16 SEPTEMBER (1877)

‘Forever with the Lord’

‘So shall we ever be with the Lord.’ 1 Thessalonians 4:17
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: John 13:36–14:6

Forever with the Lord—what will it mean? I remember a sermon upon this text by a notable preacher, of which the heads were as follows:- ‘Forever life, forever light, forever love, forever peace, forever rest, forever joy.’ What a chain of delights! What more can heart imagine or hope desire? Carry those things in your mind and you will get, if you can drink into them, some idea of the blessedness which is contained in being forever with the Lord; but still recollect these are only the fruits and not the root of the joy. Jesus is better than all these. His company is more than the joy which comes out of it. I do not care so much for ‘life forever’, nor for ‘light forever’, as I do for ‘forever with the Lord’. To be with him! I ask no other bliss and cannot imagine anything more heavenly. Why, the touch of the hem of his garment healed the sick woman; the sight of him was enough to give life to us when we were dead! What, then, must it be to be with him actually, consciously and always, to be with him no more by faith, but in very deed with him forever?

My soul is ready to swoon away with too much joy as she drinks even in her shallow measure into the meaning of this thought, and I dare not venture further. I must leave you to muse your souls into it, for it needs quiet thought and room for free indulgence of holy imagination until you cause your soul to dream of this excess of joy. ‘Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit’.

FOR MEDITATION: (Our Own Hymn Book no.846 v.1—James Montgomery, 1835)
‘ “Forever with the Lord!”
Amen! so let it be!
Life from the dead is in that word,
’Tis immortality!’


C. H. Spurgeon and Terence Peter Crosby, 365 Days with Spurgeon (Volume 4), (Leominster, UK: Day One Publications, 2007), 270.