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

"Watch and pray."   -Mark 13:33 [KJV] There is no keeping up faith except by  prayer and watchfulness.  As prayer declines in the bosom, so does the strength of faith. You may go on neglecting prayer and supplication until every grain of faith seems lost out of your bosom, and may come at last to think you never knew anything of a work of God upon your heart, and have been deceived in believing there was any grace there. By watchfulness also is the love of God maintained. Unless you watch against your besetting sins, against the snares spread for your feet, against the temptations that daily and hourly beset your path, against being overcome by the strength or subtlety of your unwearied foe, you are sure to fall; and if you fall you will bring guilt and bondage, darkness and distress into your mind, and cut off for a time all friendly intercourse with God.   Therefore you must pray and watch; for without watchfulness, prayer is of little efficacy. And if we neglect t...

"We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous."   -I John 2:1 [KJV] This advocacy is here called, as elsewhere, "pleading the cause" of the believer, and is connected with deliverance, for such an advocate can never fail: "O Lord, Thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul; Thou hast redeemed my life" (Lamentations 3:58) . The figure is taken from a lawyer pleading the cause of a criminal, and using his best endeavours to bring him off uninjured. But  such advocacy may fail for two reasons: 1. the incompetency of the advocate; or 2. the badness of the cause. But there are no such hindrances to the success of the advocacy of Christ. How he can plead his own sufferings, blood, and obedience?  His very Person as the Son of God, and yet son of man, gives unspeakable value and validity to every plea of the great Intercessor. What validity, then, has His intercession in the court of heaven! It is true that He cannot deny the truth of the charge...

"Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on Him, If ye continue in My word, then are ye My disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. "   -John 8:31, 32 [KJV] The truth is not known at first in all its sweetness, liberty, and power. We have " to continue in the word; " it maybe at times in very great darkness, distress, exercise, temptation, and trouble; and yet, such has been the power of the word upon the heart, it cannot, will not let us go. We see and feel the misery of departing from the truth, the wretchedness of getting back into the world, and being entangled in the spirit of it; and what must be the consequence if we leave those things we profess to know and believe, and embrace error or fall into the arms of sin!  There is, therefore, a continuance in the word, it may be often, as I have said, in much darkness, much exercise, many trials, many temptations: but still we are brought to this point, never to give up ...

"I cried unto Thee; Save me, and I shall keep Thy testimonie s ."   - Psalm 119:146 [KJV] If you know anything for yourself inwardly and experimentally of the evils of your heart, the power of sin, the strength of temptation, the subtlety of your unwearied foe, and that daily conflict betwixt nature and grace, the flesh and the spirit, which is the peculiar mark of the living family of heaven, you will find and feel your need of salvation as a daily reality. Think not that the only salvation to be felt and known is salvation past—salvation accomplished by the bloodshedding and death of the Son of God. There is salvation present— an inward, experimental, and continual salvation communicated out of the  fulness of Christ as a risen Mediator.       Don't you want to be daily and almost hourly saved? But from what? Why, from everything in you that fights against the will and word of God. Sin is not dead in you. If you are reconciled and brought near to God; if you h...

Weekend Gospel message to follow for All Hands (07-09JAN22) Heads-Up --- Please find enclosed encouragement in SO GREAT SALVATION by the perfect and finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ in saving poor, needy and wretched sinners by His sovereign free grace - God's unmerited favor - from our sins and from Hell: “ O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness: fear before Him, all the earth.” -Psalm 96:9 [KJV] True spiritual worship is not natural to fallen, sinful people. The only worship that is natural to such people is the worship of idols, mostly in self-worship. True godly, spiritual, and acceptable worship (acceptable to God) is the response of a chosen, justified, redeemed, and born-again (regenerated and converted) sinner honoring, praising, and glorifying God as He is revealed to be both a just God and a Savior in the glorious Person and finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.   Christ crucified and risen from the dead, by Whom our sins are purged away, and righteousn...

"That ye be not slothful, but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises." - Hebrews 6:12 [KJV] Patience is necessary in order to prove the genuineness and reality of faith. The Lord generally—I may say invariably—does not accomplish His purposes at once. He usually—I might say almost invariably—works by gradations. Is not this the case in creation? Do we see the oak starting up in all its gigantic proportions in one day? Is not a tiny acorn committed to the ground; and is not the giant oak, whose huge limbs we admire, the growth of a century? Men and women are years growing up to their full stature. So spiritually. "He that believeth shall not make haste." Faith in the soul is of slow growth for the most part; for the Lord takes care that every step in the path shall be tried by the perplexities and difficulties that surround it.     And He has appointed this that it may be a means of distinguishing the faith of God's elect from the...

"Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts." - Proverbs 31:6 [KJV] The wise mother of king Lemuel gave her son gracious directions when she spake these words. It is when we begin to feel the misery into which we have been cast by sin, and thus become ready to perish, and of heavy hearts, that the pure wine of gospel grace is suitable to our lost condition. As the holiness  and justice of God are discovered to the conscience, and we are made to see and feel the depths of the Adam fall, we look out of ourselves for a salvation which we could not find in our fallen nature or in our deeply corrupt and unbelieving heart.     When, then, we obtain by living faith a view of the Son of God as a Mediator between God and men , when we see by the eye of faith the blood of the cross, and the full and complete atonement which He, as the Lamb of God, made for sin, then we heartily embrace Him as "of God made unto us wisdom, and r...