“All the gifts of sovereign grace are intended to give us joy” by Charles Spurgeon

“Brethren, let us think over our comforts now, for a minute, and our consolations. Have we not this for consolation—that God has loved us with an everlasting love, even the Lord who cannot change?

Hitherto He has never failed us,—He has promised that all good things shall be ours as we need them, and it has been so. Have we not this for a consolation—that He has given us Christ, and therein has given us all things?

Can He deny us anything now, after having given to us His own dear Son? Let us think how dear we are to Christ, how much we cost Him, how precious we are in His sight.

Can He leave us? Can He be unkind to us? Let us reflect upon the way in which the Lord has hitherto always appeared for us in times of difficulty, and rescued us in days of jeopardy.

Turning to the Book, and finding it written, ‘I am God: I change not,’ let us be consoled for the future, and go on our way confident that all shall be well.

All the covenant promises are meant to console us. All the gifts of sovereign grace are intended to give us joy. The attributes of God are springs of consolation for us.

The human nature of Christ in which He comes near to us is a source of bliss. The gentleness and tenderness of the Holy Ghost who dwells in us on purpose to be our Comforter are dear subjects of delight.

Indeed, if we be down cast, we must blame ourselves. ‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him.’ The consolations of the Spirit are ‘waters to swim in.’

Beloved, we must draw to a close upon this one thought of abundance. Just think of what God has done for us by way of making us happy.

He has not only pardoned us, but He has received us into His family, and He has taken us there, not to be His hired servants, as we once thought He might do, but He has made us His own sons; and what is more than that, He has made us heirs, and not secondary heirs either, but ‘joint-heirs with Christ Jesus’; so that we have come right up from the place of the slave into the position of the heir of all things.

Our Lord Himself, our dear and ever blessed Saviour, was not content to pluck us like brands from the burning—not content to make us His sheep, whom He should watch over with tender care—but He has taken us to be His spouse, and He calls us His beloved.

Yea, He has done more. He has taken us to be members of His body, and we are of His flesh and of His bones. Was there ever such an exaltation as this?

When Scripture speaks of lifting a beggar from the dunghill, and setting him among princes, surely it falls short of this wonder—that of taking a worm of the dust, a sinful wretch that was only fit for Hell, and putting him into union with Christ Jesus, so that he should be a part of the mystical body of the Son of God.

This is marvellous; and, as I think of it, I feel that I have brought you to the sea shore and shown you an ocean to swim in, the depth of which you cannot fathom. Oh the depths of the mercy of God!”

–Charles H. Spurgeon, “‘Waters to Swim In,’” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, Vol. 18 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1872), 18: 317–318.