"Salvation is of the LORD." -Jonah 2:9

"But if he thus say, I have no delight in thee; behold, here am I; let him do to me as it seemeth good unto him." -II Samuel 15:26 [KJV] Here is majesty in distress: a kingdom in confusion: and the king’s royal heart struck with a panic. Every circumstance concurs to heighten poor David’s sorrow. His own son had stolen away the heart of his subjects—raised a most unnatural rebellion against his royal father, and caused him to flee from his city. Very excellently, says one, “Let a child of God be but two or three years without an affliction, and he is almost good for nothing. He cannot pray, nor meditate, nor discourse at that rate he was wont to do. But when a new affliction comes, he finds his tongue: he comes to his knees with fervency, and lives at another rate.”  Perhaps David was never more weaned from self-confidence, nor did his faith ever run higher, nor was his soul bowed lower, nor did he ever breathe with more humble submission to divine sovereignty, t...

"...for the good will of Him that dwelt in the bush." -Deuteronomy 33:16 [KJV] And who is this, my soul; who indeed can it be but JESUS? Surely He is the glorious person. It was good will, in the highest possible instance of it, that prompted His infinite mind, from everlasting, to love His people, to engage for them in suretyship engagements, and to stand up and come forth, at the call of God the Father, as the Head of His body the church. It was a continuation of the same good will which prompted Him, in the fulness of time, to assume our nature for the purposes of fulfilling those engagements. Then it was, indeed, He dwelt in the bush; for what is our nature, at the best, but a poor dry bramble bush, fit for burning? But yet, by Christ in it, so sustained, and so preserved, that though the bush burns with fire, even the fiery lusts of our corruptions, and the fiery darts of the wicked, and all the fiery opposition of the world, it shall not be consumed. Prec...

"The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God." -Galatians 2:20 [KJV] There is no way except by being spiritually baptized into Christ's death and life, that we can ever get a victory over our besetting sins. If, on the one hand, we have a view of a suffering Christ, and thus become baptized into His sufferings and death, the feeling, while it lasts, will subdue the power of sin. Or, on the other hand, if we get a believing view of a risen Christ, and receive supplies of grace out of His fulness, that will lift us above its dominion. If sin be powerfully working in us, we want one of these two things to subdue it; either we must have something come down to us to give us a victory over our sin in our strugglings against it, or we must have something to lift us up out of sin into a purer and better element. When there is a view of the sufferings and sorrows, agonies and death of the Son of God, power comes down to the soul in its...