15 JUNE (1876)
Good cheer for outcasts
‘He gathereth together the outcasts of Israel.’ Psalm 147:2
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Psalm 40:1–17
If Jesus Christ received some of us when we felt ourselves to be outcasts, how we ought to love him! It does you good to look back ‘to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged’. We get to be very top-lofty at times, my brethren. We are wonderfully big, are we not? Are we not experienced Christians now? Why, we have known the Lord these five-and-twenty years. Dear me, how important we are! Perhaps we are deacons of churches, or, at any rate, we have a class in the Sunday-school, and we pray in the prayer-meeting: considerable importance attaches to us, and we are high and mighty on that account.
I have heard say of a man worth his thousands that once he had not a shirt to his back, and, if he recollected from what he sprang, he would not carry his head so high. I do not see much in that, but I do see something in this—if we recollected the time when we ‘were dead in trespasses and sins’, when we had not a rag to cover us, when we were under God’s frown and heirs ‘of wrath, even as others’, if we recollected our lost and ruined state by nature, I am sure that we should not lift our heads so very loftily, and want to have respect paid to us in the church, or think that God ought not to deal so very hardly with us, as if we had cause for complaint. Dear friends, let us remember what we used to be, and that will keep us low in our own esteem. But how it will fire us with zeal to remember from what a depth he has lifted us up. Did Jesus save such a wretch as I was? Then for him would I live and for him would I die. This ought to be the utterance of us all. We ought to live in that spirit. God grant we may!
FOR MEDITATION: When Christians begin to glory in their own characters and achievements, they are thinking like unbelievers and forgetting the ground on which they stand before God (Ephesians 2:8–9). The apostle Paul knew how to burst the pride of arrogant Christians. Consider some of the questions he asked one proud church (1 Corinthians 4:6–7; 5:1–2, 6). He had to remind them of the various pits from which God had lifted them (1 Corinthians 1:26–29; 6:9–11).
C. H. Spurgeon and Terence Peter Crosby, 365 Days with Spurgeon (Volume 4), (Leominster, UK: Day One Publications, 2007), 177.
Good cheer for outcasts
‘He gathereth together the outcasts of Israel.’ Psalm 147:2
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Psalm 40:1–17
If Jesus Christ received some of us when we felt ourselves to be outcasts, how we ought to love him! It does you good to look back ‘to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged’. We get to be very top-lofty at times, my brethren. We are wonderfully big, are we not? Are we not experienced Christians now? Why, we have known the Lord these five-and-twenty years. Dear me, how important we are! Perhaps we are deacons of churches, or, at any rate, we have a class in the Sunday-school, and we pray in the prayer-meeting: considerable importance attaches to us, and we are high and mighty on that account.
I have heard say of a man worth his thousands that once he had not a shirt to his back, and, if he recollected from what he sprang, he would not carry his head so high. I do not see much in that, but I do see something in this—if we recollected the time when we ‘were dead in trespasses and sins’, when we had not a rag to cover us, when we were under God’s frown and heirs ‘of wrath, even as others’, if we recollected our lost and ruined state by nature, I am sure that we should not lift our heads so very loftily, and want to have respect paid to us in the church, or think that God ought not to deal so very hardly with us, as if we had cause for complaint. Dear friends, let us remember what we used to be, and that will keep us low in our own esteem. But how it will fire us with zeal to remember from what a depth he has lifted us up. Did Jesus save such a wretch as I was? Then for him would I live and for him would I die. This ought to be the utterance of us all. We ought to live in that spirit. God grant we may!
FOR MEDITATION: When Christians begin to glory in their own characters and achievements, they are thinking like unbelievers and forgetting the ground on which they stand before God (Ephesians 2:8–9). The apostle Paul knew how to burst the pride of arrogant Christians. Consider some of the questions he asked one proud church (1 Corinthians 4:6–7; 5:1–2, 6). He had to remind them of the various pits from which God had lifted them (1 Corinthians 1:26–29; 6:9–11).
C. H. Spurgeon and Terence Peter Crosby, 365 Days with Spurgeon (Volume 4), (Leominster, UK: Day One Publications, 2007), 177.
15 JUNE (1876)
Good cheer for outcasts
‘He gathereth together the outcasts of Israel.’ Psalm 147:2
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Psalm 40:1–17
If Jesus Christ received some of us when we felt ourselves to be outcasts, how we ought to love him! It does you good to look back ‘to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged’. We get to be very top-lofty at times, my brethren. We are wonderfully big, are we not? Are we not experienced Christians now? Why, we have known the Lord these five-and-twenty years. Dear me, how important we are! Perhaps we are deacons of churches, or, at any rate, we have a class in the Sunday-school, and we pray in the prayer-meeting: considerable importance attaches to us, and we are high and mighty on that account.
I have heard say of a man worth his thousands that once he had not a shirt to his back, and, if he recollected from what he sprang, he would not carry his head so high. I do not see much in that, but I do see something in this—if we recollected the time when we ‘were dead in trespasses and sins’, when we had not a rag to cover us, when we were under God’s frown and heirs ‘of wrath, even as others’, if we recollected our lost and ruined state by nature, I am sure that we should not lift our heads so very loftily, and want to have respect paid to us in the church, or think that God ought not to deal so very hardly with us, as if we had cause for complaint. Dear friends, let us remember what we used to be, and that will keep us low in our own esteem. But how it will fire us with zeal to remember from what a depth he has lifted us up. Did Jesus save such a wretch as I was? Then for him would I live and for him would I die. This ought to be the utterance of us all. We ought to live in that spirit. God grant we may!
FOR MEDITATION: When Christians begin to glory in their own characters and achievements, they are thinking like unbelievers and forgetting the ground on which they stand before God (Ephesians 2:8–9). The apostle Paul knew how to burst the pride of arrogant Christians. Consider some of the questions he asked one proud church (1 Corinthians 4:6–7; 5:1–2, 6). He had to remind them of the various pits from which God had lifted them (1 Corinthians 1:26–29; 6:9–11).
C. H. Spurgeon and Terence Peter Crosby, 365 Days with Spurgeon (Volume 4), (Leominster, UK: Day One Publications, 2007), 177.
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