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

"Ye know the heart of a stranger." -Exodus 23:9 [KJV] True, Lord, I do indeed! for I was once a stranger in a strange land, even in the land of spiritual Egypt. My soul! wilt thou not find it profitable to look back, and call to remembrance thy original nothingness; yea, worse than nothing, when Jesus passed by, and bade thee live? It is among the gracious precepts of the Lord, "to look to the rock whence thou wert hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence thou wert digged," Isaiah 51:1. And never surely was mercy more seasonable, more abundant, more unexpected, unlooked for, and unmerited, than when bestowed upon me! And doth my Lord say, "Ye know the heart of a stranger?" Oh! for grace rightly to apprehend that state out of which the Lord brought me, when living as a stranger to the commonwealth of Israel, "without hope, and without God in the world!" Thou knowest the heart of a stranger, my soul; say then what it was. A stranger to any knowl...

"Thou gavest also Thy good Spirit to instruct them, and withheldest not Thy manna from their mouth, and gavest them water for their thirst." - Nehemiah 9:20 [KJV] When we are thoroughly emptied of ourselves—when our knowledge is shewn to be ignorance, our wisdom folly, our righteousness filthy rags, and our strength weakness—then we begin to long after the teachings of the blessed Spirit. We must be purged and tried before we can value and receive the treasures of grace. When we are well exercised and tried in our souls, then we begin to long after the teachings of the Holy Spirit, that He would shed abroad the love of God in our soul, visit and guide us, overshadow us with His holy presence, and drop into our hearts His secret unction.  Before we are brought here, we know not the personality of the Holy Ghost. We have no evidence in our conscience that He is God; we cannot worship and adore Him as the Third Person in the blessed Godhead. But when we are brought to this spot...