"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...

"And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work, and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the L ORD our God hath cursed ." -Genesis 5:29 [KJV] I still think, and believe that I always shall think, that holy men of old possessed great superiority of faith to new testament believers, in the attention they paid to the choice of names given to their children. Our choice, for the most part, is from caprice, or respect to our relations or earthly connections; they had an eye to heaven. Thus, in the instance before us, Lamech evidently called his son, Noah, which signifies rest, in reference to "the rest which remaineth for the people of God;" and, as such, had an eye to Christ, the promised seed, in whom alone that rest was to be found. I do not presume to suppose that Lamech thought this child to be himself the promised seed, as our first mother Eve did at the birth of Cain, when she said, "I have gotten a man,"...

"Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer. Behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days. Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." -Revelation 2:10 [KJV] My soul! thy last evening meditation, by faith, was on Pisgah's top. This evening, do thou attend to what thy Saviour speaks in this scripture of the prospect of a prison. This forms the state and condition of the believer. The transition he is sometimes, and suddenly, called to make, is from the house of feasting to the house of mourning. He is here but in a wilderness at the best; and whatever accommodations he meets with by the way, the apartments of joy and sorrow are both under the same roof, and very often it is but a step from one to the other: yea, sometimes, and not unfrequently, when Jesus hath been feasting with His people, and they with Him, before the cloth hath been taken away, and the blessing offered ...

"The L ORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee." - Jeremiah 31:3 [KJV] There can be no new thought in the mind of God. New thoughts, new feelings, new plans, new resolutions continually occur to our mind; for ours is but a poor, fallen, fickle, changeable nature. But God has no new thoughts, feelings, plans or resolutions; for if He had He would be a changeable Being, not one great, eternal, unchangeable I Am. All His thoughts, therefore, all His plans, all His ways are like Himself, eternal, infinite, unchanging, and unchangeable.   So it is with the love of Christ to the Church. It is eternal, unchanging, unchangeable. And why? Because He loved as God. Never let us lose sight of the glorious Deity of Jesus. He loved Him in eternity as the Son of God, prior to His incarnation. That was but the fruit of His love. We can, therefore, assign no beginning to the love of Christ, fo...

"The top of Pisgah." -Deuteronomy 34:1 [KJV] There is somewhat truly interesting in this account of Pisgah, to which Moses ascended before his death. The relation, no doubt, was intended to convey seasonable instruction, of a spiritual nature, to all true believers in Christ, in their Pisgah contemplations of the promised land. My soul! sit down this evening, and see what, under divine teaching, thou canst make of it. Probably thy Lord, thy Jesus, may grant to thy faith, sights yet more glorious than even Moses beheld in open vision, when he went up to Mount Nebo. "The top of Pisgah" afforded to the man of God, a beautiful prospect of Canaan; and as we are told, that "his natural force was not abated, neither his eye become dim;" he might possibly view the boundaries of Israel's dominions; which, in point of extent, reached but little more than fifty miles in one direction, and about three times that length in another.   Indeed, we are informed, th...

"The L ORD hear thee in the day of trouble; the name of the God of Jacob defend thee; send thee help from the sanctuary, and strengthen thee out of Zion." - Psalm 20:1, 2 [KJV] When the soul has to pass through the trying hour of temptation, it wants help from the sanctuary. And nothing but help from the sanctuary can ever stand it in any stead. All other help leaves the soul just where it found it. Now why does the Lord send help from the sanctuary, but because the soul to whom help is sent stands interested in the Father's love, the Saviour's blood, and the Spirit's teachings—interested in the eternal covenant transactions of the Three-One Jehovah . Help is sent him from the sanctuary, because his name has been from all eternity registered in the Lamb's book of life, graven upon the palms of His hands, borne on His shoulder, and worn on His heart.   He was in the sanctuary when his covenant Head stood up on his behalf, and in the Lord's book all his me...