory!" We do not need glory yet, and we are not yet fit for it; but we
shall have it in due order. After we have eaten the bread of grace, we shall
drink the wine of glory. We must go through the holy, which is grace, to the
holiest of all, which is glory. These words and glory are enough to make a man
dance for joy. A little while -- a little while, and then glory forever!
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Stuffed Christians? Spurgeon's, "Life's Ever Springing Well" "We
are all Christians." "Why, we belong to a Christian nation; are we
not born Christians?"
"Surely we must be all right; we have always attended our
parish church, is not that enough?" "Our parents were always godly;
we were born into the church, were we not? Did they not take us up in their
arms when we were little, and make us members of Christ? What more do we
lack?" This is the common talk. There is no Christian practice, there is
no Christian habit, but what has been, or will be before long, imitated by
people who have no vital godliness whatever. A man may appear much like a
Christian, and yet possess no vital godliness! Walk through the British Museum,
and you will see all the orders of animals standing in their various places,
and exhibiting themselves with the utmost possible propriety. The rhinoceros
demurely retains the position in which he was set at first; the eagle soars not
through the window; the wolf howls not at night; every creature, whether bird,
beast, or fish, remains in the particular glass case allotted to it. But you
all know well enough that these are not the living creatures, but only the
outward forms of them. Yet in what do they differ? Certainly in nothing which
you could readily see, for the well stuffed animal is precisely like what the
living animal would have been; and that eye of glass even appears to have more
of brightness in it than the natural eye of the creature itself. Yet you know
well enough that there is a secret inward something lacking, which, when it has
once departed, you cannot restore. So in the churches of Christ, many
professors are not living believers, but stuffed believers, Stuffed Christians!
There is all the external of religion, everything that you could desire, and
they behave with a great deal of propriety, too. They all keep their places,
and there is no outward difference between them and the living, except upon
that vital point; they lack spiritual life. This is the essential distinction,
spiritual life is absent. It is almost painful to watch little children when
some little pet of theirs has died, how they can hardly realize the difference
between death and life! Your little boy's bird moped for awhile upon its perch,
and at last dropped down in the cage; and do not you remember how the little
boy tried to set it up, and gave it seed, and filled its glass with water, and
was quite surprised to think that birdie would not open his little eye upon his
friend as it did before, and would not take its seed, nor drink its water! Ah,
you finally had to tell the poor boy that a mysterious something had gone from
his little birdie, and would not come back again. There is just such a
spiritual difference between the mere professor, and the genuine Christian.
There is an invisible, but most real, indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the
absence or the presence of which makes all the difference between the lost
sinner and the saint.
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