January 29 "A wise man fears the Lord, and departs from evil--but
the fool rages, and is confident."--Proverbs 14:16 I believe no true Christian 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 speaks better things
than that of Abel. What is a Christian worth without inward trials and
afflictions? 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. January 29 |