Oct 22
17
“Where Is He?”
John 7:11
Everyone knew that the Lord Jesus would be at Jerusalem during the feast of tabernacles. The whole city seems to have been buzzing with this question. Some sought him to kill him, others to make him a king. Some were curious about him. Some wanted to see his miracles, some to hear his doctrine, and some to experience his grace. Are you interested in knowing where the Lord Jesus Christ is today? Are you concerned about finding him for yourself?
The Word of God tells us plainly where he is. The Lord Jesus Christ is in the bosom of the Father (John 1:18). He is the centre of heaven. He is the glory of glory. (Read Rev. 4 and 5).He is on the throne of universal dominion (John 17:2; Rom. 14:9). There he sits in the serenity of total sovereignty. There he must reign until he has made all his foes his footstool. Jesus Christ is Lord of all forever! He is at the right hand of the majesty on high, in the place of representation and advocacy as our great High Priest (Rom. 8:27, 34). The Lord Jesus Christ is on the throne of grace, dispensing mercy to helpless, guilty, needy sinners. The Son of God is within the reach of needy sinners like you and me. He is a God accessible to all who seek him (Heb. 4:15-16).
I have found by experience that the Lord Jesus will be found of all who seek him. I have found him at the mercy-seat when, in the closet of my heart, I have cried to him in secret prayer (Isa. 65:24), in his Word(John 5:39; Lk. 24:44-47), in the assemblies of his people (Matt. 18:20), at his Table, in the bread and in the wine, and in the field of his service (Matt. 28:18-20). As we serve the interests of his kingdom, his people, his gospel, and his glory, as we seek to do his will and honour his name, as we endeavour to serve the souls of men, as we try to serve our generation by the will of God, our Saviour says, “I am with you always!” He is with us in sympathy to guide us, strengthen us, protect us, and to make our way prosperous and successful, according to the will of God. I have found him in every fiery furnace of trial, lion’s den of persecution, storm of difficulty, and river of woe to which I have been exposed. I have been a lot of places. I have experienced a lot of things. I have known a few troubles along the way. But I have never been in any place of need without him who is my Rock and my Salvation (Isa. 43:1-5). I have always found my Redeemer to be a God at hand (Phil. 4:4-7).
Don Fortner
Who cares for pebbles — when
jewels glitter before him?
(Charles Spurgeon,
“Flowers from a Puritan’s Garden” 1883)
“To rule a kingdom, is a nobler matter than to play with
marbles.”
What, then, is the folly of the worldling’s choice, when he prefers
to be contending among men for earthly toys — instead of seeking those things
which are above!
How great is the degradation of professing Christians, when
their minds are taken up with fashionable trivialities —
instead of living alone to glorify their God, and acting as those whom Jesus
has made to be kings and priests!
Who cares for pebbles — when jewels glitter before him?
Who would choose toys and rattles — when the wealth of the
Indies is offered him?
Let us be no longer children or fools — but act as men who have
put away childish things.
If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are
above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. 2 Set
your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. Colossians
3:1-2
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Coming up from the
wilderness (J. C. Philpot, “Coming up from the Wilderness” 1857) Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved?Song of Solomon 8:5 To come up from the wilderness, is to come up out of OURSELVES; for we are ourselves the wilderness. It is our wilderness heart that makes the world what it is to us . . . our own barren frames; our own bewildered minds; our own worthlessness and inability; our own lack of spiritual fruitfulness; our own trials, temptations, and exercises; our own hungering and thirsting after righteousness. In a word, it is what passes in our own bosom that makes the world to us a dreary desert. Carnal people find the world no wilderness. It is an Eden to them! Or at least they try hard to make it so. They seek all their pleasure from, and build all their happiness upon it. Nor do they dream of any other harvest of joy and delight, but what may be repaid in this ‘happy valley’, where youth, health, and good spirits are ever imagining new scenes of gratification. But the child of grace, exercised with a thousand difficulties, passing through many temporal and spiritual sorrows, and inwardly grieved with his own lack of heavenly fruitfulness, finds the wilderness within. But he still comes up out of it, and this he does by looking upward with believing eyes to Him who alone can bring him out. He comes up out of his own righteousness, and shelters himself under Christ’s righteousness. He comes up out of his own strength, and trusts to Christ’s strength. He comes up out of his own wisdom, and hangs upon Jesus’ wisdom. He comes up out of his own tempted, tried, bewildered, and perplexed condition, to find rest and peace in the finished work of the Son of God. And thus he comes up out of the wilderness of self, not actually, but experimentally. Every desire of his soul to be delivered from his ‘wilderness sickening sight’ that he has of sin and of himself as a sinner. Every aspiration after Jesus, every longing look, earnest sigh, piteous cry, or laboring groan, all are a coming up from the wilderness. His turning his back upon an ungodly world; renouncing its pleasures, its honors, its pride, and its ambition; seeking communion with Jesus as his chief delight; and accounting all things but loss and rubbish for the excellency of the knowledge of Jesus his Lord as revealed to his soul by the power of God; this, also, is coming up from the wilderness. |
Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth:
for I am God, and there is none
else. Isaiah 45:22
Octavius Winslow
A true spiritual beholding of the Lord Jesus, in the great
matter of our eternal salvation, requires that we look from every other object
that would divide our attention, to Him alone. We must look from ourselves.
This is, perhaps, the most common and insidious object that comes between the
eye of the soul and Jesus. When God was ejected from the heart of man, self
vaulted into the vacant throne, and has ever since maintained a supremacy. It
assumed two forms, from both of which we are to look, in looking savingly to
Jesus. We must look from righteous self; from all works of righteousness which
we can perform—from our almsgivings, from our charities, from our religious
observances, our fastings, and prayers, and sacraments—from all the works of
the law, by which we are seeking to be justified; from all our efforts to make
ourselves better, and thus to do something to commend ourselves to the Divine
notice, and to propitiate the Divine regard; from all this we must look, if we
rightly look unto Jesus, to be saved by His righteousness, and by His alone.
The noble language of the apostle must find an echo in our hearts—” What
is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of
knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider
them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a
righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through
faith in Christ–the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.”
We must equally, too, look unto Jesus from unrighteous self. Our
sins, and transgressions, and iniquities—red as crimson, countless as the
sands, and towering as the Alps—are not for one moment to intercept or obscure
our looking unto Jesus for salvation. Jesus is a Saviour, as His precious name
signifies. As such, He came to save us from our sins, be those sins never so
great for magnitude, or infinite for number. It is impossible that we can look
unto Jesus, and feel the joy of His salvation flowing into our hearts, while at
the same time we are looking at the number and the turpitude of our sins. We
must not look at the sin and at the Saviour at the same time; but beholding by
faith Him who “bore our sins in His own body on the tree,” who was
“made a sin-offering for us,” who was “wounded for our
transgressions, and was bruised for our iniquities,” who shed His precious
blood that the guiltiest may be cleansed and the vilest saved, and between whom
and the penitent sinner, though he were another Manasseh, another Saul of Tarsus,
another dying malefactor, no transgression and no crime can interpose an
effectual barrier, we shall see the exceeding greatness and sinfulness of sin
in a clearer and more searching and solemn light than we possibly could,
viewing it apart from the cross. Look unto Jesus, then, from your sins: their
magnitude and their number interpose no difficulty, and form no real
discouragement to your immediate approach to Christ. No argument based upon
your unworthiness can avail to exclude you from an interest in His great
salvation. He came into the world to save sinners, even the chief. It is His
work, it is His joy, it is His glory to save sinners. For this He exchanged
heaven for earth, relinquished the bosom of His Father for the embrace of the
cross. He was never known to reject a poor sinner that came to Him; He has
never refused to take within His sheltering side, to hide within His bleeding
bosom, the penitent that sought its protection, fleeing from the condemnation
of the law to the asylum of the cross. “Whoever comes unto me, I will in
no wise cast out.” With such a declaration as this, flowing from the lips
of Jesus, who can refuse to look from the greatness of his own sin and guilt,
to the greatness of His love, the greatness of His grace, the greatness of His
salvation, “who came into the world to save sinners”?
The duty, the privilege, the
safety, the unspeakable happiness!
(John Newton)
“Looking unto Jesus!” Hebrews
12:2
Look unto the Lord Jesus Christ!
Look unto Him as He hung exposed, wounded, bleeding, dead, and
forsaken upon the cross!
Look unto Him again as He now reigns in glory, possessed of all
power in Heaven and in earth, with thousands of thousands of saints and angels
worshiping Him! And then compare . . .
your sins — with His blood,
your needs — with His fullness,
your unbelief — with His faithfulness,
your weakness — with His strength,
your inconstancy — with His everlasting love!
If the Lord opens the eyes of your understanding, you would be
astonished at the comparison!
“Looking unto Jesus” is the duty, the privilege, the safety, the unspeakable happiness, of a
believer — are all comprised in that one sentence!
It is by looking to Jesus, that the believer is enlightened and
strengthened, and grows in grace and knowledge of Him.
We are as moths near
a burning candle!
(Charles Spurgeon)
Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity
Ps 119:37
Dear friends, do not gaze upon any sin . . .
for looking breeds longing,
and longing begets lusting,
and lusting brings sinning!
Keep your eyes right — and you may keep your heart right.
If that first woman had not looked upon the
forbidden tree and seen “that the tree was good for food, and that it was
pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise,” she
would not have plucked and eaten the forbidden fruit — and we would not have
been the children of sin and sorrow!
O friends, if we begin to look upon iniquity, we
shall almost certainly fall! There are some sins that we poor, frail creatures
cannot endure to look at. We are
as moths near a burning candle —
the only safety for us is to get out of the room and fly into the open air. But
if we go near the candle — we shall certainly burn our wings and, perhaps, even
destroy ourselves!
Just so, we must take care that we do not get used to
sin. I believe that even the common reading in the newspapers of accounts
of evil things is defilingto us. If we habitually read
such things, we shall come, at last, to think less and less of the coarser
forms of vice than we ought to do.
Nothing can keep us away from the fangs of sin, like
falling into the embraces of Christ. Looking unto Jesus, is the great remedy
against looking unto sin!
Turn away my eyes from vanity, my Lord, by filling them full
with a vision of Yourself and holding me spellbound with that grandest
spectacle that eyes of men, or angels, or even of God, Himself ever saw — the
spectacle of God Incarnate bearing our sin in His own body on the Cross!
Keep your eyes fixed there — and all will be well.
Reformation?
I hear a lot about “reformation” in our day. There are reformed churches, reformed doctrine, reformed preachers and reformed believers, everything seems to be “reformed.” The word “reform” means to “improve or to make better.” If “reformation” means to improve myself or make myself better, then, I do not need reformation! What I need is a perfect righteousness. I surely cannot find any hope of eternal life in trying to make myself better, especially when God requires perfection. I do not need “reformation”; I need “regeneration.” I do not need to get my heart right; I need a new heart that is right. The lost sinner does not need to just change their way; they need to change their God. I do not need to make myself “better”, I need to be made “perfect.” I do not need reformation, I need a “new creation”, which can only be found in Christ.
~David Eddmenson