Every one who hears the Gospel has a door opened to him of escape from the wrath to come. In the Day of Judgment men shall know all the past. Forgetful hearers of the Gospel shall then with gnashing of teeth remember how they once neglected so great salvation (Heb. 2:3)
No child of Adam has a right to anything from God save the wages of sin. Justice, apart from grace in Christ’s cross, must allot to every sinner hell for his wages and portion. If the sinner is to have eternal life, he must have it as a free gift from God. Alas that thousands of sinners who hear the Gospel will not have it, because they are too proud to be saved on God’s terms of pure grace!
What is it to obey the Gospel, but to believe the Gospel? Unbelief says, “I will not receive Christ as a gift from God.” Faith, on the contrary, says, “I want Christ in His fulness; my pinching poverty makes me glad of so rich and all-sufficient a Saviour.”
The Scriptures
There are mysteries of grace and love in every page of the Bible: it is a thriving soul that finds the Book of God growing more and more precious.
A careless reader of the Scriptures never made a close walker with God.
Spread the Bible before the Lord; ask Him to teach you what your ignorance and what His wisdom.
Meditation on the Word of God is the chief means of our growth in grace: without this even prayer itself will be little better than an empty form. Meditation nourishes faith, and faith and prayer are the keys which unlock the hidden treasures of the word.
We have great need to be prepared for trials of faith and patience in so great a business as reading the Scriptures with understanding heart. It is only by faith and patience, and prayerful meditation of the Word, that we are delivered from imaginations of the flesh—from sacrificing to our own net, and burning incense to our own drag.
The laying open the heart of God is the great design of the Scriptures: happy the reader who falls in with that design!