November 14, 2010

• In Christ .. we cannot perish!

  I want you to go away with a sense of your own weakness, and yet a belief in your own safety. I want you to know that you cannot stand a minute, that you will be damned within another second unless grace keep you out of hell, and yet I want you to feel that since you are in the hand of Christ you cannot perish, neither can any pluck you out thence. And, poor sinners, my heart’s desire is that you may be put into the hand of Christ tonight, that you may have done with trusting yourselves. You can run, but you cannot save yourselves. “Oh Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself, but in me is thy help found.”

  Christ alone can save you, oh look out of self to Christ; trust yourselves in his hands; he is “able to keep you from falling” Jude 24. You cannot even stand upright yourselves, and if he should set you upright you cannot keep so for a minute without his protecting care. If saints need to be kept, how much more need have you to seek the shelter of the Saviour’s wounded side: flee thither as the dove to the cleft of the rock. If holy men of God cry daily for pardon, and profess to have no right of themselves to heaven, how much more urgent is your case.

  You must perish if you die as you are. You can never make yourself faultless, but Christ can. He wants to do it: he has opened a fountain for sin and for uncleanness: wash and be clean. Again, I say, look to Jesus. Away with self and cling to Christ, down with self-confidence and up with simple faith in Christ Jesus. I shall not let you go, dear friends, without singing one verse, which I think will express the feeling of each one of us:

  “Let me among thy saints he found,
  Whene’er the Archangel’s trump shall sound,
  To see thy smiling face;
  Then loudest of the crowd I’ll sing

   

   

  (from Spurgeon’s Sermons, Christians Kept in Time and Glorified in Eternity – Jude 1:24,25)

   

   

   

  • 9:27 am
  • 1 Comment