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Spurgeon “Growth in Grace”

reese — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 05:05:20 +0000

Below is an excerpt from a sermon “Growth in Grace” by Spurgeon.

There are some of you, beloved, who think you are not growing in grace because you do not feel as lively as you used to do. “Ah!” say you, “when I was young every thing was good then. What peaceful hours I then enjoyed. I would go over hedge and ditch to hear the Gospel preached; it mattered not, I had such an intense desire to hear about God and Jesus Christ, such love to the Gospel, that when I once got to hear a minister preach, it mattered not whoever he might be, it all seemed sweet. But now I am so depressed, I cannot enjoy the words I used to do.”

Do not think because your wild heat is gone you have not grown. When we light a fire, we always put the straw and such like at the bottom; and when we first light it there is a great deal of flame and a great deal of smoke that rises. But afterwards when the flame gets hold of the coals, there is not so much blaze, but there is really more heat. You may have some of your flame and smoke departed, but then it gets to be more solid fire; we would rather warm our hands by the coals than by the straw, for that must soon go. So with grace.

How could I not include Joe’s hand on fire!

It begins with flame, catches the lighter substances, lays hold on the imagination and the passions; but, in after life, it will appeals to the judgment, and makes the man one solid lump of burning fire. He is not a little flame rising towards heaven that the wind might blow out with a puff; but he becomes so strong a fire that the wind shall but increase the flame, and shall make the heat the greater. So with you.

Do not suppose when you are depressed, therefore, you are not growing. Many of God’s plants grow best in the dark, and He often puts them in the dark to make them grow. When you are growing upwards, recollect there is such a thing as growing downward. You might have had yesterday a divine manifestation that took you up to the top of the delectable mountains. You must not think you are big because you are high, for pigmies perched on Alps are pigmies still; and if you were ever so little, it would not make you any bigger if you were taken to the top of St. Paul’s – you would be little still. If you are in a mine deep down, do not think you are smaller for that. I tell you you will grow faster in the dungeon often than on the top of a mountain; but it is no pleasant spot.

When our depravity is revealed to us, when our desolation of spirit, when our utter hopelessness and powerlessness are uncovered and made manifest by God’s Holy Spirit, we grow, I believe, even faster than we do when, on the wings of seraphs, we are privileged to mount on high. Do not measure you growth in grace by your feelings. Do not do so.

If we are in Christ, we are in Christ’s by faith, and not by feelings; and recollect, whether your feelings are good or bad, you are no more or less a child of God. Your faith, sinner, unites you with the Lamb – not your feelings. Trust Him in darkness, lean on Him when you cannot see Him, and when there seems nothing to walk on, still tread, for the ground is firm beneath the foot of faith.

A doomed democracy?

reese — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 16:13:36 +0000

Last week at FBC-Bryan, we discussed the fhe following is a quote from Dr. Alexander Tyler generalizing his findings about the fall of the Athenian Republic. Dr. Tyler was a Scottish professor writing around the time of the American Revolution.

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith

From spiritual faith to great courage

From courage to liberty

From liberty to abundance

From abudance to complacency

From complacency to apathy

From apathy to dependence

From dependence back into bondage

Do you agree? Is this prophecy true of America? If so, where do we find ourselves on this timeline? I’ll post my thoughts on this later.

How to Not Kill Sin

reese — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 06:10:36 +0000

from John Owen’s The Mortification of Sin, Chapter 3. Not the greatest passage from the book… hopefully there will be better quotes from Owen later.

“Men are galled with the sin that hath prevailed over them; they instantly promise to themselves and to God that they will do so no more; they watch over themselves and pray for a season, until this heat waxes cold, and the sense of sin is worn off; and so mortification goes also, and the sin returns to its former dominion. Duties [i.e. spiritual disciplines] are excellent for a healthy soul; they are no physic for a sick soul. He that turns his meat into medicine must expect no great operation. Spiritually sick people can not sweat our this distemper with working. But this is the way of men who deceive their own souls”

The Office Space principal

reese — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 05:39:32 +0000

It hits every semester like a brick wall. Apathy. Apathy for all things academic. Usually it takes a round of tests to do this. But this semester is different. Even though I have no desire to do any schoolwork already, it has become easier to will myself to work. Why? Because I am convinced that it matters in the long run… that someday I’ll actually use this information. How I remember the days of Physics 208, Thermo, wait EVERY SINGLE class with an ENGR label!! Goodness, looking back I don’t understand what the point of any one of those classes was… We industrial engineers are imaginary engineer, not real ones!!

Anyway, it’s little surprise that this points to a larger principal. Let’s call it the Office Space principal. Work must have perceived value; otherwise, people generally can’t do it without going insane over a stapler or plotting to slowly steal millions of Innitech’s fortune. It’s part of the design. Work is good, very good, but if it has no value, just work for work’s sake, it’s simply inhumane. But let’s face it… there’s awful, boring, tedious, deskwork to be done. Someone has to do it… and it’s that kind of work I loathe. Is it because I lack the humility or because work must have a perceived value? Both. Still, I don’t want to really live in a 40+ hour a week world where I don’t think that my work has some valuable. Thankfully, I have the option, which is why these spells of laziness and apathy are easy to cure.

Charles Spurgeon — Faith

reese — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 02:41:43 +0000

(taken from www.spurgeon.org, from a sermon entitled Faith delivered on December 14, 1856, by the Charles Spurgeon at the Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens).

“Without faith it is impossible to please God.”—Hebrews 11:6.

The Old Assembly’s Catechism asks, “What is the chief end of man?” and its answer is, “To glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.” The answer is exceedingly correct; but it might have been equally truthful if it had been shorter. The chief end of man is “to please God;” for in so doing—we need not say it, because it is an undoubted fact—in so doing he will please himself. The chief end of man, we believe, in this life and in the next, is to please God his Maker. If any man pleases God, he does that which conduces most to his own temporal and eternal welfare. Man cannot please God without bringing to himself a great amount of happiness; for if any man pleases God, it is because God accepts him as his son, gives him the blessings of adoption, pours upon him the bounties of his grace, makes him a blessed man in this life, and insures him a crown of everlasting life, which he shall wear, and which shall shine with unfading lustre when the wreaths of earth’s glory have all been melted away; while, on the other hand, if a man does not please God, he inevitably brings upon himself sorrow and suffering in this life; he puts a worm and a rottenness in the core of all his joys; he fills his death-pillow with thorns, and he supplies the eternal fire with faggots of flame which shall for ever consume him. He that pleases God, is, through Divine grace, journeying onward to the ultimate reward of all those that love and fear God; but he who is ill-pleasing to God, must, for Scripture has declared it, be banished from the presence of God, and consequently from the enjoyment of happiness.

If then, we be right in saying that to please God is to be happy, the one important question is, how can I please God? And there is something very solemn in the utterance of our text: “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” That is to say, do what you may, strive as earnestly as you can, live as excellently as you please, make what sacrifices you choose, be as eminent as you can for everything that is lovely and of good repute, yet none of these things can be pleasing to God unless they be mixed with faith. As the Lord said to the Jews, “With all your sacrifices you must offer salt;” so he says to us, “With all your doings you must bring faith, or else “without faith it is impossible to please God.”