Bless the LORD, O my soul
"A
wise man feareth, and departeth from evil: but the fool rageth, and
is confident." -PROVERBS
14:16 [KJV]
I
believe no living soul can be satisfied with a notional religion:
though a miserable backslider, and driven into the fields to feed
swine, he cannot feed on their husks, but sighs after the bread of
his Father's house. The eyes being enlightened to see the nature of
sin, the justice and holiness of God, and the miserable filthiness of
self, the quickened soul can find no rest in anything short of a
precious discovery of the Lamb of God; and the more that the soul is
exercised with trials, difficulties, temptations, doubts, and
besetments of various kinds, the more does it feel its need of that
blood of sprinkling that speaketh better things than that of Abel.
What
is a Christian worth without inward trials and exercises? How dead
and lifeless are our prayers; how cold and formal when the soul is
not kept alive by inward exercises! Where are the sighs, cries,
groanings, wrestlings, and breathings of a soul that is at ease in
Zion? The world is everything and Christ nothing, when we become
settled on our lees, and are not emptied from vessel to vessel; but
inward exercises, fears, straits, and temptations stir up the soul to
cry, and pray, and beg for mercy. The certainty, the power, the
reality of eternal things are then felt, when guilt, and wrath, and
fear, and disquietude lay hold of the soul.
Mere
notions alone of Christ, false hope, a dead faith, a presumptuous
confidence, a rotten assurance, are all swept away as so many refuges
of lies, when the soul is made to feel its nakedness and nothingness,
its guilt and helplessness before God. And thus all these inward
exercises pave the way for discoveries of Christ—those views of His
blood and righteousness, that experimental acquaintance with His
Person, love, grace, and work, which is life and peace.
-Gospel
report by preacher J.C. Philpot (1802-1869 A.D.)
January
29th, EARS FROM HARVESTED SHEAVES
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