Mar 11
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GOD PROMISES THE PRISONER AND CAPTIVE
God sets the solitary in families: he brings out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land. Psalm 68:6
Who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The Lord gives freedom to the prisoners. (Psalm 146:7).
“If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the LORD thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee” (Deuteronomy 30:4).
For the Lord heareth the poor, and despiseth not his prisoners” (Psalm 69:33).
“[He] brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and brake their bands in sunder” (Psalm 107:14).
“The captive exile hasteneth that he may be loosed, and that he should not die in the pit, nor that his bread should fail” (Isaiah 51:14).
“Thus saith the LORD, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered: for I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children” (Isaiah 49:25).
“Verily it shall be well with thy remnant; verily I will cause the enemy to entreat thee well in the time of evil and in the time of affliction” (Jeremiah 15:11).
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Mark 5:19- “Go home….and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee”
Cannot you imagine the scene, when the poor demoniac went home? He had been a raving madman, and when he came and knocked at the door, don’t you see his friends calling to one another in fear, ‘Oh, there he is again,” and the mother running upstairs and locking all the doors, because her son who was raving mad, had come back, and the little ones crying because they knew how he cut himself with stones, because he was possessed by devils?
And can you picture their joy when the father opened the door he said, “Father! I am not what I was. All the evil spirits are gone. I shall live in the tombs no longer. I want to tell you how the glorious man who wrought my deliverance accomplished the miracle. I have come home healed and saved.”
Oh, if such a one, possessed with sin, were here and would go home to his friends to tell them of his release, I think the scene would be somewhat similar.-
The miracle seems to me to teach that the power of Christ to save from sin does not lie in the person saved. It lies wholly in Jesus Himself. Further, I learn that though the person to be saved be so far gone that you could scarcely expect faith from him, yet the gospel coming to him brings faith with itself and does its own work. The gospel is a seed that makes its own soil! It is a spark that carries its own fuel with it, a life which can implant itself within the ribs of death, yes, between the jaws of destruction.- Charles Spurgeon.
My Yoke is Easy
The Lord had just been describing and condemning the Pharisee’s. They put hard yokes and heavy burdens upon men, never restoring or refreshing the soul with rest (Mat 23: 4). Our Lord’s yoke is the opposite. To come unto the Lord is to come to him by faith, to be taught of him, about him, to follow him and to find that he refreshes the soul with “grace for grace”. He is meek and lowly in heart. When your soul is refreshed and full of joy whatever it is you are doing is easy and light–this is the rest he gives. He has removed every burden. “This is his commandment, That we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ. And love one another, as he gave us commandment.” What an easy yoke faith and love make. Oh, we will not find this soul rest in the high places of the wise and prudent, nor in the law, but to those who come with a broken and contrite heart, he gives rest unto your souls (John 6: 37). Clay Curtis
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A GRACIOUS PARDON
“How precious also are Your thoughts unto me, O God!”
“I—yes, I alone—am the one who blots out your sins for My own sake and will never think of them again.” Isaiah 43:25
“I—yes, I alone”—the Great, the Pure, the Holy, the Righteous God! Surely if there be one way more than another, in which God’s thoughts are not as man’s thoughts, it is this—pardoning the rebel, welcoming the undeserving, forgiving and forgetting. How we remember the sins and the failings of others. How we harbor the recollection of ingratitude or unkindness. We say, “I forgive, but I cannot forget.” God does both. Forgiveness is with Him no effort; it is a delight—”The Lord is well pleased for His righteousness’ sake.”
“I—yes, I alone”—the God who for weeks and months, and, it may be, for years, we have been wearying with our iniquities, whose Book of Remembrance is crowded with the record of our guilt—“I—yes, I alone”—the very Being who has registered that guilt, is ready to take the recording pen and erase the pages thus blotted with transgression!
How can He thus forgive? How can the God who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, cancel the handwriting that is against us in these volumes of transgression, so that they are remembered no more? It is through the atoning work of Jesus. “The Son of man has power to forgive sins.” He shed His precious blood that He might have a right to say, “Your sins, which are many, are all forgiven you.” What a complete erasure! Crimson sins, scarlet sins; sins against grace, and love, and warning, and privilege—see them all cast into the depths of the sea, never again to be washed on shore!
“Whatever our guiltiness is,” says Rutherford, “yet when it falls into the sea of God’s mercy, it is but like a drop of blood fallen into the great ocean.” “The ancients said there was nothing so pure as snow. But we know of something purer, a human soul washed in the blood of Christ.”
What is the impelling MOTIVE with God in so wondrous a forgiveness as this? It is, it can be, nothing He sees in us. No repentance, however sincere; no good works, however imposing or splendid. It is His own free sovereign grace! “For My own sake!” “Thus says the Lord God, I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel; but for My holy Name’s sake.” If He had meted out retribution in proportion to our deserts, His thoughts towards us must have been of evil, not of peace—our blood would, long before now, have been mingled with our sacrifices. But He is God, and not man. “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed.” “O Israel you have destroyed yourself, but in Me is your help found.”
Most wondrous chapter in the volume of God’s thoughts!—His full, free, unconditional, everlasting forgiveness of the guilty and undeserving. All the most gigantic thoughts of man look poor and shabby after this. God, the just God, yet the Savior—just, in justifying the ungodly.
Lord! I accept the gracious overture of pardon. I joyfully repose on this thought of Your forgiving mercy. “My debt is very great, neither can I pay anything thereof myself. But I trust in the riches and benignity of my Surety. Let Him free me, who became surety for me; who has taken my debt upon Himself.”—(John Gerhard). Yes, He has taken my debt! Think of God, not only willing to blot out and bury in oblivion a guilty past—but hear Him giving the assurance that the legion-sins are already cancelled. The debt has been discharged—the wages paid. He makes it an argument for immediate return and acceptance, “I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, your transgressions, and, as a cloud, your sins; return unto Me; for I have redeemed you.”
What can we say about such wonderful things as these? If God is for us, who can ever be against us? Romans 8:31
John MacDuff, 1864.
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“Jesus suffered him not.” (Mark 5:18)
A more pitiful sight can hardly be imagined than the sight of that wild, naked, filthy Gadarene demoniac living in a graveyard, running to and fro among the tombs, crying and cutting himself. Once the Savior healed him by his grace, from the inside out, how things changed! A more delightful sight can hardly be imagined than the sight of that same man, after the Son of God saved him by his grace. We see him sitting at his Savior’s feet in adoring wonder, gratitude and love, “clothed and in his right mind.”
When the Lord Jesus is about to leave the coasts of Gadara, as he got into the ship, “he that had been possessed with the devil prayed him that he might be with him.” I cannot imagine anything more reasonable. Can you? What a wonderful change grace had wrought in him. He, who but a few minutes before was a terror to everybody, is now so heavenly composed that he desires never to leave his great Savior. His heart is fixed upon his Redeemer. He wants to be in his company permanently.
Is that not the case with every heaven born soul? The sinner who has experienced the mighty transforming power of God’s saving grace in Christ, being called of God and turned by omnipotent mercy “from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that he may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith” (Acts 26:18), every saved sinner desires “that he might be with” the Savior. Having once tasted that the Lord is gracious, we cannot but long to be absent from the body and present with the Lord. But the Lord Jesus refused to grant this beloved soul the desire of his heart.
“Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee. And he departed, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him: and all men did marvel” (Mark 5:19-20)
Soon, the Lord Jesus would bring him home to glory, but for the present he must remain among the Gadarenes, and tell his family and friends, all among whom he lived, what great things the Lord had done for him, how he had performed them by his omnipotent mercy, and how he had compassion upon him.
That is precisely the reason our Savior has left us in this world. He has left us here to tell eternity bound sinners what great things he has done for us, how he has done them, and how he has had compassion upon our poor souls. I can think of no reason for God leaving us in this world except to use us as instruments in his hands for the salvation of other chosen, redeemed sinners. Every believer is completely fit for heaven (Colossians 1:12). We are completely forgiven of all sin, perfectly righteous, and approved of by God through the sin-atoning blood and imputed righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we have been given our Savior’s own righteous nature in regeneration. Righteousness has been imparted to us by the Spirit of God. Why then has God left us in this world to live in this body of flesh? It seems to me that the answer to that question is obvious. — It is because he has chosen to use saved sinners to carry the gospel to other sinners for the saving of his elect!
Saved sinners are to go home to their unsaved friends, and show forth “the praises of him who hath called us out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Peter 2:9), until we have fulfilled the purpose for which our God put us in the world. Let us ever live with our eyes and our hearts in heaven with Christ, longing to depart and be with him who loved us and gave himself for us. Yet, we ought to be content to live on this earth for as long as our Savior is pleased to use us for his glory and the calling of his elect.
The thought that the God of Glory might use such things as we are to build his house, his church, his holy temple, that he should condescend to use us, putting into our hands the treasure of his gospel, to save his elect is thrilling. Is it not? That ought to make us happy as we wait all the days of our appointed time, until our change come (Job 14:14). That ought to inspire us to devote ourselves to this noble purpose and work. — “Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee.” Don Fortner
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The Miracle Grace Performs
Acts 16: 25: And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them. 26: And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one’s bands were loosed.
We get our title from this great miracle that occurred as Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises unto God. Several places in scripture we find the Lord shaking the earth whenever the Spirit of grace works triumphantly in the midst of sinners. (Acts 4:31: Mt 28:2; Rev 11: 13.) In our text, as we find the Lord shaking the earth, it again marks a time when the Spirit of God triumphed in the hearts of redeemed sinners (Ps 146: 7; Is 42: 6-8.)
Proposition: In this passage, we see the miracle of God’s grace through the gospel of Christ working irresistibly in the jailor and those in his household at Philippi.
Divisions: I. The Effects the Grace of God Has Upon A Sinner; II. The Good News of the Gospel; III. The Obedience of Faith
I. The Effects the Grace of God Has Upon A Sinner (v27-28.)
A. Grace quickens the dead sinner (Eph 2: 1)
B. Grace removes all hope of gain before God by our own doing (v23, 24; Jn 5: 44.)
C. Grace makes a sinner call upon God (Jn 3: 20, 21; Is 49: 8-11; Ps 110:3; Pro 9: 10, 11; Lk 11:9.)
II. The Good News of the Gospel (v30-32.)
A. Believing is the opposite of works. (Jn 6: 29; 8: 24; I Jn 5: 11.)
B. Believe on the Lord…Jesus…Christ! Do you know WHOM you have believed? (2 Tim 1: 12; Pro 16:33; Ro 8: 3, 4; Mt 1: 21; Lk 4: 18.)
C. And thou shalt be saved. Do you need to be saved? From what do you need to be saved?
D. The first evidence where God begins to work in the heart is that a sinner desires to know and believes what the Lord says about the sinner and about himself in his word (v32; Ro 10: 14, 15; Jn 9: 36; 2 Cor 10: 4.)
III. The Obedience of Faith (v33, 34)
A. The Believer Falls in Love With Christ Jesus the Lord (Mt 25:40.)
B. The Believer Submits to Christ
C. The Believer Falls in Love With Christ’s Brethren (Is 11:6; 1 Jn 5:1.)
D. The Believer rejoices and continues believing God (Ro 5:2, 11.)
Application: May Paul’s prayer for the Romans be our prayer for all those in our house and with whom we are able to minister the word of the Lord: Romans 15:13: Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost. Clay Curtis