Tried With Fire

“I have chosen you in the furnace of affliction.” Isaiah 48:10. "“I have chosen you in the furnace of affliction.” I chose you before you were here. Yea, I chose you before you had a being, and when all creatures lay before Me in the pure mass of creatureship, and I could create or not create as I pleased, I chose and created you a vessel of mercy appointed unto eternal life. And when you, in common with the whole race, had fallen, though I might have crushed you with them and sent you down to hell, I chose you in your fallen condition and I provided for your redemption. In the fullness of time, I sent My Son, who fulfilled My law and made it honorable. I chose you at your birth, when a helpless infant you did sleep upon your mother’s breast. I chose you when you did grow up in childhood, with all your follies and your sins. Determined to save you, I watched o’er your path when, as Satan’s blind slave, you did sport with death. I chose you when, in manhood, you did sin agai...

Christ is always the same. Here at the end of his letter, the author echoes a theme from its beginning, "To the Son He says:... 'You [remain] the same'" (Heb. 1:8, 12, citing Ps. 102:27). But now he makes explicit what earlier was implicit. The immutable One of Psalm 102 is none other than the incarnate One of the gospel. The practical implication of this becomes clear when we remember that Psalm 102 is possibly the most eloquent description of depression and despair to be found in the entire Psalter. The psalmist's mental salvation lay in his rediscovery of the immutability of God. Hebrews gives that truth flesh and blood dimensions in Jesus Christ. You can trust Him; He is always the same. Do not mistake the meaning. This is not the immutability of the sphinx - a Christ captured once for all in a never-fading photograph. This is the changelessness of Jesus Christ in all His life, love, holiness, grace, justice, truth, and power. He is always the same for ...

The Christian life is a life of communion with the Father who loved and loves us, with the Son who gave himself for us and who ever lives to protect and bless us, and with the Holy Spirit who brings us into the communion of the Holy Trinity and makes it his special delight to glorify Christ in us and to us (John 16:14). Is there anything in life to rival such astounding privilege? John Owen wrote, 'Our greatest hindrance in the Christian life is not our lack of effort, but our lack of acquaintanceship with our privileges.' How right he was! Your and my greatest privilege in life, this life and the life to come, is to know the Holy Trinity, and even more wonderfully to be known by the Holy Trinity. May the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, give us all the grace to become more personally acquainted with our privileges, the greatest of which is knowing this triune God to be our God. The Gospel-Shaped Life , Ian Hamilton, Banner of Truth Trust, 2017, pgs. 3-4. Photo...

Do not keep back from Christ under the idea that you must come to him in a disinterested frame, and from an unselfish motive. If you were right in this thing, who could be saved? You are to come as you are; with all your bad motives, whatever these may be. Take all your bad motives, add them to the number of your sins, and bring them all to the altar where the great sacrifice is lying. Go to the mercy seat. Tell the High Priest there, not what you desire to be, nor what you ought to be, but what you are. Tell him the honest truth as to your condition at this moment. Confess the impurity of your motives; all the evil that you feel or that you don’t feel; your hard-heartedness, your blindness, your unteachableness. Confess everything without reserve. He wants you to come to Him exactly as you are, and not to cherish the vain thought that, by a little waiting, or working, or praying, you can make yourself fit, or persuade Him to make you fit. “But I am not satisfied with my faith,” you ...