THE COLLECTED WORKS OF OCTAVIUS WINSLOW

VOLUME 9.1

## THE PRECIOUS THINGS OF

## GOD

## BY OCTAVIUS WINSLOW

CROWDEDSHIP PUBLISHING

## The Collected Works of Octavius Winslow: Volume 9.1 The Precious Things of God: Divine Realities in the Life of Faith Copyright © 2026 Aaron Sturgill All rights reserved.

This work by Octavius Winslow (1808–1878) is in the public domain. This edition © 2026 Aaron Sturgill.

This volume is a faithful, unabridged reproduction of The Precious Things of God. The text has been newly typeset, with minor formatting adjustments for readability. The author’s language and structure remain unchanged.

Pagination in this edition follows modern conventions.

The original work is in the public domain. The transcription, formatting, and editorial arrangement of this edition are copyright © 2026 Aaron Sturgill. All rights reserved.

Published by: Crowdedship Publishing Waterloo, Wisconsin

## Preface .......................................................................................... 5

## 1. The Preciousness Of Christ ................................................... 7

## 2. The Preciousness Of Faith .................................................. 23

## 3. The Preciousness Of Trial .................................................. 43

## 4. The Preciousness Of God's Thoughts .............................. 63

## 5. The Preciousness Of The Divine Promises ...................... 77

## 6. The Preciousness Of Christ's Blood .................................. 87

## 7. The Precious Anointing .................................................... 103

## 8. The Preciousness Of God's Children .............................. 115

## 9. The Preciousness Of God's Word ................................... 131

## 10. The Preciousness Of Prayer ........................................... 151

## 11. The Preciousness Of Christ's Sympathy With Our Infirmities ................................................................................ 180

## 12. The Death Of The Saints Precious ................................ 200

## PREFACE

A slight glance at the contents of this volume will convey an idea of its character and design. It is intended to be, not so much a systematic treatise of theology, as the companion, in his hours of devotional, meditative retirement, of the experienced and spiritual Christian. The truths which it contains, and the style in which they are presented, are perhaps more adapted to those peculiar seasons in the Christian experience of the believer, in which profound discussion and labored thought would not only be distasteful, but out of place. Bearing with him the volume in his sequestered walks with God, or making it the sharer of his temporary seclusion from the active engagements of life, the “precious things of God” which it unfolds may serve to shed the perfume and the luster of Jesus' name and work around his lone and pensive path—cheering solitude, soothing grief, and dissolving doubt, depression, and gloom. Many and costly are the precious things of God not enumerated in this work; blessed are they who, from the volume of their personal and spiritual experience, can complete the catalogue, and supply the Author's lack. These pages address themselves pointedly and strongly to that essential principle of vital religion— the experimental. We really know as much of the gospel of Christ, and of the Christ of the gospel, as by the power of the Holy Spirit we have the experience of it in our souls. All other acquaintance with Divine truth must be regarded as merely intellectual, theoretical, speculative, and of little worth. But, to apprehend, in some measure, the value, the glory, and the preciousness of the Lord Jesus, and, as a consequence, to esteem Him above all good, to reflect His image, to labor in His service, and to be found preparing and waiting for the happy moment described with such exquisite beauty by Doddridge, and as he only could portray it,—

“That blessed interview, how sweet! To fall transported at His feet; Raised in His arms, to see His face

Through the full beamings of His grace!” —this, this is spiritual LIFE. And, compared with the heart-experience of this, when we take a close, realizing survey of eternity, all other subjects of study and employments of time appear but solemn trifling with our destiny.

The Author regrets, that to the discussion of themes so transcendently important and precious he should have brought so much human feebleness and infirmity. His work, planned amid the happy tranquility and repose of a long and warmly-attached pastorate, and finished amid the scenes of anxiety, excitement, and toil incident to a new and more extended sphere of ministerial labor, has necessarily been exposed to much that was unfavorable to that matured thought, careful composition, and literary finish which he considers efforts of this kind should possess. His hope, however, is, that, imperfect as is his production, the Divine Spirit may yet deign to bless it to the saving of precious souls, give it acceptance with the Church of Christ, and use it for the advancement of the cause of God and truth in the world,—and the glory shall be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, three Persons in the One God, world without end. Amen.

Bath, September 1859

## 1. THE PRECIOUSNESS OF CHRIST

“Unto you therefore who believe He is precious.” 1 Peter 2:7.

A felt conviction of the preciousness of the Savior has ever been regarded by enlightened ministers of the gospel as constituting a scriptural and unmistakable evidence of the existence of divine life in the soul; and in moments when neither time nor circumstance would admit of the close scrutiny of a theological creed, or a nice analysis of spiritual feelings and emotions, the one and simple inquiry upon which the whole matter is made to hinge has been—“What is your experience of the worth of the Savior? Is Christ precious to your heart?” And the answer to this question has been to the examiner, the test and the measure of the soul's spiritual and vital change. And how proper that it should be so. In proportion as the Holy Spirit imparts a real, intelligent sense of personal sinfulness, there will be the heart's appreciation of the value, sufficiency, and preciousness of the Lord Jesus. An enlightened and thorough conviction of the nature and aggravation of the disease, will enable a physician to form a just conception of the remedial process by which it may be arrested and cured. We estimate the force of a motive power by the strength of the body it propels. Thus, as the conviction of our lost and undone condition deepens, as sin's “exceeding sinfulness “ unveils, as the purity and extent of God's law opens, as the utter helplessness and impotence of self is forced upon the mind, the glory, the worth, the suitableness, and the preciousness of Jesus will, through the teaching of the Spirit, present itself vividly to the mind and heart, as constituting the one only foundation and hope of the soul!

The Bible recognizes but two specific and distinctive characters—the SINNER—the SAVIOR; and all others are but modifications of these. The saint is but the sinner converted, justified, pardoned, adopted, sanctified, saved,

glorified. And all the official relations sustained by Christ in the economy of salvation are but so many varied and beautiful forms of the one Savior, of whom it is said, “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.” Thus, then, as you feel your sinfulness, you will estimate the fitness and suitableness of the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior. There will be a perfect agreement between your consciousness of guilt and your believing apprehension of the excellence of the Atonement to meet your case. Your sinnership and Christ's Saviorship will harmonize and dovetail in exact and beautiful fitness and proportion.

Oh, what a divine and blessed arrangement is this! With what grandeur, yet with what simplicity, does it invest the scheme of salvation! What solemnity, yet what hope, does it throw around the present and the future of the soul! It seems to fathom the lowest depth of my sinfulness, while it lifts me to the loftiest height of God's grace. In a volume designed to place before its readers a few of the precious things of God's revealed word, we commence, as is most proper, with the foundation and source of them all—the dignity, worth, suitability, and preciousness of Christ. The great truth upon which we are about to expatiate is announced in the words placed at the head of this chapter—“Unto you therefore who believe He is precious.”

In the unfolding of this subject may there rest upon the writer and the reader the fresh anointing of the Holy Spirit, even Him of whom Jesus said, “He will bring me glory by revealing to you whatever he receives from me” - that, while we treat of a precious Savior, His preciousness may be FELT in our hearts, filling the whole soul with penitence, faith, and love. We propose, in the present chapter, to group our thoughts around two specific views of the subject—the Preciousness of Christ —and the Character of those to whom He is precious.

We commence with a consideration of CHRIST'S PERSONAL PRECIOUSNESS—His preciousness in Himself. It is the conviction of Christ's personal dignity and worth that gives to faith such a substantial realization of the greatness and preciousness of His work. We have need, beloved, to be cautioned against an error into which some have fallen—of exalting the work of Christ above the person of Christ—in other words, not tracing the efficacy of Christ's sacrifice to the essential dignity of Christ's

person. The Godhead of the Savior admitted—His atoning death becomes a fact of easy belief. Once concede that He who died upon the cross was “GOD manifest in the flesh,” and the mind will experience no difficulty in admitting that that death was sacrificial and expiatory.

The sufferings and death of a Being so illustrious must be in harmony with an object, and in connection with a result of equal dignity and momentousness; and where will there be found such an object and such a result as the SALVATION of man? The brilliant achievements of a general rushing to the rescue of a beleaguered garrison may so exalt his personal genius and valor as to invest his name with a glory peerless and immortal; but the reverse of this holds good with Christ.

There had been no glory in His achievements, no significance in His work, no efficacy in His blood, had there been no divine dignity and worth in His person. And, had He not taken a single step in working out the salvation of man—had He repaired no breach, wept no tear, endured no agony, shed no blood in the redemption of His Church,—had He, in a word, conferred not a solitary blessing upon our race—He still had been the ETERNAL SON OF GOD, divine, peerless, glorious—the object of supreme love, adoration, and worship by all celestial beings and through all eternal ages.

While, then, His sacrificial work illustrates His marvelous grace and love to sinners, that work owes all its acceptance and efficacy to the value imparted to it by the essential Deity of His person. Thus, it is the personal preciousness of Christ that imparts an official preciousness to His work. Who, then, is the Lord Jesus Christ? In common parlance, men term Him, “our Savior.” But do the great body pause and reflect who Christ really is? Do they regard Him as the CREATOR Of this world—of all worlds? of their being—of all beings? Do they consider that “all things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made?” If so, would they not give Him divine homage, since that Who creates must be antecedent to and above the thing created, and therefore must be pre-existent and divine?

But what a grand and glorious truth is this to the believing soul—the absolute Deity of the Savior—the essential Godhead of Christ! How it endears Him to the heart as the Rock of ages upon which its hope is built! How precious must be every evidence of the divine strength, stability, and durability

of that basis upon which the believing sinner reposes his whole salvation. Precious, then, is Christ as God. Precious in His Deity—precious as a distinct person in the adorable Godhead—precious as “God over all, blessed for evermore.”

But pause, Christian reader, for a moment, in wonder and praise before this august truth. If there is a spot where we should put off the shoes from our feet, surely it is this. With what profound reverence, with what silent awe, yet with what adoring love should we contemplate the GODHEAD of our Redeemer! But for that Godhead we had been forever lost! His obedience to the law, His satisfaction to the justice of Jehovah, had been of no efficacy or avail, except only as it partook of the authority, dignity, and virtue of His higher nature. Do not question the existence of the fact because of the mystery of its mode. How Jehovah could become incarnate is a wonder we shall never, in this state of limited knowledge, fully understand; enough that it is so. Let reason reverently adore, and faith implicitly trust.

Hesitate not, then, to give full credence to all the glorious truths of the gospel, and to place the entire weight of your soul upon the Atonement of Jesus, and to believe that, sinner though you are, be it the very chief, such is the divine worth and sovereign efficacy of His sacrifice, you will, you must, you shall be saved to the uttermost, because your Creator is your Savior, and your Judge is your Justifier.

But this personal representation of the Lord Jesus involves also the preciousness of His manhood. His personal alliance with our nature, His condescending stoop to our humanity, is not the least endearing feature to the heart of His believing saints. We have claimed for the Son of God absolute Deity; we now claim for Him perfect humanity. “Flesh,” real and substantial, yet, “holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners,” was He “made.” A humanity identical with His people in all but its original and actual sinfulness. “He knew no sin.”

And yet, what a sin-bearer was He! All the transgressions of His elect met upon Him! But He could only bear sin, as He himself was essentially free from its taint. Had there been the remotest breath of pollution adhering to Him— had one drop of the moral virus circulated through His veins, it had rendered Him utterly and forever incapable of presenting to the justice of God, an

atonement for sin. He then would have needed, like the high priest of old, to have offered for sins “first for Himself, then for the people.” How precious, then, beloved, is our Lord Jesus as “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.”

Think of His perfect humanity—a humanity free from sin, and therefore capable of dying for the ungodly, -a humanity laden with sorrow, and therefore capable of sympathizing with the afflicted. Precious to our hearts as God— precious as Man—precious as both united in one—inconceivably and eternally precious is He, whose name is “Wonderful,” to His believing saints. Tell, oh tell, how precious is that humanity of the Son of God that partook, by actual participation, and still bears, by the most perfect sympathy, all the sinless weaknesses, infirmities, temptations, and sorrows of His people. Precious humanity! to which, when other human friendships are changed, and other human love is chilled, and other human sympathy is exhausted, you may repair, and find it an evergreen, a perennial stream, a gushing fountain of unchanged affection, tenderness, and sympathy, meeting and satisfying, to their utmost capacity, your hearts' deep pantings!

Precious humanity! that dries each tear, that bears each burden, that is touched with each infirmity, that soothes each sorrow, and that succours each temptation of His people. “In all things it behooved Him to be made like unto His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of His people. For in that He himself has suffered being tempted, He is able to succor those who are tempted.” Oh, love the Lord, then, all you His saints; laud Him, all you His people; and, in all your deep griefs, your lonely sorrows, your sore trials, your fiery temptations, your pressing needs, your daily infirmities, repair to the succourings, and the sympathies, and the intercessions of His humanity, and learn how precious Jesus can be to the hearts of His suffering and sorrowing ones.

Upon this rock of Christ's complex person God has built His Church, and the gates of hell cannot prevail against it. Precious is the Lord Jesus in His work. That must be a costly and substantial superstructure that reposes upon a basis so divine and perfect. No wise or experienced architect would, at a vast expenditure, lay a deep, broad foundation for the purpose of rearing upon it a small and fragile fabric. Look at the ground work of our salvation. “Thus says

the Lord God, Behold, I lay in Zion, for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner-stone, a sure foundation.” Upon such a foundation we look for a superstructure in all respects worthy of its costliness and capability. We find it in the work of Jesus.

Oh, what a superstructure is it—nothing less than the salvation of His Church! Such a work was worthy of God, and of all the glory, wisdom, and power embarked in its accomplishment. Nowhere have we such a perfect view of the Divine glory as through the medium of the cross! That magnificent sky that spreads above us, studded and glowing with countless myriads of worlds, pales before the subdued glory, the softened splendor of the cross of Christ! Nowhere does Jehovah-Jesus appear to the spiritual, believing mind so exalted as when He stoops! so glorious as when in eclipse! so holy as when bearing sin! so loving as when enduring its punishment! so triumphant as when vanquished upon the cross!

Oh, do not study God in the jeweled heavens—in the sublimity of the mountain—in the beauty of the valley—in the grandeur of the ocean—in the murmurs of the stream—in the music of the winds. God made all this, but all this is not God. Study Him in the cross of Jesus! Look at Him through this wondrous telescope, and although, as through a glass darkly, you behold His glory—the Godhead in awful eclipse, the Sun of His Deity setting in blood— yet that rude and crimsoned cross more fully reveals the mind of God, more harmoniously discloses the perfections of God, and more perfectly unveils the heart of God, and more fully exhibits the glory of God, than the combined power of ten thousand worlds like this, even though sin had never marred, and the curse had never blighted it.

Study God in Christ, and Christ on the cross! Oh, the marvels that meet in it—the glory that gathers round it—the streams of blessing that flow from it—the deep refreshing shadow it casts, in the happy experience of all who look to Jesus and live—who look to Jesus and love—who look to Jesus and obey-who look to Jesus and embrace that blessed “hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before the world began.” A worthy structure this of a foundation so divine!

What could be more worthy of God, whose essence is “love,” than the salvation of His people? In nothing could He appear more like Himself. Upon

no platform could He so honorably and completely withdraw the veil from His perfections, and stand forth in His full-orbed majesty, “mighty to save,” as this! Humble believer in Christ, you are saved! Happy saint of God, you shall be in heaven! Christ has paid your debt, opened your prison, broken your chains, and set you free from the law's curse, from sin's condemnation, and from death's penalty, and you will be forever with the Lord! Is not this enough to make your whole life, clouded and checkered though it be, a sweet psalm of praise—thus learning the first notes of the song that will employ your tongue through eternity?

How precious is the righteousness of Christ—a righteousness that fully justifies our person, completely covering all our deformity, and presenting us to God, “lovely through His loveliness put upon us;” wherefore the renown of the clothed and adorned Church goes forth through all the earth, and men inquire, “Who is she that looks forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?”

And look at the preciousness of His sacrifice, which is as a “sweet-smelling savor unto God,” ascending ever from off the golden altar before the throne, in one continuous cloud of incense, wreathing the people, perfuming the prayers, accompanying the offerings, and presenting with acceptance every breath of devotion, every accent of praise, and every token of love which His people here below lay at His feet. “By one offering He has perfected forever those who are sanctified.” That “one offering,” offered once for all, was so divine, so holy, so complete, so satisfactory, it has forever perfected the pardon, perfected the justification, perfected the adoption, and will perfect the sanctification when it perfects the glory of all the elect of Jehovah. Beloved, is not this enough to check every sigh, to quell every fear; to annihilate every doubt, and to fill you with peace and joy in believing? What shouts of praise to Jesus should burst from every lip as each believer contemplates the sacrifice that has secured his eternal salvation!

When Titus liberated the imprisoned Greeks, they clustered around his tent, chanting his praises and exclaiming, with impassioned fervor, “A savior! a savior! a savior!” Oh, with what deeper emphasis may every child of God, freed from the chains of sin and of death by the “liberty with which Christ has made him free,” extol the person and chant the praises of that glorious Savior, and

exclaim, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! He has saved His people from their sins!” Believer, demonstrate your sense of the preciousness of this great sacrifice by bringing to it daily sins, by drawing from it hourly comfort, and by laying yourself upon it, body, soul, and spirit, a “living sacrifice unto God.”

How precious is Christ in all the offices and relations which He sustains to His people. Precious as the Head, the 'covenant surety' Head, of His people, the source of life, the seat of power, the fountain of all blessing. Reader, hold fast the Headship of Christ. Acknowledge no legislative head, no administrative head, no authoritative head, no reigning head of the Church, but the Lord Jesus Christ. There are under-currents of priestly domination in the Church of God in the present day, subversive of this cardinal truth, against which it behooves us to be on our guard. Acknowledge no spiritual Head and King in Zion but the Lord Jesus; and demonstrate your recognition of, reverence for, and love to, His government, by vindicating His Headship, bowing to His authority, and obeying His laws!

Oh, how blessed to be under the holy, benevolent, and gentle government of Christ, whose scepter is a scepter of righteousness, so mild and loving in its sway, that “He will not break the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax.” Precious is He as the Husband of His Church, to whom He is united by the closest and most indissoluble ties, pledged to discharge all her obligations, to supply all her need, to soothe, by sympathy, her every sorrow, and to increase, by participation, her every joy.

Precious is He as a Friend -the Friend whose love is infinite and boundless, changing not with circumstances, chilling not with indifference, nor wearying with lapse of years—a Friend who shows himself friendly, who loves at all times, and who sticks closer than a brother.

Precious as a Brother, our kinsman-redeemer, our next of kin, claiming and exercising, as such, the right of redemption, and proving Himself, by His help and succor in all the calamities of His brethren, to be a “Brother born for adversity.” Thus might we travel over all the offices and relations which the Lord Jesus sustains to His saints, and find in each that which endears Him to their souls, enthroning Him upon their hearts as the “chief among ten thousand,” and exhibiting Him as “the altogether lovely one.”

But to whom is Christ precious? This is a most important question. He is not precious to all. It is a privileged class, a peculiar people, a little flock, few and scattered, hidden and unknown, who feel the Savior's preciousness. Only to the believer is Christ precious; the declaration of the Holy Spirit is, “Unto you therefore who BELIEVE He is precious.” This is philosophically as well as scripturally true. There cannot possibly be a felt conviction of the worth of an object of which we have no intelligent and clear perception. There must be something to create interest, to awaken admiration, to inspire love; the object must be seen, known, and tried.

Now, the only spiritual faculty that discerns Christ, and in discerning Christ realizes His preciousness, is faith. Faith is the optical faculty of the regenerate, it is the spiritual eye of the soul! Faith sees Christ, and as Christ is seen His excellence is recognized; and as His excellence unfolds, so He becomes an object of endearment to the heart! Oh, how lovely and how glorious is Jesus to the clear, far-seeing eye of faith! Faith beholds Him the matchless, peerless One; His beauty eclipsing, His glory outshining, all other beings! Faith sees majesty in His lowliness, dignity in His condescension, honor in His humiliation, beauty in His tears, transcendent, surpassing glory in His cross!

In natural things, as the beauty of an object unveils to the eye, it awakens in the mind a corresponding interest. The grey mist of morning slowly rising from off the face of nature, revealing a landscape of rich and varied beauty— the blending of mountain and valley, the green meadows and winding streams, presents an object which, in every mind susceptible of the sublime and the beautiful, inspires the feeling of admiration and delight. Beloved, in proportion as the personal dignity, beauty, and excellence of the Lord Jesus unfolds to the believing eye, He becomes more sensibly and deeply enshrined in the heart's warmest love! We must know the Lord Jesus to admire Him, and must admire Him to love Him, and must love Him to serve Him.

The believer, too, beholds a suitability in Christ, sees Him to be just the Savior adapted to the necessities of his soul; and this renders Him peculiarly precious. “I see Him,” exclaims the believer, “to be exactly the Christ I need— His fulness meets my emptiness—His blood cleanses my guilt—His grace subdues my sin—His patience bears with my infirmities—His gentleness succours my weakness—His love quickens my obedience—His sympathy

soothes my sorrows—His beauty charms my eye. He is just the Savior, just the Christ I need, and no words can describe His preciousness to my soul!”

There is thus an appropriation of Christ in the personal experience of every believer which endears Him to the heart. A Christ unappropriated is a Christ whose worth is undervalued, and whose preciousness is unfelt. The believer can say, “Christ is mine, and I have all things in one, even in Christ, who is my all and in all.” This simple, trembling faith, sublime in its simplicity, mighty in its tremblings, sweeps all the treasures of the everlasting covenant of grace and all the fulness of the Surety of the covenant into its lap, and exclaims, “All is mine, because Christ is mine, and I am Christ's.”

Do not shrink, beloved reader, from what the quaint divines of other days, and, perhaps, of a deeper experience and of a sounder creed than ours, were wont to term a “Christ-appropriating faith.” If you have fled to Jesus as a poor, empty, believing sinner, there is not a throb of love in His loving heart, nor a drop of blood in His flowing veins, nor a particle of grace in His mediatorial fulness, nor a thought of peace in His divine mind, which is not yours, all yours, inalienably yours, as much yours as if you were its sole possessor! And in proportion as you thus deal with Christ, individually traveling to Him, living upon Him, living out of Him, dealing as personally with Him as He deals personally with you, He will involve Himself in your concerns, and will become growingly precious to your soul.

There are peculiar circumstances in the believer's experience when Christ becomes especially precious to the soul. For example: in the deeper ploughings of the heart's hidden sinfulness—when the Holy Spirit reveals more of the innate corruption of our nature, and gives a more spiritual perception of sin's exceeding sinfulness, oh, how precious does the finished work of Christ then become! how precious the blood that cleanses from all sin! If God is leading you through this stage of Christian experience, beloved, be not alarmed; it is but to build up His dear Son upon the wreck and ruin of your own merit, strength, and sufficiency. He will have us love His Son with a love like His own—a love of divine, supreme, ineffable affection—and this can only be felt in the region of our own nothingness!

In circumstances of spiritual relapse, how precious does Christ become, as the Restorer of His saints, as the Shepherd that goes in quest, of His stray

sheep, and brings it back to the fold with rejoicing! How unspeakably dear is the Savior to the wandering yet restored heart! Our backslidings are perpetual and aggravated, our affections fickle and truant, our faith fluctuating, our love waning, our zeal flagging, our walk often feeble and unsteady; but Jesus does not withdraw His eye from His own work in the soul, and never for a moment loses sight of His stray-going sheep. Ah, there are few aspects of the work of Jesus more precious in the experience of the saints of God than His divine and gracious restorings. “He restores my soul,” is a declaration of David which finds its response in every believer. Precious, then, is that Savior who breaks the heart, checks its waywardness, restores its wanderings, heals its backslidings, rekindles its love, and once more wakes its languid, silent chords to sweetest harmony.

How precious is Christ in the season of fiery temptation! When the arch- foe comes, robed as an angel of light, with gentle tread, and oily tongue, and soft persuasiveness, seeking to ensnare and beguile the unsuspicious and unwary -leveling his darts at the very foundations of our faith—insinuating his doubts of the truth of the Bible, of the being of God, of the sufficiency of the Savior, of the reality of a future world—thus seeking to shake the confidence, obscure the hope, and destroy the comfort of the Lord's people— oh, how precious then is Christ as the Conqueror and Spoiler of Satan; as He who enables the trembling believer to quench the fiery dart in His own blood, and to take refuge beneath His outspread, all-sheltering wing!

How doubly precious must the Savior have been to the tempted Peter, when Christ assured him that, by an anticipated intercession, He had blunted the keen edge of the sword by which the subtle enemy sought the downfall of his disciple. Tempted believer, the Tempted One, He who, alone and unaided, battled with Satan those forty days and nights in the solitary wilderness—is He who was “in all points tempted like as we are,” and “knows how to deliver the godly out of temptation,” and will shortly bruise Satan, crushed and conquered, under your feet.

In the hour of adversity, of trial, of sorrow, oh, how precious is Christ in the experience of the believer! It would seem, beloved, as though we had never really known Him until then. Certainly, we never knew from experience that there was so much that was human, tender, and compassionate in His heart

until sorrow touched our own. We had no conception what a fount of sympathy was there.

A new bend in your path, a new epoch in your history, or a new stage in your journey, has frosted with the snowflake and swept with the storm-blast of winter, the entire landscape of life; fortune gone, friends removed, health failing, poverty threatening, need pressing. Oh, how dreary and lonely seems the path you tread! But pause—it is not all winter! Jesus approaches! He unveils a bosom once pierced, shows a heart once sad, and drawing you within its blest pavilion, hides you from the wind and covers you from the tempest. You never thought Jesus had a heart of such exquisite tenderness until now.

I do but give utterance to the experience of many a timid believer, many an afflicted Christian, when I say that, looking back upon all the way the Lord our God has led us, we can thank Him for the swelling surge, can bless Him for the wintry blast, can praise Him for the falling blow that veiled the sky, and draped the landscape, and smote the idol, since that was the suitable occasion of making the Savior better known to you, and of endearing him unutterably to your heart!

“You have known my soul in adversities.” And that adversity was the time in which you were more fully brought to know Him. Chastening seasons are teaching seasons; suffering times are Christ-endearing times; trying dispensations are purifying processes in the experience of the godly. The whirlwind that swept over you has but cleared your sky and made it all the brighter, but deepened your roots and made them all the firmer. Earth may have lost a tie, but heaven has gained an attraction. The creature has left a blank, but Christ has come and filled it. Setback has made you poor, but the treasures of divine love have enriched you. In the Lord Jesus you have more than found the loved one you have lost; and if in the world you have encountered tribulation, in Him you have found peace. O sweet sorrow! O sacred grief, that enthrones and enshrines my Savior more pre-eminently and deeply in my soul!

There is a supremacy in the feeling of Christ's preciousness to the believer, which is worthy of a remark. Christ has the pre-eminence in the affections of the regenerate! “Whom have I in heaven but you? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside you.” Listen to His own words, asserting His claim to a

single and supreme affection: “Whoever loves father or mother, brother or sister, wife or children, more than Me, is not worthy of Me.” There are natural ties of affection—the parental, the marital, the filial. There are ties, too, of human love and friendship, linking heart to heart; but not one word does He who inspired those affections, who formed those ties, breathe, denying their existence or forbidding their exercise.

No, the religion He came to inculcate distinctly recognizes these human relations, and seeks to strengthen and intensify by purifying, elevating, and immortalizing them. But mark the emphatic word employed by Christ— “MORE than Me! “ All these affections are to have full play and exercise, but ever to be maintained in profound subordination to Himself, and to be so sanctified and employed as to become auxiliaries and aids to the higher and purer affection of supreme attachment to the Savior! In a word, Christ should become more supreme and precious to our hearts by all the sweet, sacred relations and affections of life. We should enjoy the creature in Him, and glorify Him in the creature.

Christ is not only supremely, but He is increasingly precious to the believer. It must be so, since a closer intimacy with a perfect being increases our knowledge of His perfection, and, in the same ratio, our admiration and love. The further the believer advances in the divine life, the more he must necessarily become acquainted with Christ; for his spiritual progress is the measure of his growing knowledge of the Lord Jesus. We can only really advance in grace, truth, and holiness, as we have close relations with Jesus, constant transactions with the Savior.

Christ is our life; and our growth in spiritual life is Christ increasing within us. It is as utterly impossible to cherish a holy desire, to conceive a heavenly thought, to perform a good action, to conquer a single infirmity, or to baffle a solitary temptation, apart from a direct communication with Christ; as for the lungs to expand without air, or light to exist without the Sun. Oh, yes! Christ is increasingly precious to the believer. The absence from His beatific presence—distance from His blest abode—the vicissitudes of life—the fluctuations of time—the advance of infirmities—the increase of anxieties and cares—and the formation of new friendships, do not render the Savior less precious to the believing soul.

Other objects often lose their attraction, their desire to interest, or their power to charm us, by the lapse of years; but JESUS is that glorious object who grows more precious to the heart in time, as His capacity unfolds of making us supremely happy; and in eternity will become increasingly the object of our love, and the theme of our song, and the source of our bliss, as growing ages unveil His loveliness, His glory, and His grace!

Beloved reader, is Jesus increasingly precious to your soul? Each day's history, each day's trial, each day's sin, each day's need, should endear the Savior to your heart, because in each and all of those circumstances you should have direct and close dealings, daily and personal transactions, with Christ! You cannot cultivate an intimacy with Christ and not be enamored of His beauty, charmed with His graciousness, and absorbed with His love!

Be cautioned against an eclipse of the Savior! Let no object come between your heart and Christ! Do not be presumptuous when in high spiritual frames, nor be depressed when in low ones. Do not let your conscious shortcomings, failures, and stumblings estrange your affections from Jesus. Nor allow pride or carelessness to insinuate itself, if the Lord confers upon you some especial favor or proof of His regard.

The foot is more apt to slide in the smooth than in the rough path; and it is more difficult to carry with a steady hand the brimmed than the empty cup. Walk humbly with God in all circumstances, especially after seasons of peculiar nearness to Him in your soul. Forget your spiritual attire, and your ornaments, and think of and love only Him who clothed you so beautifully and who adorned you so magnificently. Do not toy with your graces, but look to Him who gave them. Let all your thoughts, affections, and admiration be concentrated in that precious Savior, who took all your sins, deformity, and sorrow upon Himself, and who transferred all His righteousness, beauty, and blessing upon you!

Oh, let your heart and Christ's heart be one heart! Receive as precious everything that flows from the government of Jesus. A precious Christ can give you nothing but what is precious. Welcome the rebuke—it may be humiliating; welcome the trial—it may be painful; welcome the lesson—it may be difficult; welcome the cup—it may be bitter; welcome everything that comes from Christ in your individual history. Everything is costly, salutary, and

precious that Jesus sends. The rude tones of Joseph's voice, when he spoke to his brethren, were as much the echoes of his concealed affection, as the softest, gentlest accents that breathed from his lips. The most severe disciplinary dispensations in the government of Christ are as much the fruit of His eternal, redeeming love, as was the tenderest and most touching expression of that love uttered from the cross.

All is precious, wise, and salutary in the dealings of Christ. His teachings, His woundings, His withholdings, His withdrawings, His slayings, His changed countenance, His altered tones,—when, in a word, His uplifted hand lands heavily upon us, smiting us seven times, even then, oh, how precious should Christ be to the believing soul! Then it is we learn by experience what a balsam exudes from His pierced heart for the very wound His own hand inflicted! What a covert from the stormy wind, and what a hiding-place is He from the fierce tempest which His own providence created! What a succouring, appropriate to our sorrow, springs from the very hand that winged the dart which pierced us through and through!

Oh, precious Christ! so divine, so all-sufficient, so indescribably precious, may we not welcome with thankfulness and receive with submission all that You do send—the mingled ingredients of bitter and sweet, the blended tints of light and shade, of all the wise, righteous, and salutary dispensations of Your wise, loving, and ever watchful providence?

But there is approaching a period-ah, how it speeds! -which will be the most solemn and severe, yet the sweetest and truest test of the sustaining, soothing power of Christ's preciousness in the experience of His saints—the last sickness and the closing scene of life. Imagine that moment to have arrived! All of earth's attraction ceases, all of creature-succor fails. Everything is failing—heart and strength failing—mental power failing—medical skill failing—human affection and sympathy failing; the film of death is on the eye, and the invisible realities of the spirit-world are unveiling to the mental view. Bending over you, the loved one who has accompanied you to the shore of the cold river, asks a sign. You are too weak to conceive a thought, too low to breathe a word, too absorbed to bestow a responsive glance. You cannot now assert your faith in an elaborate creed, and you have no profound experience, or ecstatic emotions, or heavenly visions to describe. One brief, but allemphatic, all-expressive sentence embodies the amount of all that you now know, and believe, and feel; it is the profession of your faith, the sum of your experience, the ground of your hope—“Christ Is Precious to My Soul!” Enough! The dying Christian can give, and the inquiring friend can wish no more.

Dearest Savior, be close to me in that solemn moment! Tread the valley by my side, pillow my languid head upon Your bosom, speak these words of heart- cheer to my struggling, panting, departing soul, “Fear not, I Am with you” - then, it will be happiness for me to die, -death will have no venom—the grave no gloom—eternity no dread; and, from the measured experience of Your preciousness on earth, I shall pass in triumph through the shadowy portal into the full sunshine and perfect realization and eternal enjoyment of all that faith believed, and love desired, and hope expected, of Your full-orbed glory and preciousness in heaven. “In your presence is fulness of joy; and at your right hand there are pleasures for evermore!”

“Precious Jesus! O how lovely are You to my longing heart. Never, never let me grieve You, never from You let me depart. Precious Jesus! all in all to me You art.”

## 2. THE PRECIOUSNESS OF FAITH

“Precious faith.” 2 Peter 1:1

The indispensableness of faith as an essential element of salvation, and as an influential instrument in all well-doing for God, is very clearly and impressively set forth in the apostle's declaration, “Without faith it is impossible to please Him.” And yet, what crude and superficial views of this eminent grace of the Spirit do the most of us entertain. To believe is by many regarded as a most facile and commonplace thing. They suppose that an individual can believe when he will, and may believe what he will; that faith is the mere assent of the judgment to a certain creed; and that with this intellectual reception of the truth, there requires no other operation of faith to give its mold to the character, and to impart root and acceptableness to the actings of the Christian's life. And have not even the most enlightened and spiritual of God's people to mourn over their deficiencies touching their conviction of the nature, worth, and preciousness of this grace of the Holy Spirit, apart from which nothing is well-pleasing to God; but springing from which, the lowliest action, the faintest desire, the gentlest throb of the spiritual believing soul, is infinitely precious in the view of Jehovah?

Having in the preceding chapter considered the preciousness of the Object of faith, it seems proper that our thoughts should next be directed to a consideration of the preciousness of faith itself. We desire, as God the Holy Spirit shall guide us, so to unfold the nature and operations of this cardinal grace of the Christian character, as that the unbelieving reader may learn the true nature of saving faith, and that the reader who through divine grace does believe, may have his views of faith so cleared, and faith itself so nourished and invigorated, as shall result in a deeper experience of the power and preciousness of the doctrine of faith. The faith of which we are now to speak

is described by the apostle in the passage from whence our motto is taken, as being “like precious faith with us.” The “faith of God's elect” in all ages of the world, and in all dispensations of the Church, is essentially and identically the same. There is a divine unity in faith which no distance of time, or differences of nation, or standards of theological opinion, or modes of religious worship, or forms of ecclesiastical polity can touch. True faith is essentially and unchangeably the same, in every age, and in every Church, all the world over. Just as the sun that now pours its golden beams by day, and in the moon's soft luster sheds its reflected silver rays by night, is the same that shone on Eden's bowers, that veiled its face in sackcloth when its Incarnate Creator died, and that illumines all creation, so the “precious faith of God's elect,” that now pulsates in the lowliest breast of the believer, is essentially the same as that which poured the joy and luster of a glorious hope upon the trembling spirit of our primeval parent, when God, in evening's twilight, revealed to Adam the promise of a Savior. We propose, in the present chapter, to unfold the preciousness of faith in two or three particulars.

We have already expatiated upon the preciousness of the Object of faith; but we revert to it again, for a moment, as illustrating the preciousness of the character of the grace of faith.

The believing soul, while it reposes on the three persons in the ever adorable Trinity, fixes its eye, in the great matter of salvation, especially upon One—the central Person of the Godhead—embracing whom, it includes in its faith, and enfolds in its affection, the Father and the Holy Spirit. There is a unity and simplicity in all Jehovah's works. In nothing is this more traceable than in the salvation of man, the master-work of God. The object which the gospel presents for his belief is, the Lord Jesus Christ. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.” Thus, a simple and not a complex object is upheld to his eye. There is here nothing to divide the attention, and thus bewilder the mind. As the pole which Moses erected in the wilderness was single—no other object commanding the look of faith—so single and simple is the object of salvation presented in the gospel. “Look unto me, and be you saved”—“Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved,” is the united voice of the two witnesses for Christ, the Old and the New Testament, touching the one Object of faith—a crucified Savior.

Thus, while human religions, be they Romish or Protestant, present a plurality of objects for belief—false saviors many—to the eye, the Bible presents but One—Christ crucified. It is interesting and instructive to trace the interweaving of this blessed doctrine—the unity of the Object of faith—like a thread of gold, throughout the entire Scriptures of truth. In the Levitical economy, every type however varied, every symbol however mysterious, every shadow however profound, had JESUS for its object—all conspired to exalt, and all pointed to, the Lamb of God as the one object of saving faith. Thus, too, with the prophetical writings of Scripture,—“TO HIM gave all the prophets witness.” And in the New Testament the agreement is perfect touching this typical and prophetical testimony to the unity of the object of faith—“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” In another place, the same Divine Savior says, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” “And, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so shall the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Oh, rejoice, beloved reader, that in the great matter of your salvation, your faith has to look to one object only; that, amid your own fluctuations of spiritual feeling, and the conflicting judgments of men, you can—like the roving dove, sweeping with drooping wing the troubled waters and finding no repose, until, weary and panting, she retreats back to the ark,—turn to a full and perfect rest in that one, precious object of faith—the LORD JESUS CHRIST. You find creed contradicting creed, opinion conflicting with opinion, church opposed to church, and your heart sickens within you; but, amid your embarrassment and depression, you bethink yourself of JESUS, and betake yourself to His feet; and in that one object, forever blessed and precious, and in this lowly posture, your fluttering, believing heart finds perfect rest. Oh, thank God that the object of saving faith is one; that, in knowing Jesus, in looking to Jesus, in trusting in Jesus, in confiding your soul to Jesus, you have no fear, misgiving, or doubt; but, in the confidence of a humble, yet unwavering faith, can exclaim, “I know in whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day.”

Thus, then, does faith derive a preciousness from the preciousness of its Object—precious in His person, to which faith looks; precious in His

atonement, to which faith leads; precious in His fullness, from which faith draws; precious in His intercession, in which faith relies; precious in His example, by which faith walks. Thus, let faith contemplate the Lord Jesus in any one of His ten thousand forms of beauty—as the sun unveils the landscape's loveliness, while the landscape endears the luster of the sun—its preciousness is enhanced by contemplating Christ's beauty, while the loveliness of the Savior illustrates the costliness of faith. Precious faith dealing with a precious Christ enriches the believer with the two most precious things of God.

But faith is not only relatively, it is intrinsically precious—precious in itself. It is emphatically denominated, “precious faith.” And with this description of its character will correspond the experience of every true believer in the Lord Jesus. As the universal testimony of men will confirm the value of gold, all evidencing by their earnest, and many by their covetous, pursuit of the metal, its intrinsic value; so shall each believer, though possessing but the smallest portion of this divine gift, witness to its essential and priceless worth. One grain of this precious grace, in his estimation, has in it more of real value, more of positive good, than all the wealth which ever has been, or which yet may be, dug from the mines of the earth. Glance at some of those essential features which stamp the preciousness of faith.

Faith is a divine grace, consequently precious. It has not its origin here. It is a plant indigenous not to our fallen humanity. Faith in that which is created, springs from the creature; faith in that which is human, is human; but the faith which deals with God, believes His word, trusts in His Son, beholds the invisible, and is the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” must be divine. It deals with the spiritual, and itself is spiritual; it has to do with the divine, and itself is divine. We are not born believers. A parent, as Cecil did, may explain to his child by a simple and ingenious illustration the nature of faith, but the faith itself he cannot give. A minister may enforce upon his hearers the necessity of faith (and it is his duty so to do), but be forgets not that the Holy Spirit has written, “Faith is the gift of God.” Thus, then, faith is a superhuman grace. It comes from God, it descends from above; and because it is a supernatural and heavenly grace—proceeding from heaven, and leading to heaven—it is of itself inconceivably precious. Do not think lightly, then,

beloved reader, of the faith which you may have, measured though it may be in its degree and feeble in its exercise—it is divine and precious; and although of this gold from God's mint you may possess but the smallest coin, yet that coin, bearing the superscription of God, will secure your admission into glory, and will put you into the full and eternal possession of that “inheritance which is incorruptible, undefiled, and which fades not away, reserved in heaven for you who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.”

But faith is precious being the product of the Holy Spirit. As a fruit of the Spirit, it is preeminently costly. “The fruit of the Spirit is—faith.” As He is the Author of all that is divine, and holy, and sanctifying, He is, and must be, the Author of that divine root of all holiness in the heart—the grace of faith. The lowliest fruit of the Spirit in the regenerate soul is of priceless worth. And how low and feeble that work may be, who can tell? How hidden—how unsuspected—how faint? Yet, be it but a tear of godly sorrow falling in secret—a sigh soft as an infant's, and breathed to the lone winds of heaven— the eye smiting the earth with its downcast glance of conscious sin—it is truly an emanation of the Spirit, and is as essentially the offspring of faith as is the 'abundant entrance' into the kingdom of grace with which, when in full sail, faith wafts the believing soul. How full is God's word of this! The imagery of the Bible, illustrative of this truth, is exquisitely beautiful. We read of the lily springing among thorns—of the lamb browsing among wolves—of the tremulous touch of the hem—of the dim look—of the bruised reed—of the smoking flax—of the faith that doubts Christ's power while it believes His willingness—of the faith that disbelieves His willingness, yet reposes in His power. Why these varied and expressive images, but to teach us that grace in the soul may be limited in its degree, and yet real in its character,—that faith may be weak in its actings, yet divine in its nature,—that God despises not the day of small things in the spiritual experience and exercises of a gracious soul? Is there a single product of God in nature upon which He looks down with disdain? is there a spire of grass—a shaded flower—a buzzing insect—a winged sparrow—a line of beauty—a gleam of light—a morning's dew-drop, or an evening's zephyr unnoticed or disregarded by Him? No! He despises nothing that He has made. How much less will He regard with indifference, or look with a frown upon the weakest, obscurest, faintest putting forth of the

faith of His own Spirit in the soul! If the lowliest product of nature—fading in its beauty, and evanescent in its duration—is arrayed with loveliness and invested with interest worthy of His notice, how much more the tenderest bud, the lowliest flower of divine grace in the renewed heart!

Not only is faith precious in itself, but the trial of faith is precious. The Holy Spirit thus asserts this truth: “The trial of your faith being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it be tried with fire.” The process as here described is severe—it is the trial of fire. Yet that is the element by which the refiner tests and separates his precious metal. God condescends, as it were, to borrow from man an illustration of His wonder-workings in regard to our faith. He places it in the furnace heated by fire. Thus we find how frequently and pointedly the figure is employed in the Bible. We read of a “fiery furnace” (Daniel 3:6); of the “fiery darts of the wicked” (Ephesians 6:16); of the “fiery trial” (1 Peter 4:12); of “the baptism of fire” (Matthew 3:11); and in the words already quoted—“the trial of your faith, though it be tried with fire.” And yet, severe and painful, and, to all appearance, destructive as this process is to which the faith of God's elect is subjected, it is described as one of the precious things of God in the experience of the saints. Why so? Let us see.

The trial of faith is precious because it attests its reality. Apart from its trial, what an uncertainty attaches to faith! Untried faith is uncertain faith, just as unsmelted ore is suspicious ore. A believing man knows not upon what he is really leaning until God brings his dependence to the proof. Has he wealth? has he strength? has he friends? has he influence? has he interest? has he gifts? How far he may be secretly and unsuspectingly leaning upon one or more of these and not upon God, he cannot know until God tries him. But when all these creature-dependencies, these human supports, tremble and fall from beneath him—when the flood-tide of sorrow has swept them away, or the wintry blast of adversity has scattered them, then comes the grand test of his true support,—he stands or falls, raises his head in hope or droops it in despair, just as is the reality and strength of his faith in God. Trace in some of its illustrious examples the sustaining power of real faith in the hour of its severe trial. “I had fainted,” says the Psalmist, “unless I had BELIEVED to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” In an earlier stage of his tried experience we read, concerning this man of God, that, “David was greatly

distressed; for the people spoke of stoning him,…but David encouraged himself in the Lord his God.” In the prophecy of Habakkuk, there occurs a remarkable and beautiful instance of a like result of a severe trial of faith: “Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet will I rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.” Trace the power of real faith when brought to the trial of that most certain and solemn of all tests—a dying hour: “My flesh and my heart fails: but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” It would seem impossible to surpass these instances of the supporting, sustaining power of real faith in the hour of extreme trial. And yet there is one—the most illustrious—that distances them all, extraordinary and precious though they are. When suspended upon the cross, amid its agony and gloom, in the exercise of a faith that doubted not, staggered not, Jesus clung to a frowning, hiding, deserting Father, exclaiming—“MY GOD, MY God, why have you forsaken me?” Behold the Man—the God- man—the Author, the Giver, the Sustainer, and the Finisher of your faith, treading the path of faith's trial, and leaving you an example that you should follow His steps. Thank God, then, believer in Jesus, for every fresh evidence of the reality of that faith, which is “like precious faith” with the faith of the Son of God. The test may be severe, the trial may be fiery, yet if it confirms you in the blessed assurance, “I know in whom I have believed,” you cannot afford to lose it, scorching and painful as the furnace may have been; that trial may be as severe as Abraham's, when commanded to slay his son—as David's, when the people talked of stoning him—as Job's, when hurled from the pinnacle of health, affluence, and adulation to the lowest depth of sickness, poverty, and contempt—as Daniel's, when cast into the lion's den—as the three children, when thrown into the fiery furnace—or as Paul's, when the messenger of Satan buffeted him—nevertheless, it is the ancient path to glory, and severe though the trial, blessed, eternally blessed, will be the result.

The trial of faith is precious, because it purifies faith. In its own nature faith, as it comes from God, is pure and without alloy. Essentially there is no admixture whatever with the faith the Holy Spirit inspires—it is as pure, sinless, and untainted as was our humanity when it first came from the hands of God.

But, as the mountain stream which starts from its hidden source pure and sparkling, partakes of the earthiness and tint of the soil through which it courses its way into the valley beneath, so the faith which proceeds from God holy and unmixed, mingles with the hidden corruption and unbelief of the heart in which it dwells, and thus becomes alloyed and impaired. Hence the necessity and the preciousness of its trial. The fire separates—the furnace purifies—the crucible refines; and so, in the happy experience of the believer, the trial of faith becomes “much more precious than gold, though it be tried as by fire.” Oh to have the dross of carnality, and the alloy of unbelief, which so dims the luster and paralyzes the vigor of faith destroyed! Nothing, after the fiery trial, may be left, of all that looked so divine, so holy, and so spiritual, but one grain of the pure gold of faith—yet that one grain of faith, obscure, infinitesimal as it may seem, outweighs in its real value millions of worlds, and it shall never, never perish.

But we may illustrate the preciousness of faith by its actings and fruits. Faith is a wonderful plant in the garden of the soul—it yields all manner of precious fruits, and, like the tree of life in the midst of the streets of the New Jerusalem, it bears fruit all the year. Dear reader, there is no holiness in the soul but faith is its root. Springing from, resting in, and looking to Jesus, from whom its fruit is found, faith produces love, joy, peace, patience, holiness, humility, and every grace that adorns the character, and beautifies the walk of a believer in Jesus. Faith is precious, too, in its wonder-workings. It has a powerful faculty of sight and of extraction. It can see both sides of the guiding pillar—the cloudy and the bright. It can extract a smile from God's frown, love from God's displeasure, mercy from God's judgment, encouragement from God's refusal, hope from God's delays; can find a door of hope in the valley of Achor, and can sing as sweetly in the dreary night season as in the bright and sunny day. Wonderful triumph of faith that can say, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord!” Thus faith, laying one dispensation over against another—placing in the scales apparent opposites and contradictions in God's government—can see light in darkness, can produce harmony from discord, and can gather encouragement from defeat; and, dipping its pencil in the darkest colors of sad and gloomy providences,

can trace upon the canvas of the Christian's life some of its most brilliant and cheerful pictures.

From this general view of the fruits of faith, let us specify two or three in particular.

What is peace but a blessed fruit of faith? The peace which God gives, which the Holy Spirit creates, which the Atonement of Christ secures, and which in its nature and blessedness “passes all understanding,” is only received from precious faith dealing with a precious Christ. Were you, my reader, banished like John to some lone isle, bearing with you but a fragment of the Bible—that fragment the single but full and sublime declaration, “Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”—it were enough to calm, cheer, and assure your mind, amid all the dreadful consequences of sin, with the hope of a full acceptance with God through Christ. Oh, how real and tranquillizing the peace which simple faith brings into the soul the moment Jesus is seen as the “Prince of peace,” as “making peace,” as “our peace,” and as bequeathing “peace,” His last legacy of love to His saints! All peace is contained in that one word—RECONCILIATION. Reconciled to God through the peace-making, peace-speaking “blood of the everlasting covenant,” there is no longer any ground of condemnation, nor fear of hell. “If God be for us, who can be against us?” God pacified towards us, no matter who accuses or condemns; the believing sinner, at peace with God through Christ, can afford to be at war with the world, the flesh, and the devil. Beloved, bring all your sin and guilt to the atoning blood of Jesus, and the “God of peace” will give you peace; and “when He gives quietness, who then can make trouble?”

And what is true joy—a twin grace with peace—but a precious fruit of faith? The apostle reminds us of this—“Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing.” In the same proportion to the directness and simplicity with which your faith deals with Christ, looks to Christ, lives upon the fullness of Christ, rests in the complete salvation, the finished work of Christ, draws all its evidences and hopes from Christ, will be your “joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Nothing can enkindle this holy joy in the heart but a believing view of what the Lord Jesus is, and what He has done. It is only a sense of full pardon, of free justification, of gracious adoption, of the hope

of glory, that can awaken real joy in the soul of a believing sinner. What joy can there be in the heart of a convicted felon, or of a condemned criminal, or of a convict paying the sad penalty of his crime in lonely exile, toil, and degradation? None whatever. But convey to him a free pardon, unbar his prison, break his manacles, and bid him go free; restore him to his country, his family, his home, and, bruised and broken though that heart be with a consciousness of guilt and a sense of shame, you yet have awoken in its sad chambers the sweetest chimes, and joy, entrancing joy, thrills and dilates his bosom. Such is the picture of a soul cleansed from the guilt of sin, and freed from the condemnation of the law by a believing acceptance of the Lord Jesus Christ. That moment Christ is received into the lowly, penitent, and believing heart—the instant that Christ is seen paying the great debt, suffering the penalty, enduring the condemnation—a joy springs up in the soul such as never thrilled an angel's heart, and all this joy is “joy in believing.” “In this rejoice not,” says the Savior, “that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.” Oh, how much more joyful would the saints of God be did they deal less with themselves, and more with Jesus! They look at their sins, pore over their unfitness, pine at their leanness, and succumb to their failures and infirmities, their poverty and emptiness, and so all sweet, sacred joy droops and dies within their souls. But, “the joy of the Lord is your strength.” “The meek shall increase their joy in the Lord.” And seeing that the Lord has “clothed them with the garments of salvation, and has covered them with the robe of righteousness,” it is the privilege of their soul “greatly to rejoice in the Lord, and to be joyful in their God” (Isaiah 61:10). But, beloved, remember that Christ's joy can only remain in you, and your joy be full, as in childlike faith you look directly, and only, and constantly to Christ. “We joy in God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.” Oh for a higher tone of holy joy among the Lord's redeemed! Who in this vast universe have such reason to make the valley resound and the mountain echo with the glad notes of praise, as you who are freed from servitude, who are delivered from hell, and who are on your way to heaven, to spend your eternity—“forever with the Lord?” Beloved reader, if you are saved—if, in the exercise of the lowliest faith, you can cherish the hope of acceptance, as a poor sinner, with God through Christ—you may rejoice in

tribulation, and glory in infirmity, and count the sufferings of this present time not worthy to be compared with the glory that will be revealed in you. “Rejoice in the Lord, and again I say, Rejoice.”

This precious faith is equally the parent of all holiness, and in this view is not less precious to the child of God. There is no true holiness apart from faith in the Lord Jesus—it is the root of all real sanctification. “Purifying their hearts by faith” (Acts 15:9). “Faith, that purifies the heart and works by love” (Galatians 5:6). How much is there in the outward religion of many that has all the appearance of holiness, but which is yet unholy in the sight of a holy God! The religious worship, practices, and duties of some, clothed with an air of sanctity so profound, and which awaken the awe, win the admiration, and elicit the applause of so many, pass for nothing with that infinitely holy Being concerning whom it is written by the Holy Spirit, “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” Faith is a revealing, emptying, impoverishing grace—it gives its real possessor to see the depravity of his own nature, the vileness of his own heart, the worthlessness of his own righteousness, and the innumerable flaws, spots, and failures of all holy spiritual doings. It opens the eye, too, to Christ, and by its gentle and persuasive influence leads the soul, thus emptied and impoverished, to Him, as having all fullness of righteousness, all riches of grace, all soothings of love treasured up for the “poor in spirit,” and for those who “hunger and thirst after righteousness.” Faith resting in Christ, beholding Him who is invisible, will mold and influence the believer's entire walk. It begets holy principle, and holy principles inspire holy practice, and a holy practice will be “filled with the fruits pf righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God” (Philippians 1:11). This precious faith will influence a man to walk prayerfully, circumspectly, and vigilantly. His daily prayer will be, “Let integrity and uprightness preserve me.” In his worldly calling he will seek to glorify God. The false balance, the scanty measure, the exaggeration of the seller, the depreciation of the buyer, the rash speculation, the prodigal expenditure, the grasping covetousness, love for the world, its pleasures, attire, and show, an uncharitable, unforgiving, censorious, malicious spirit, with all the corruptions and sinful infirmities of our fallen nature,—true faith, looking to Christ and dealing with eternal realities, will constrain the believer to war against, crucify, and conquer. “This is the victory that

overcomes the world, even our faith.” Oh for more of this heart-purifying, soul-elevating, Christ-assimilating, God-glorifying, heaven-attracting faith! When your worldly business opposes God's glory, your interests Christ's honor, your temper the Spirit's witness, your conduct the high and heavenly calling you profess, remember that true faith will not cause a moment's hesitation as to your duty. Oh that at that moment, the most critical it may be of your life, when the balance quivers between self-interest and the Divine honor, your faith may take one close view of the cross, one piercing glance into eternity, and so bring you off more than a conqueror, covered with the deathless acclaim and reward of a Christ-exalting triumph!

Precious, indeed, is that faith that leans upon God in adversity, that goes to Jesus in trial, and that repairs to the Spirit in sorrow. Precious faith, that finds a promise for every condition, a helper in every emergency, a soother for every sorrow,—that can hope against hope, taste a sweet disguised in every bitter, and see a bright light veiled by each dark cloud. This is the true gold that procures all blessings and enriches its possessor with all good. He that has FAITH IN GOD has every desire of his heart fulfilled. He can dive into the treasures of God's word and say, “All these are mine, for they are my father's epistles of love.” He can turn to the Redeemer's fullness and exclaim, “It pleased the Father that all this fullness of grace, and truth, and love, should dwell in Jesus for me.” He can repair to the throne of grace and say, “Here I am permitted to draw near to God, burdened with sin, laden with want, oppressed with trial, assailed by temptation, crushed with sorrow, casting, by an act of faith, all my care upon Him.” Is not that precious faith that enriches my poverty, that dignifies my lowliness, that guides my perplexities, that cheers my loneliness, that calms my grief, that defeats my foes, that paints a bow upon every cloud, and that brings all heaven into my soul? Yet such is the fruit of that faith of which God is the giver, the Spirit the author, Christ the object, and a poor, empty, unworthy soul the happy possessor!

But rich and inviting as this subject is, we must conduct the present chapter to a close. In doing so, suffer me to exhort you not to despair when God sees fit to deal with you as He did with the father of the faithful—assure you of a promise, and then put death into all the means leading to its fulfillment. Be it so—that promise, lifeless though it may seem, yet stands good against all that

militates against its accomplishment. One affirmative of God may be weighed, against ten million negatives of man,—one Divine promise against a universe of human improbabilities and impossibilities,—a grain of faith against a pyramid of unbelief. “Let God be true, and every man a liar.” With second causes faith has nothing to do. It sees God only, deals with God only, believing that “with God all things are possible.”

Beware of making a Christ of your faith, precious as it is. If you are staying away from the Savior because your faith is weak, you are substituting your faith for Christ—the channel for the Fountain of comfort, peace, and salvation. If I have a mission to the sovereign of these realms—some petition to prefer— and I linger upon the steps that conduct me to the royal presence, or in the corridor that leads me into the royal chamber, what marvel if I have no audience, and, consequently, no response to my request? That lofty flight of steps, that magnificent corridor, are but introductions to my approach to the sovereign, not the sovereign herself. Such is faith! Divine and precious as it is, faith is but the path that leads us to the King. And although it is often with hesitation and weakness we tread this royal pathway, yet each new step upon which we place our foot brings us nearer to Jesus. We must, however, beware of lingering upon the steps, or of loitering in the ante-rooms, substituting our going to Christ for our having actually come to Christ. Onward we must press, discouraged not by our slow, nor elated by our rapid progress—counting nothing of our faith but as a mean to an end—that end our full reception of the Lord Jesus—until we find ourselves in the royal presence, “beholding the King in His beauty.” It follows, then, that faith does not save you, it being but the instrument of salvation; that your weak faith is no reason why you should stay away from Christ, and that your strong faith is no plea recommending you to Christ. It is CHRIST, and Christ only, from first to last, that saves; and your faith is precious and valuable only as it brings you to Him to be saved through His imputed righteousness alone. The truth we are endeavoring to explain is so vital and important, we would venture to simplify and enforce it by another illustration. The ship riding in the roads heaves not her anchor in order to aid the little boat which has just put out from the shore, and contending with wind, and tide, and wave, struggles to approach her. But casting forth a line, she bids the frail vessel grasp it and draw itself to the ship. Thus, it is not the ship that

approaches the boat, it is the boat that approaches the ship. Trembling soul! setting out for Christ, leaving the shore of a sinful, delusive world, and loosening yourself from the strong grasp you have long had of your own righteousness, let me remind you that Christ is in heaven, and that He comes not down again from above to meet the soul battling with sin, and guilt, and unbelief in its struggles to come near to Him. What, then, does He? He gives an exceeding great and precious promise—“Him that comes unto me I will in no wise cast out;” and bidding the sinner take hold of that promise by faith, He invites it to approach Him and receive all the blessings of salvation, and all the treasures of grace of which He is the Author, the Head, and the Giver. Faith does not bring Christ to the soul (the blessed Redeemer is self-moved— moved by His own graciousness and love), but faith brings the soul to Christ. Faith fastens itself upon Jesus, “exalted a Prince and a Savior to give repentance unto Israel, and remission of sins,” and so it draws the soul to Christ. “Say not in your heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above;) or, Who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead). But what says it? The word is near you, even in your mouth, and in your heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach; that if you shall confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and shall believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you shall be saved.” Here is the divine cord that draws the sinner to Jesus, and will, if taken hold of in simple earnestness, assuredly bring the weakest, most trembling, and unworthy soul to the Savior. “If you will BELIEVE in your heart,…you SHALL be SAVED.”

Then, let no sin-distressed soul, bending over this page, despair of being saved. Numberless, aggravated, great as your sins may be—death and condemnation staring you full in the face—confronted as if by the grim, gloomy instrument of your execution—behold, here is a full and free pardon asking but the acceptance of your faith. “Only believe.” When the trembling jailor of Philippi rushed into the cell of Paul with the memorable inquiry, “What shall I do to be saved?” did the apostle send him to religious ordinances, or to duties, or to pious doings—to baptism, to the Lord's supper, to prayer, and fasting, and charities? Oh no! These were proper in their place, but sadly out of place here, and therefore most improper. But what is the work the apostle puts the anxious penitent upon?—the work of believing. “Believe in

the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.” This is the work,—“And this is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” And when a poor woman came and poured an alabaster box of precious ointment upon His head, what did Jesus say to her? what was the act which He commended? He mentions not her tears, though she wept; He speaks not of her fondness, though she kissed His feet; He commends not her liberality, though her anointing was very costly and precious. He does not say, Your repentance has saved you, your love has saved you, your liberality has saved you; but He says, “Woman, YOUR FAITH has saved you; go in peace.” He passes by all her other qualities, and places the crown of acceptance upon the head of her faith. Dear reader! Jesus is just the same at this moment that He was then—as ready to receive, accept, and save you—as ready to crown your feeble, trembling faith with such a diadem of glory as angels never wore. “Go in peace, your FAITH has SAVED you.” Oh that with the believing, weeping father in the Gospel, you may exclaim, “Lord, I believe; help you mine unbelief.”

Is it with you a season of great strait, difficulty, and want? Now is the time to set faith to work. Your faith may long have been inactive and dormant. The sword has so long reposed in its scabbard that you can with difficulty withdraw it, now that it is a time of need; and your arm has become so enfeebled from disuse that you can scarcely wield the sword even when drawn. But God has sent this pressure in order to restore and quicken your confidence in Himself. Oh, have faith in God that He will appear in your behalf, and glorify Himself in you. His name is Almighty—God all-sufficient. Listen to the language of one who thus, from a chapter in his own deep experience, unfolds the blessedness of that simple, believing confidence in God to which we would urge you in this hour of need:—“I have seemed to see a need of everything God gives me, and want nothing that He denies me; there is no dispensation, though afflictive, but either in it or after it I could not have done without it. Whether it be taken from me or not given to me, sooner or later God quiets me in Himself without it. I cast all my concerns on the Lord, and live securely on the care and wisdom of my heavenly Father. My ways are in a sense hedged up with thorns, and grow darker and darker every day; but yet I distrust not my good God in the least, and live more quietly in the absence of all, by faith, than I should do, I am persuaded, if I possessed them all. I think the Lord

deals kindly with me to make me believe for my mercies before I have them. The less reason has to work on, the more freely faith casts itself on the faithfulness of God. I find that while faith is steady nothing can disquiet me, and when faith totters nothing can establish me. If I tumble out among means and creatures, I am presently lost, and can come to no end; but if I stay myself on God, and leave Him to work in His own way and time, I am at rest, and can sit down and sleep on a promise when a thousand rise up against me; therefore my way is not to cast beforehand, but to work with God by the day. 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' I find so much to do with my calling and my heart that I have no time to puzzle myself with peradventures and futurities. Faith lies at anchor in the midst of the waves, and believes the accomplishment of the promises through all these overturning confusions and seeming impossibilities. Upon this God do I live, who is our God forever, and will be our guide unto death. Methinks I lie becalmed in His bosom; as Luther, in such a case, I am not much concerned, let Christ see to it. I know prophecies are still dark, and the books are sealed, and men have all been deceived, and every cistern fails. Yet God abides faithful, and faithful is He that has promised, who also will do it. Many things now I might say, but enough; O brother! keep close to God, and then a little of the creature will go a great way. Maintain secret communion with God, and you need fear nothing. Lay up all your goods in God, so as to be able to overbalance the sweetness and bitterness of all creatures. Spend no time anxiously in forehand contrivances for this world; they will never succeed; God will turn His dispensations another way. Self- contrivances are the effects of unbelief. I can speak by experience, would men spend those hours they run out in plots and contrivances in communion with God, and leave all to Him by believing, they would have more peace and comfort.”

Such, then, is the preciousness of faith—it is so precious that none but God can bestow it, and when bestowed it is so precious that it brings into the soul, as the queen-grace, untold blessings in its royal retinue. It has been remarked by an eminent minister of Christ, now in glory, that were God to limit him to one prayer it would be the apostle's—“Lord, increase our faith.” And this is no exaggerated sentiment, because the increase of faith brings with it an increase of love, joy, peace, obedience, and every grace of the Holy Spirit.

But while not content with any limit to your growth in this grace of faith, yet remember for your encouragement who do you think have no precious faith, that it may exist in the soul, and for the most part does, in the smallest degree. Who will affirm that he has yet attained unto faith, small even as the grain of mustard seed? Then we ask such a boaster that he say to this mountain, Be you cast into the sea; to this sycamore tree, Be you plucked up: for our blessed Lord has told us that “if we have faith as a grain of mustard seed, nothing shall be impossible unto us.” Thank God, then, for the least degree of faith, though it be less than the grain of mustard seed, for the smallest measure will conduct you fully into heaven. And yet do not forget that there is no difficulty that faith in God, however small, cannot surmount, no mountain it cannot level, no tree it cannot uproot, simply because it deals with the power of God. Calling to its aid omnipotence, allying itself with the Almighty, it can thrash the mountains small, and make the hills as chaff, it can leap over a wall and run through a troop, and though often lame and halting, it yet can take the prey.

We conclude the present chapter with a brief glance at the crowning act of precious faith—the glory it brings to Jehovah;—and this is the crown of its preciousness. If the faith of a child of God terminated in himself—even though it were to put him in the full possession of heaven—it would come short of its highest, holiest, noblest end. It is worthy of God that He has made all things to center in Himself. “The Lord has made all things for himself ” (Proverbs 16:4). “I have created him for my glory” (Isaiah 43:7). In no being in the universe has God put forth so much of His glory, and by none will He finally appear so illustrious as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. God has done more for that saved soul, and will more magnify His great name in him, than for all the unfallen intelligences of heaven. He will appear more glorious, His perfections will shine forth with more full, harmonious, and complete luster in one sinner saved, than in the final and eternal destruction of the myriads who people the regions of the lost. In the case of the lost, justice and holiness appear in dreadful severity; but in those who are saved, justice and holiness— yet more awfully illustrated in the soul-sorrow and dying agonies of Jesus— are seen blended with love, mercy, and grace; so that men and angels see more of the divine glory in the salvation, than in the condemnation of man. It is the glory, then, of faith, and the perfection of its preciousness, that it gives glory

to God. “The reason why faith is said to give glory to God is, because faith answers God's faithfulness. Great faith is said to give glory to God: one of the special commendations of Abraham's faith is, 'He was strong in faith, giving glory to God' (Romans 4:20). God magnifies His name of faithfulness above all His name; the believer magnifies his faithfulness by his believing; therefore he gives glory to God. There are three honorable services that some men get put into their hands, and which are denied to angels. There is preaching of Christ, suffering for Christ, and believing in Christ. Let us consider wherein there is an honoring of God by believing; for it is a point very rarely believed. Who is there of believers that think that by bare believing they give God more glory than any other way they can do?

“Faith gives glory to God, because it brings nothing to Him but poverty, want, and emptiness. All graces bring something to God, but faith brings nothing. Love brings a flaming, burning heart to God; repentance brings a bleeding, broken heart to God; obedience brings a working hand to God; patience brings, as it were, abroad back to God, let Him lay on what He will; poor faith brings just nothing, but the poor man's bare hand and empty dish. The poorer man comes to God the more glory to God. It is remarkable that, in those cases wherein we bring something to God, we are very apt to carry away something of the glory that belongs to Him: faith brings nothing at all to God; it brings no more than broken bones and sores to the great Physician (Romans 3:27).

“Faith glorifies God, for it seeks all in Him, and from Him: as it brings nothing to Him, so it expects everything from Him, whatever its wants be. The language of faith is, 'All my wants be upon You, O Lord;' there is no other way of bearing them; it expects all from Him, and from the single warrant of His word. (John 3:33.)

“Faith always glorifies God, for it ventures its all upon His word. The believer is still in this frame, in the exercise of faith: 'Now, here I have God's faithful promise; and if it should fail me, I should certainly sink forever. My soul, body, reputation, privileges of the gospel, all my concerns whatever, are all laid upon the faithfulness of God; they are all put in that bottom of the ship; if I miscarry, I am gone for ever.' Who is there of believers that believes this, that a bare adventuring of your eternal salvation upon the Son of God,

by virtue of the promise of God, brings more glory to God than all things else can do? (1 Corinthians 1:30, 31.)” (Traill.)

If this be true—and most true it is—then, beloved, besiege the throne of grace for more of this Christ-crowning, Spirit-honoring, God-glorifying grace of faith. Oh, it is the mightiest grace of the Holy Spirit in the soul, and because it is so, it brings the richest revenue of praise to the Triune Jehovah! Behold, how like a queen she enters the soul, her train composed of the costliest material, her train-bearers the sister-graces of the Spirit. “The king's daughter is all glorious within; her clothing is of wrought gold.” Seek, O seek it, then; earnestly, diligently, importunately seek it. Every new deposit of this precious coin augments your real wealth; and every new victory this grace of faith achieves adds another precious stone to the diadem of glory with which your Savior is crowned. Whatever may be your present circumstances, “have faith in God.” Stand still, and see His wonder-working on your behalf. He will smite that rock—He will part that sea—He will level that mountain—He will exalt that valley—He will roll from off the tomb of your buried mercy the stone you can not move. Only have faith in Him! “Commit your way unto the Lord, trust also in him, and he shall bring it to pass.” Thus, your soul, in the exercise of this “precious faith” that looks from self, ceases from man, and trusts alone in God, shall repose in Him, acquiescent, tranquil, and safe as an infant on its mother's breast. Then will the Psalmist's enviable experience be yours— “Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.”

“Leave God to order all your ways, And hope in Him, whatever betide; Thou'lt find Him in the evil days, Your all-sufficient strength and guide; Who trusts in God's unchanging love, Builds on the rock that nothing can move. “What can these anxious cares avail, These never-ceasing moans and sighs? What can it help us to bewail Each painful moment as it flies? Our cross and trials do but press

The heavier for our bitterness. “Only your restless heart keep still, And wait in cheerful hope; content To take whatever His gracious will, His all-discerning love has sent. Doubt not our inmost wants are known To Him who chose us for His own. “He knows when joyful hours are best, He sends them as He sees it meet; When you have borne the fiery test, And are made free from all deceit, He comes to you all unaware, And makes you own His loving care. “Sing, pray, and swerve not from His ways, But do your own part faithfully, Trust His rich promises of grace, So shall they be fulfilled in you; God never yet forsook at need The soul that trusted Him indeed.” (Newmarch, 1653.)

## 3. THE PRECIOUSNESS OF TRIAL

“The trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perishes.” 1 Peter 1:7

It is the preciousness of trial in general, including the preciousness of the trial of faith in particular, to which the apostle thus refers. We propose, therefore, to amplify the truth, and to illustrate in the present chapter the preciousness of all those trials of which, more or less, the saints of God are partakers. This view may present the subject of trial in a point of light more soothing and sanctifying than the reader has been used to contemplate it. You have thought of trial, have anticipated trial, have met trial, have shrunk from trial as the patient recoils from the surgeon's lance, forgetting that that very trial was the needed process by which God was about to work out some great good in your personal experience; and that so far from being dreaded, it should be welcomed as among the most precious things of God, the richest blessings of the everlasting covenant. The points we propose to illustrate are trial—the preciousness of trial—and the blessings that spring from trial.

The term is expressive. It refers to a process by which the character or strength of a thing is tested. The engineer tries the base of his arch, the architect tries the foundation of his building, the refiner tries the nature of his ore. The word trial thus acquires a significant import in relation to that disciplinary process by which God proves His people. Trial, then, becomes a necessary element in the schooling and training of the children of God for duty and service upon earth, and for enjoyment and glory in heaven. Exempt the Church of God from trial, and she is excluded from a process the results of which are incalculable in her experience.

It will tend to open this subject more forcibly, if we consider who the Lord tries in the sense in which the term is now employed. There is one passage in God's book which contains—as many brief sentences of inspired truth do—

a volume in a word, and it will supply the answer to the question, Who does the Lord try? “The Lord tries the righteous.” The furnace in which God places His people—in other words, the process of trial by which He proves them— is not the same by which the ungodly world is tried. “The fire in Zion, and His furnace in Jerusalem,” are only for His own elect. He has the crucible for gold, and the crucible for earth—the fire of love, and the fire of wrath; and in nothing will He more distinguish His own people from the ungodly,—the gold from the “reprobate silver,”—than in the mode by which both are thus dealt with. He tries the righteous because they are righteous; He chastens His sons, because they are sons; He reproves, rebukes, afflicts them, because He loves them, having “chosen them in the furnace of affliction.” What touching words of Christ are these—who can read them without emotion?—“As many as I love I rebuke and chasten.” Again, “Whom the Lord loves he chastens, and scourges every son whom he receives.” Thus, it is His own people, His righteous, His holy ones, on whom His afflictive hand is often the most severely and heavily laid. “The Lord tries the RIGHTEOUS.”

But what does the Lord try? It is not our fallen nature that He tries, the existence of whose depravity is clear and unmistakable. There needs no proof that we are sinful and corrupt, and that “in our flesh there dwells no good thing.” But the Lord tries His own wondrous work of grace in the soul. He tries everything that is divine, and good, and holy in the regenerate. He tries their principles, He tries their motives, He tries their graces, He tries their knowledge, He tries their experience, He tries His own work. Take, for example, a few of the spiritual graces which He more especially brings to the test of trial. He tries the believer's love. “Loves you me more than this?” is often the probing question of Jesus to His disciples. He will test the reality, the sincerity, the strength of our love to Him—whether it can confide in Him when He smites, cling to Him when He retires, obey Him when He commands—whether it will entwine around Him the closer that the storms seek to tear it from its hold. “Can you resign this blessing? will you undertake this service? are you able to drink this cup, or bear this cross for me?” is the significant language of many a trial with which the Lord tries the righteous. Happy if your love sustains the test of its sincerity, and your heart replies, “Yes,

Lord; Your love inspiring my love, Your grace helping my infirmity, Your strength perfected in my weakness, I can—I will—I DO.”

The Lord tries also the patience of His people. There is, perhaps, no grace of the Spirit, or adornment of the Christian character more overlooked than this, and yet there is not one more precious, God-honoring, and beautifying. To find this divine and rare pearl, we must often pass from the surface of society, and seek it—where, indeed, the piety and taste of few lead them— amid scenes of suffering, of grief, of adversity. In some secluded apartment, on some couch of languor, or bed of sickness, shaded by poverty and loneliness, this divine grace may exist—no eye beholding its sparkling amid the surrounding gloom, but His whose “eyes are over the righteous, and whose ear is open to their cry.” There may be seen the patient, quiet spirit of a humble believer in Jesus, enduring without a murmuring word, bearing without a rebellious feeling; suffering without a hard thought of Him who has smitten— with a calm, submissive, dignified surrender to the Divine disposal—the will of God. And yet, who, in whatever path he walks, finds not, in some circumstances of his daily history, the “need of patience?” The trying circumstances of life—the chafings of the hourly cross—the constant contact with dissimilar tastes, uncongenial minds, unsympathizing hearts—the delays in answer to prayer—the ceaseless pain—the restless head—the nervous temperament, to which the buzzing of a fly is agony—above all, the hidings of God, the tarrying of Jesus, the suspension of the Spirit's consolation—all, all demand the exercise of that patience with which the believer possesses his soul. This is the grace the Lord tries! Ah! how little know we of the impatience of our spirit—the petulance and unsubmissiveness which will brook no delay, which frets against the Lord, and rebels against His dealings—until the Lord tries us. But He tries our patience only to increase it. Humbled under the conviction how rebellious and repining is our spirit, we are led to cry mightily to God to give to us this grace, meekly to endure, silently to suffer, and cheerfully to do His will. “The Lord direct your hearts into the patience of Christ.” “You have need of patience, that, after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise.” We are exhorted to “let patience have her perfect work, that you may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.” “Here is the patience of the saints.”

I have spoken of the trial of faith. Without recalling the train of thought already pursued, it may be well briefly to remark, that faith being the queen- grace of the graces—all others constituting her regal attendants—the Lord especially tries this grace of the believer, and by so doing He indirectly tries and so strengthens all the cognate graces of the soul. Thus, we read, “The trial of your faith works patience.” And what are the ends to be accomplished in the trial of faith? The Lord tries our faith to test its genuineness, to promote its purity, to invigorate its power—thus to bring us into a more intimate acquaintance with Himself. Never should we try God as we do did He not try us as He does. We should, alas! be content to travel many a stage without Him. No child-like sense of dependence—no holy communings—no seeking His will—no trying of His love, faithfulness, and wisdom. How seldom would the Lord see our uplifted face, or our outstretched hands, or hear the plaint accents of our voice, did He permit this grace to lie sluggish and stagnant in the soul. But it is “living water” which Christ has deposited within the regenerate, and trial is needed to keep it pure, sparkling, and ascending. Be you sure of this, then, beloved, that the Lord thus exercises your faith only to make you a richer possessor of this most enriching of the graces. It is a kind process of Jesus by which He seeks your greatest good. The more your faith is tried, the more it deals with God, and travels to Christ; and it is impossible for you to spend one minute with God, or to catch one glimpse of Christ, and not be sensibly and immeasurably the gainer. The more your faith leads you to the throne of grace, the more precious will prayer become. The more your faith deals with the atonement of Christ, the more will the glory of His work unfold to your mind. The more your faith takes hold of the Divine promises, the more will it be confirmed in the truth of God's word. Thus faith—so supernatural and wondrous a grace is it—transmutes everything it touches into most precious gold, and so confers upon its tried but happy possessor “greater riches than the treasures of Egypt.”

But who can travel the circle of all the trials to which the saints of God are subject? How great their variety! how peculiar often their character! Each child of God seems to move in a groove peculiar to himself, to revolve round the great center in an orbit of his own. The Lord deals with us as individuals that we may have individual dealings with Him. Therefore, among the

catalogue of the Christian's trials, those of an individual nature may take the precedence of all others. It is a great mercy when we can retire from the crowd and deal with God individually—when we can take the precious promises to ourselves individually—when we can repair to Jesus with individual sins, infirmities, and sorrows, feeling that His eye bends its glance upon us, His ear bows down to us, His hand is outstretched to us, His whole heart absorbed in us, as though not another claimant, suitor, or sufferer unveiled a sorrow or preferred a request—as if, in a word, we were the solitary object of His love. Oh, deal with Christ personally, even as He deals personally with you. His invitation is, “Come unto ME,”—and He would have you come,—and you cannot honor Him more—recognizing His personality, and His personal relation to yourself, and disclosing your personal circumstances, making confession of personal sin, presenting personal wants, and unveiling personal infirmities, backslidings, and sorrows.

But, in addition to personal, there are often relative trials, which many are called to experience. It is impossible for feeling hearts not to make the circumstances of those to whom they are bound by close and tender ties of love and friendship in a measure their own. The religion of Jesus is the religion of sympathy. It teaches us to “weep with those that weep, and to rejoice with those that rejoice”—to “bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” And what a touching exemplification of this our religion did its great Author present when bending over the grave of Lazarus; as the evangelist tells us—“JESUS WEPT.” He had griefs of His own—oh, how bitter!—but He buried them deeply and silently within His breast, and seemed to feel and to weep only for the griefs of others. “In all their afflictions he was afflicted.” And thus, too, it often is with the Christ-like believer. Concealing his personal sorrows, and bearing in lonely and uncomplaining silence his own burden, he is often found, from his unselfishness and sensibility, to be more deeply afflicted and oppressed by the sorrows and burdens of others. “Who is weak, and I am not weak? who is offended, and I burn not?”

But there are spiritual trials peculiar to the children of God. The world, as it cannot sympathize with the joy of the believer, so it cannot participate with his spiritual sorrow. The Lord tries the righteous as righteous. What knows the world of trials springing from the indwelling of sin, from the temptations of

Satan, from spiritual darkness, from the conflict of unbelief, from the infirmities of prayer, from leanness of soul, coldness of love, hardness of heart, perpetual tendency to spiritual relapse? Nothing whatever! But such are the soul exercises of many a saint of God, and these constitute his sorest trials.

But it is not so much on the fact of the Christian's trials that we would dwell, as upon a particular aspect of those trials which—especially in the actual process of trial—we are prone to overlook—their preciousness. The apostle clearly intimates this—“The trial of your faith being much more precious than of gold.” It is to the preciousness of the trial of faith, not so much to the preciousness of faith itself, to which he refers. Let us briefly pursue this idea, and see in what respects the child of God may contemplate his trials as among he precious things of God.

Trial is precious, because that which it tries is so. The work which God brings to the test of affliction is worthy of all the pains He takes to prove its reality, to promote its purity, and to advance its growth. Nothing is so precious, so costly, so indestructible as the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul. If, beloved, you have a broken heart for sin, if you possess faith less even than a grain of mustard seed, if there glows in your heart a solitary spark of Divine love, or there beats in your soul a throb of spiritual life,—if, in a word, there is the outline of the restored moral image of God, faint and imperfect though it is, no figure can illustrate its beauty, nor words describe its worth. It distances all idea in its intrinsic preciousness. Now this is the work the Lord tries. These are the Divine principles, holy emotions, heavenly feelings He brings to the test. He tries it because it is worth the trial, and so the trial itself becomes a precious thing because it has to do with a precious work.

Trial also derives a value from its being the discipline of a loving Father. The moment faith can see the extraction of any drop of the curse from the cup of sorrow, and trace in its ingredients nothing but the elements of love, wisdom, goodness, faithfulness, righteousness, it realizes the costliness of the discipline. The very rod is loved because it is the rod of Him who is “Love.” The chastening is sweet because it is parental. And the true believer exclaims, “My Father designs by this to teach me some salutary lesson, to inculcate some divine truth, to rebuke me for some folly, to correct me for some sin, to recall my truant heart, to restore my wandering soul, to endear Himself, and by

detaching my affections and sympathies from earth's attractions, to allure and bind them closer to heaven. Precious trial that is the dictate of a wise and holy discipline, that leaves traces of a Father's hand, that is loving in its origin, loving in its nature, loving in its results!”

Trial is precious because it increases the preciousness of Christ. It is in adversity that human friendship is tested. When the wintry blast sweeps by, when fortune vanishes, and health fails, and position lowers, and popularity wanes, and influence lessens, then the summer birds of earthly friendship expand their wings and seek a warmer climate! The same test that proves the hollowness of the world's affection and constancy confirms the believer in the reality, power, and preciousness of the friendship of Jesus. To know fully what Christ is we must know something of adversity. We must be tried, tempted, and oppressed—we must taste the bitterness of sorrow, feel the pressure of want, tread the path of solitude, and often be brought to the end of our own strength and of human sympathy and counsel. Jesus shines the brightest to faith's eye when all things are dark and dreary. And when others have retired from our presence, their patience wearied, their sympathy exhausted, their counsel baffled, perhaps their affection chilled and their friendship changed, then Christ approaches and takes the vacant place; sits at our side, speaks peace to our troubled heart, soothes our sorrows, guides our judgment, and bids us “Fear not.” Beloved reader, when has Christ appeared the nearest and most precious to your soul? Has it not been in seasons when you have the most stood in need of His guiding counsel and of His soothing love? In the region of your heart's sinfulness you have learned the value, completeness, and preciousness of His atoning work, of His finished salvation. But the tender, loving, sympathetic part of His nature, you have been brought into the experience of only in the school of sanctified trial. Oh, how precious has that trial made Him! Into what sacred intimacy and close fellowship and conscious nearness has it brought you. When He has approached with an expression so benignant, with a look so winning, with words so soothing, with an influence so tranquillizing, and told you that He was acquainted with your sorrow, entered into your loss, felt all the keen, delicate touches of your grief; and then spoke words of comfort to your spirit, bound up your broken heart, gently drew you into a sweet, holy, cheerful submission to His will and full justification

of His dealings, oh, has He not enthroned Himself upon your soul at that moment more supremely and firmly than ever? You once thought you knew Him, and you did in some degree, but now, in the depth of your hallowed sorrow, a sorrow into which the Man of sorrows and the Brother born for adversity has enshrined His whole self, you exclaim, “I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye sees you.” We ask, Is not trial a precious discipline, a precious correction, a precious school, that leads you more fully into the heartfelt experience of the preciousness of the Savior? Shrink not from, nor rebel against, that which makes you more intimately acquainted with your best Friend, your dearest Brother, the tender, sympathizing, Beloved of your soul. You will know more of Jesus in one sanctified trial than in wading through a library of volumes or in listening to a lifetime of sermons.

It is impossible either to contemplate the costly results of trial, and not find an evidence of its preciousness. Trial is a fruitful process; and, though often painful as the incisions of the amputating knife, the results, like those incisions, are salutary and healthful. Sanctified trial opens an outlet for the escape of much soul-distemper. Deep-rooted, hidden, and long pent-up evil, the existence of which has been as a fretting sore, inflaming, irritating, and impairing the whole spiritual constitution of the soul, has by this process been thrown off, and thus a more wholesome state and healthful action has supervened. Oh, what selfishness, what carnality, what rebellion, what worldliness, what secret declension, has God's lancet brought to light, revealing it but to inspire self-abhorrence, sin-loathing, and sin-forsaking—and all this the costly fruit of a deeply sanctified affliction!

Trial, too, stirs us up to lay hold upon God in prayer. Nothing, probably, in all the Lord's means of grace and dispensations of providence so leads us to prayer, incites us to call upon the Lord, as the pressure of affliction. And so high a privilege is access to God, so sweet a spot is the throne of grace, so great and holy the blessings that spring from a waiting of soul upon the Lord, that must be a wholesome discipline that leads to such results. Oh, count it a precious trial, a golden affliction, that brings your heart into a closer communion with Christ! Your Elder Brother's voice may, like Joseph's, sound harshly and alarmingly upon your ear, filling you with fear and foreboding; yet

it is the voice of your Brother, the “voice of the Beloved,” and it speaks but to rouse you to a more full, confiding opening of your heart in prayer. Oh, precious trial! Oh, heaven-sent affliction! that breaks down the barriers, removes the restraints, thaws the congealings that intercept and interrupt my fellowship with God, and with His dear Son Christ Jesus. Our heavenly Father loves to hear the voice of His children; and when that voice is still, when there is a suspension of heart-communion, and the tones are silent which were used to fall as music upon His ear, He sends a trial, and then we rise and give ourselves to prayer. Perhaps, it is a perplexity, and we go to Him for counsel; or it is a want, and we go to Him for supply; or it is a grief, and we go to Him for soothing; or it is a burden, and we look to Him for upholding; it is an infirmity, and we repair to Him for grace; it is a temptation, and we fly to Him for support; it is a sin, and we repair to Him for pardon; but, be its form what it may, it has a voice—“Rise, and call upon your God!” and to God it brings us.

How much, too, does deeply sanctified trial correct our false judgments. We conceive dark thoughts of God's character, wrong views of His dealings, crude interpretations of His word—our judgments often miscarry in their opinions of persons, of actions, and events; but when under God's hand how much of this is corrected. The passing tempest has swept the clouds away, cleared our intellectual, and purified our moral atmosphere, and a brighter, serener sky has smiled upon us from above, and our path has become easier and pleasanter. We see God's character and our own in a different light—His so glorious, our own so vile. We interpret His dealings differently and more favorably, and begin to learn that there is no individual who has not, perhaps, more in his character to admire and love than to censure and condemn; and that there is no event in Divine Providence that has not a lesson of truth and a message of love.

We are deeply indebted to trial—and it thus fully sustains its character as among the precious things of God—as authenticating the fact of our divine sonship. Erase sanctified trial from the catalogue of the Lord's dealings with you, and you would cancel one of the strongest evidences of your adoption. What earthly father corrects not the waywardness, self-will, and disobedience of his child? and shall not our heavenly Father, in the exercise of a wisdom

and love yet greater, employ a holy and wholesome discipline towards His children? Every stroke of His rod is a proof of His love, and every correction of His hand an evidence of our sonship. How tender and touching the admonition, “My son, despise not you the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when you are rebuked of him. For whom the Lord loves he chastens, and scourges every son whom he receives.” Thus, then, our hallowed afflictions and trials are among the choice, precious things of God, because they are signs and seals of our gracious adoption into His family. Be not cast down, O tried believer! as though some strange and untoward thing had happened to you. Misinterpret not the dealings of God, as though your present sorrows, difficulties, and trials, were marks of His displeasure, and evidences against your true and divine relationship. Many of the Lord's people who appear exempt from those trials by which others are severely afflicted are prone to argue from thence against their being the true children of God. Most true is it that the religion of Jesus is the religion of the cross, and that there never was a true Christian without a cross. And yet the painful misgiving, arising from exemption from the crosses which others bear, may itself be the cross the Lord appoints you. The heart-searching and prayer, the earnestness and anxiety, which this conviction produces, may be just the self-discipline which those peculiar trials—from the absence of which you augur ill against yourself—are designed to effect. God can as richly teach, and as deeply sanctify us by the absence as by the presence of a trial. But ah! are there no crosses other than reverse of circumstances, loss of health, chilled affection, changed friendship, heart-crushing bereavement? Yes, beloved reader; this body of our humiliation, the power of indwelling sin, the assaults of Satan, the seductions of the world, the wounding of the saints, spiritual becloudings and despondencies, is enough, in the absence of all external trial, to discipline the heart, to humble the soul, and keep the believer near to the cross of Jesus. Thus, there is no believer without a trial, and no Christian is without the cross.

“A lady of rank and great piety complained that, whereas in Scripture the cross is everywhere spoken of as useful and necessary for the children of God, yet she, for her part, must acknowledge that hitherto the Lord had never deemed her worthy of one, and that this often raised within her melancholy thoughts and doubts whether she was one of His children or not. Gotthold

said to her—I confess that complaints like yours are not common, inasmuch as few Christians have any ground to lament a lack of the cross, while others, whose share of it is exceedingly small, nevertheless imagine that it is quite as large as they are able to bear; and in particular, those who are yet unaccustomed to it, are prone to fancy that their cross is too great and heavy for them. As for your case, however, it seems to me that you are actually bearing a cross without being conscious of it. You are vexed with gloomy thoughts because you have no cross. These gloomy thoughts, however, appear to me to be themselves a considerable cross, and also a very salutary one, for they not only evince, but nourish and augment your desire to resemble the Lord Jesus, and to take up your cross and follow Him. Besides, the words of our Savior, 'Whoever does not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple,' relate not merely to the common hardships of human life, but are also and especially to be understood of the crucifixion of the old man, of his sinful lusts and desires, of self-denial and the subjugation of the will. For the rest, we cannot and ought not to make crosses for ourselves, for this would end in hypocrisy. The Lord holds the cup of affliction in His own hand, and pours out of it when and as much as He will. That He has spared you hitherto, acknowledge with humble gratitude; He is the Searcher of hearts, and perhaps knew that, with the cross, your heart would not have felt towards Him as it has done without it. Recollect, however, that the drama of your life has not yet been played to the end, and that, for ought you know, your gracious God may still have some little cross in reserve for you, to be imposed in due time. The fiercest tempests often come in the evening of the finest summer days, and it is after the pure wine has been run off that the lees are used to follow. It ought to be another ground of gratitude to God, that He has given you time to prepare for all emergencies, and provide yourself with the armor necessary for your defense.” (Gotthold's Emblems.)

It is not the least hallowed result of sanctified trial, thus increasing its preciousness, the deeper acquaintance into which it brings us with God's word. In trial we fly to the Scriptures as the unfailing source of guidance and comfort. Whatever may be the nature of our sorrow, or the singularity of our path, we are sure of finding in God's word light, sympathy, and soothing corresponding therewith. God sends us into this school of affliction to learn. Thus He dealt

with David—“It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.” God's word at all times should be our study and delight. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom.” But there is, through outward distractions and inward conflicts, a tendency to neglect the word, to lose our relish for its sweetness, or to turn from its faithful rebukes. And as a parent or a teacher sometimes employs the rod to stimulate his pupil to learn, so our Heavenly Father, our Divine Teacher, often sends His rod of correction to drive us to the study of the truth; then we testify, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted (corrected, chastened, rebuked), that I might learn your statutes.” And oh, with what increased clearness and beauty does the Bible often unfold to us in the time of precious trial! We understand the Scriptures now as we never did before. We may have consulted critics and expositors, and by our own ingenuity and skill have endeavored to penetrate the sacred mysteries of the word, and yet but to little perception of the truth. But the rod of correction has proved our best expositor under the guidance of the Spirit of truth! “Then opened He their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures.” Dark, mysterious, and trying providences—trials which we thought so untoward—have been our best commentaries on the deep things of the word. What a honied sweetness, in our personal experience, has the bitterness of trial imparted to it! We did not know that there was so much sweetness in the word until we found so much bitterness in the world; nor so much fullness in the Scriptures until we found so much emptiness in the creature. We see the Bible now to be full of Jesus—Christ its revelation, its glory and sweetness, its Alpha and Omega, its beginning and end. Satiated with creature comforts, and surfeited with self-satisfaction, we had loathed the manna of the word, and it had no more relish to our spiritual than the most insipid element to our natural taste. But sweet, sanctified, precious trial has led us to the Book of the tried—God's own word—and we have “rejoiced at it as one that finds great spoil.” With the Psalmist we have testified, “How sweet are your words to my taste! yes, sweeter than honey to my mouth.” “This is my comfort in my affliction: for your word has quickened me.” Oh welcome, then, cheerfully and submissively the precious trial that renders more precious in your experience the preciousness of God's word.

The time of trial often sets us upon a closer examination of our Christian progress and hope. In the season of worldly sunshine and prosperity, gliding along upon the smooth and calm current, how much do we take for granted as to our true spiritual state. We deem all right within because all is smiling without. The world smiles, friends approve, ministers commend, the heart flatters, and the candle of the Lord shines round about us—alas! alas! with what slight evidences of conversion, with what dubious marks of grace, with what a slender hope of heaven, are we then satisfied! How shallow our self- acquaintance, how imperfect our knowledge of Christ. But the trial comes, bearing the disguise of a foe, yet in reality a friend. And now the first blast of adversity scatters the fig-leaf covering, and destroys the beautiful tresselled wall which our own hands had constructed for our beauty and defense. What we thought was substance proves but a shadow, what we imagined was a reality proves but an appearance. The faith we thought so strong, the love we thought so fervent, the grace we thought so real, the growth we thought so unmistakable, all, all vanish before the dealings, the probings, the siftings of the Searcher of hearts in the day of trial. Trial has brought us to our right place—the feet of Jesus. There, in the spirit of self-examination, of self- loathing, of self-renunciation, we have been led to ask, “Will this evidence serve me when I come to die? will this love give me boldness in the day of judgment? will this faith present me faultless before the throne of God and the Lamb?” Thus relinquishing our vain fancies, our foolish dreams, our dubious evidences, we have been enabled to take a renewed hold of Christ, to fly afresh to the fountain of His blood, and to enfold ourselves more closely within the robe of His righteousness. Thus emptied, humbled at His feet, we praise and adore Him for the discipline that consumed the dross, scattered the chaff, swept from beneath us the sand, and that strengthened our evidences, brightened our hope, unfolded the Spirit, and enthroned the Redeemer, more vividly and supremely within our soul. O precious trial! dark though you are, that yet bear beneath your somber wing blessings of grace so sacred and costly as these!

As a moral discipline it would seem impossible to overrate the preciousness of trial. No believer has been placed in a true position for the formation, development, and completeness of his Christian character who has

not passed in some degree through this discipline. Not more essential is it that the vessel of the craftsman should be exposed to the heat of the furnace, in order to impart transparency to the material, consolidation to its form, and brilliance and permanence to the colors his pencil has traced upon it, than it is for a “vessel of mercy whom God has afore prepared unto glory,” to be tried though it be as by fire. From this moral discipline there is in the family of God no exception. It is a remark of the seraphic Leighton—true as it is beautiful— that, “God had but one Son without sin, and never one without suffering.” How touching and conclusive the argument and appeal of the apostle— himself purified in this crucible and instructed in this school—“You have forgotten the exhortation, which speaks unto you as unto children, My son, despise not you the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when you are rebuked of him: for whom the Lord loves he chastens, and scourges every son whom he receives. If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons: for what son is he whom the father chastens not? But if you be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are you bastards, and not sons. Furthermore, we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live? For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness. Now, no chastening for the present seems to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto those who are exercised thereby.” Thus is it clear that chastisement or trial is an evidence and seal of adoption; and that without it we should lack that spiritual discipline, apart from which there is no proper symmetry and completeness of Christian character. Who has not marked the wide and striking difference in the character and deportment of a child trained beneath the wholesome discipline of a parent, and a child who has grown up without that discipline, left to its own self? To what is that difference to be traced but the forming influence of discipline in the one, and its entire absence in the other? There is a development and strength of character, a maturity of mind and mellowed refinement of feeling and address in the child thus schooled, which you in vain look for in the child neglected. “A wise son hears the instruction of his father.” In the Hebrew this passage may be literally rendered, “A wise son is the

chastisement of his father.” On this text, thus rendered, in all probability the Jews founded their proverb, “If you see a wise child, be sure that his father has chastised him.” Now, how gracious and tender is our heavenly Father to condescend thus to deal with us! In everything would He sustain the relation He stands to us as a Father. Not only in loving us, thinking of us, providing for us, guiding and keeping us, but also chastising us. He has undertaken a father's office, and He will fully and faithfully discharge it, even though it may compel the frequent and painful, though loving and righteous, use of the rod. Oh to be assured that this stroke is a fresh seal of adoption! Who would not cheerfully exclaim, “The cup which my Father has given me, shall I not drink it?”

And yet we think there is a yet higher end accomplished by precious trial, even than this authentication of our adoption. We refer to the Divine holiness to which it assimilates us. “He for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness.” Next to his justification, sanctification must be the grand aim of the believer; and whatever is promotive of this must be precious. God would make us happy, but He can only make us happy by making us holy. Happiness and holiness are cognate truths: they are relative terms; they are twin sisters. He must be happy who is holy. Sin is the parent of all misery; holiness the root of all happiness. Now the holiness which God would bring us into sympathy with, and make us partakers of, is His own holiness. There is much that passes in the religious world for holiness which is spurious in its nature, and which is disowned by God. There is no real holiness but that which moulds us into the Divine image—that which makes us God-like. We cannot possess God's essential holiness, but we may partake of His imparted holiness. In the same sense in which we are said to be “partakers of the Divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), we are “partakers of the Divine holiness.” What a portrait is a child of God purified, sanctified, and disciplined by trial! God is the divine original; he is the human copy. Upon that heart softened, upon that spirit subdued, upon that will laid low, the holy Lord God has imprinted, inlaid, His own likeness. And as the polished mirror reflects the likeness of the man who looks into it, and as the glassy lake images the sun that beams down upon it, so does the disciplined child of God,—the grossness of the fleshly eliminated from the spiritual—the dross of the natural separated from the divine—his purified soul

reflects, and sparkles, and shines with the holiness of God. Oh, to be like God, who would not welcome the trial, exclaiming with the psalmist, “I know, O Lord, that your judgments are right, and that you in faithfulness has afflicted me.” How tenderly, soothingly, lovingly does your Father address you, His tried child—“My son, despise not you the chastening of the Lord.” Is there rigor in the discipline?—there is love in the rod. Is there bitterness in the cup?—there is sweetness upon its brim. Is there acuteness in the suffering? there is soothing in the relation—“My son!” Never can He forget in the severest discipline, in the most painful correction, that He is our Father, and we His children. “Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child? for since I spoke against him, I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my affections are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon him, says the Lord.” Never does God employ a rebuke without a cordial, or the pruning knife without the balm. How frequently the mercy precedes, and thus prepares for, the judgment. It was so in the case of our first parents. Before God pronounces the dreadful sentence, He breathes the gracious promise. Mercy digs the channel of judgment— prepares and paves its way. Thus, God's corrections, rebukes, and chastisements come tempered, softened, and subdued; and like the smitings and reproofs of the righteous, are a “kindness,” and “an excellent oil, which shall not break the head.” Thus it is that the tried believer can look into the face of his Father and say, “Righteous are you, O Lord, when I plead with you; yet let me talk with you of your judgments” (Jeremiah 12:1). How sweetly and tenderly did Jesus blend the warning with the consolation, “In the world you shall have tribulation, but in me you shall have peace!” Our Lord wisely and graciously presents the world to us as a scene of sorrow, trial, and tribulation, but the counterpart shall be that in its midst we shall experience His presence, love, and grace as our peace. Thus the remark of a quaint writer holds good, “Affliction's rods are made of many keen twigs, but they are all cut from the tree of life. It is a great mercy to have a bitter put into that draught which Satan has sweetened as a vehicle for his poison.” Never is the believer so near to Christ's heart, and the Spirit's comforts, and Heaven's joys, as when the flood of dark and broken waters is surging beneath and around him, lifting him upon their crested billows. The higher the ark which bore the Church of old rose upon the flood, the nearer it mounted toward heaven. As earth receded, heaven

approached; and the vessel, floating away upon the bosom of the swelling deep, mounted higher and higher. Is it not so with the believing soul when floods of great waters come into it? As these waters swell and rise, sinful follies, worldly vanities, carnal pursuits, pride, self, and ignorance, disappear, and the soul gets nearer to heaven. Precious trial that buries earth's vanity and corruption, and unveils heaven's joy and glory to the soul! Thus out of the eater comes food. The trial that looked so threatening has brought such mercy. The cloud that seemed charged with electricity empties a fruitful shower. Oh, trying seasons are our most spiritual, most prayerful, most Christ-endearing, Christ- conforming seasons, and so trial becomes precious. Stars shine the brightest in the darkest night; torches are the better for the heating; grapes do not come to the proof until they come to the press; spices smell sweetest when pounded; young trees root the fastest for shaking; vines are better for bleeding; gold looks the brightest for scouring; glow-worms glisten best in the dark; juniper smells the sweetest in the fire; the palm tree proves the better for pressing; cammomile, the more you tread it the more you spread it. Such is the condition of all God's children; they are then most triumphant when most trampled, most glorious when most afflicted; often most in the favor of God when least in man's; as their conflicts, so their conquests; as their tribulations, so their joys; they live best in the furnace of persecution, so that heavy afflictions are the best benefactors to heavenly blessings, and when afflictions hang heaviest corruptions hang loosest, and grace that is hid in nature, as sweet water in rose leaves, is then most fragrant when the fire of affliction is put under to distill it out.” (Spencer.) Favored child of God, whose Father's discipline in providence and grace wafts such blessings into the soul! Precious trial that makes Jesus more precious, the throne of grace more precious, the discipline of the covenant more precious, holiness more precious, the saints of God more precious, the word of God more precious, and the prospect of going home to glory more precious! “Happy the believer who, the more afflictions assail him, cleaves the more closely to the Lord. Like the traveler overtaken in a storm, who, when the rain beats upon him, or the snow drifts upon his person, or the mountain wind drives furiously against him, lays firmer hold of his cloak and wraps it closely around him, he, amid the storm of troubles, keeps faster hold

of the 'Man who is an hiding place from the wind and a covert from the tempest.'“

A time of trial is a time of sensibility. God often sends it for this very end. There is nothing in the gospel of Christ that forbids emotion, everything to awaken it; there is nothing in the religion of Jesus to crush sensibility, everything to create it. Christianity is a religion of feeling—deep, hallowed, sanctified feeling. It is the only religion that thoroughly appeals to our emotional nature, that touches the deep, hidden springs of our humanity, and tells us we may—weep. With Christ's tears at Bethany, and with his drops of blood in Gethsemane before us, surely we may express the deepest sympathy with the adversity of others, and may indulge in deep, chastened grief with our own. Weep on, then, beloved mourner! We would not seal up those tears. “Jesus wept,” and you too may weep. “No chastening for the present is joyous, but grievous;” therefore, it is no sin to give expression to emotion, to indulge in sensibility, to “water our couch with tears, and to make our bed to swim.” Without a measure of grief our affliction would leave no trace of good. When God speaks, we should hear; when He smites, we should feel. Only let your grief be moderate, chastened, and submissive, embodying its sentiment, and expressing its intensity in the language and spirit of the “Man of Sorrows,” “Not my will, O my Father, but your be done.”

What shall we then say to these things? Shall we not count among the precious things of God, not the least precious, the trial whose discipline removes from us so much evil, and confers upon us so much good? How little should we know experimentally of the Lord Jesus—what depths there were in His love, what soothing in His sympathy, what condescension in His grace, what gentleness and delicacy in His conduct, what exquisite beauty in His tears, what safety beneath His sheltering wing, and what repose upon His loving heart, but for this very adversity. Your ark is tossed amid the broken waters, but you have Christ on board your vessel, and it shall not founder. He may seem, as of old, “when asleep upon a pillow,” ignorant of, and indifferent to, the storm that rages wildly around you; yet the eye of His Godhead never slumbers, and He will, and at the best moment, arise in majesty and power, hush the tempest and still the waves, and there shall be peace. And will you not then count that a precious adversity that awakens in your breast the adoring

exclamation, “What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” Yes; Christ treads the limpid pathway of your sorrow. He comes to you walking upon the sea of your trouble. He approaches to quell your fears, to calm your mind, to give you peace. And but for this alienation of property, this sore bereavement, this terrible calamity, this wasting disease, this languor, suffering, and decay, these restless days and wakeful nights, oh, how many a precious visit from the Beloved of your soul would you have lost! Be still then; trial will bring a precious Jesus to you; and the presence, the love, the sympathy, and the grace of Jesus will lighten, soothe, and sweeten your trial. We shall soon be at home, where “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.” The last truth of God will be seen, the last lesson of holiness will be learned, the last taint of sin will be effaced, and there will be no more need of sorrow's discipline, nor the hallowing influence of precious trial; the last ember of the furnace will be extinguished, the last wave of trouble will die upon the shore, and we shall be forever with Jesus. Until then, “commit your way unto the Lord,” leave your concerns in His hands, “trust in Him,” and come up from the wilderness clinging to His almighty arm, and leaning upon His loving breast, to uphold you in weakness, to soothe you in grief, and to bring you home to Himself, where the days of your mourning shall be ended, and “GOD SHALL WIPE AWAY ALL TEARS FROM THEIR EYES.”

“When sore afflictions crush the soul, And riven is each earthly tie, The heart must cling to God alone: He wipes the tear from every eye. “Through wakeful nights, when racked with pain, On bed of languishing you lie, Remember still your God is near To wipe the tear from every eye. “A few short years, and all is o'er; Your sorrows, pains, will soon pass by; Then lean in faith on God's dear Son, He'll wipe the tear from every eye. “Oh, never be your soul cast down,

Nor let your heart desponding sigh, Assured that God, whose name is Love, Will wipe the tear from every eye!” —Mrs. Mackinlay

## 4. THE PRECIOUSNESS OF GOD'S

## THOUGHTS

“How precious are your thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!” Psalms 139:17

It is marvelous that God should think of us as He does. That, infinitely great and holy—all worlds, all beings, all events occupying His mind—He should yet have individual thoughts of us, those thoughts not mere passing glances of the mind, but involving the pre-determination and pre-arrangement of each event, circumstance, and step of our personal history, trivial though it be as a hair falling from the head—is a truth too mighty to grasp were it not too precious to refuse, and too divine to disbelieve. You have, doubtless, beloved, often appeared in your own view so obscure and insignificant a being—a mere cipher in the great sum of human existence, a single drop in the vast ocean of human life—as to be almost at an infinite remove from God's notice. You could not, indeed, relieve yourself from the conviction of individual responsibility, nor stifle the reflection that for each transaction of the present life the future holds you accountable; yet that, isolated and solitary, perhaps, poor and mean, as you may be, God, the great, the holy Lord God should think of you, notice you, regard you, set His heart upon you—that His thoughts, more precious than the ocean's gems, and more numerous than the sands which belt it, should cluster around you, clinging to you with a grasp so fervent and intense as to lift you to the distinction and privilege of a being in whom, the Divine regard were solely and supremely absorbed—is a truth distancing all conception, and well-near overwhelming you with its mightiness. And yet so it is! Each child of God dwells in His heart, and engages His mind as though he were the sole occupant of this boundless universe—a tiny insect swimming in the ocean of infinity. Such is the truth to which the psalmist gives utterance in a burst of devout,

impassioned feeling, “How precious are your thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!” “Unto me!” Here is faith attracting to, and concentrating upon, its individual self all the precious thoughts Jehovah has of His people. Oh, there is not a thought of His wisdom, nor a thought of His love, nor a thought of His power, nor a thought of His grace which does not entwine itself with the being, and blend itself with the salvation of each child of His adoption. The subject now engaging our meditation is—THE PRECIOUSNESS OF GOD'S THOUGHTS—and may the theme lay low all high, towering, sinful thoughts of ourselves, and inspire and raise our holy, grateful, adoring thoughts of Him—His glory, beauty, and love—until, with a depth of adoration, and an intensity of affection, worthy the theme, our hearts respond, “How precious are your thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!” Let us first contemplate a few characteristics of God's precious thoughts of His saints.

God's thoughts of His people are—infinite. Believers deal too little with the infinitude of God. Hence the tendency to “limit the Holy One of Israel.” Thus, too, it is, that our confidence in God is so hesitating, our views of His power so dwarfish, our love so defective, and our requests and expectations so contracted. “I am a great King, says the Lord God.” All His thoughts are vast, infinite, worthy of His greatness. His electing thought of us was a great thought; His thought of redeeming us was a great thought; His thought of making us divine by the regeneration of the Holy Spirit is a great thought; His thought of bringing us to glory to enjoy Him fully and forever is a great thought. All these thoughts of God are as great as they are precious, as precious as they are great. O child of God! do not think lightly of the thoughts God has of you—they are so vast, nothing can exceed, so precious, nothing can equal them. The thoughts of an Infinite Mind encircle and enfold you more closely and fondly than the ivy clasps the elm, or the mother her new-born infant. Whether they appear clad in darkness, or robed in light, they are equally the great and precious thoughts of your covenant God and Father. “How precious are your thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!”

God's thoughts of His people are—hidden. The thoughts of the Invisible One, they must necessarily be so. It is His glory to conceal until it becomes His wisdom and love to reveal them. Treasured up in the Divine Mind, they repose

in profound mystery until each circumstance in our daily life unfolds and makes them known, then we learn how real and how precious God's thoughts of us are. There is not a moment, beloved of God, that the Lord is not thinking of you; nor is there a moment that He is not, in some form or other, embodying those thoughts in His gracious and providential dealings with you. His wisdom withholds, and His love veils them, until the event transpires that gives them utterance and form. Therefore, when God is silent, let us be still; when He speaks, let us hearken. Hidden to us though His precious thoughts are, they are all known to Him. “I know the thoughts I think towards you, says the Lord; thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” Attempt not, therefore, to fathom the Divine Mind, or to penetrate the thoughts that are hidden there. Know you that they are thoughts of everlasting love, thoughts of assured peace, and let this bring your heart into silent, patient waiting, until all these thoughts shall stand unveiled in His wise, loving, and holy dispensations, here, and in heaven's own light hereafter. Enough is revealed by Christ to satisfy you that God's thoughts of you are thoughts of reconciliation—that there exists not in the Divine Mind a solitary thought adverse to your well-being. Jesus, our Friend, reposes in His people the same confidence His Father has reposed in Him. “All things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.” Jesus is the expression and embodiment of our Father's mind. Jesus is God thinking, God loving, God working, God redeeming. “He that has seen me has seen the Father.” Be not, then, troubled in mind at the dark and mysterious in your path. God is dealing well with you. By His light you shall walk through darkness. Confiding in the wise and loving, though concealed, thoughts of your heavenly Father, your trustful heart can respond, as those thoughts gradually unfold, “How precious are your thoughts unto me, O God!”

Unchangeableness is another characteristic of God's thoughts of His people. This is self-evident, since they are the thoughts of the Unchangeable One. Change implies imperfection. God is a perfect Being, consequently He cannot change. “I the Lord change not.” With Him is “no variableness, neither the shadow of a turning.” He may vary His providences, multiply His dispensations, and shift the ever-moving scene of human life, but—

“His eternal thoughts move on,

His undisturbed affairs.” How precious is this truth to the child of God! Human thoughts change; mind itself fails, and with it fades from memory countenances that were familiar, and names that were fond, and scenes that were sacred. Human thoughts that cluster and cling so warmly and closely around us today, before many weeks are past, attracted by new objects of interest, or absorbed by new engagements of time, have fled and gone, and we are alone and forgotten. But there is ONE whose thoughts of us never change, whose mind never ceases for a moment to think of us. “O Israel, you shall not be forgotten of me,” is His own loving declaration. Directing us to a mother—the last earthly home of human tenderness, sympathy, and love—He tells us, “She may forget, yet will not I.” Beloved, whatever fluctuation you find in human thought, or change in human affection, God's thoughts of love, and care, and faithfulness, are changeless. Have they ever darted into your heart like solar beams, causing that heart to sing for joy? Then, though in darkness, loneliness, and sorrow you are led to exclaim, “Has the Lord forgotten to be gracious?” God still bears you in His thoughts and on His heart. Relatives may forget, friends may forget, the saints may forget, but your God never can. He thinks of you at this moment as lovingly, as carefully, as from all eternity. Once in the thoughts of your covenant God, you are in those thoughts forever. Be not cast down, then, if God appears to forget you. “My way is hid from the Lord,” says the desponding Church. “No,” says God; “I have engraved you upon the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me.” Amid all your mental wanderings, your fickle, faint thoughts of Him, He still remembers you. In the multitude of your anxious and perplexed thoughts within you, awakened by a sense of your ungrateful oblivion of God, or by His trying and mysterious dealings, let this comfort delight your soul, that He never forgets you. But let us particularize some of God's thoughts of His saints.

He thinks of their persons. Each believer has a personal interest in the Divine Mind. The acceptance of our person before that of our sacrifice is God's order. It is man's folly, deep and fatal, to reverse this. “I will accept you and your sweet savor,” says the Lord God—first, the persons, and then the offerings of His people. Now, the Lord's people are an accepted people— “accepted in the Beloved.” You may, in some moments of spiritual

despondency, appear to your own view so vile and unlovely as to be beyond the pale of God's loving and complacent regard. You can only think of, and view yourself with, the deepest self-abhorrence. And yet at that moment of spiritual prostration, your person, standing in Christ, clad in His imputed righteousness, and lovely through the loveliness He has put upon you, is an object of His ineffable delight; and all His parental, gracious, and tender thoughts are entwined around you with a grasp from which nothing shall ever separate you.

He thinks of His own work in your soul—that divine kingdom of righteousness, joy, and peace in the Holy Spirit which has its home in every regenerate man. Its development and growth, its progress amid indwelling sin, the fluctuation of spiritual feeling, the varied phases it assumes, the summer's drought, the winter's frost through which it passes—occupies the incessant thoughts of God. He has His eye upon that hidden kingdom of grace in the soul more intently, more fixedly, more benignantly than He views the most powerful and gorgeous kingdom upon earth. “The kingdom of God is within you,” says the Savior; and all other kingdoms shall fall and disappear, when this kingdom of grace in the saints shall emerge from its veiled obscurity and feebleness, and expand and brighten into an eternal kingdom of glory. Yes, beloved, God thinks of all the spiritual exercises through which you pass— your fears and hopes, your doubtings and your trustings, your high and your low frames, your infirmities of prayer, of faith, and love—yes, there is not a throb of your heart, not a feeling of your soul, not a thought of your mind growing out of the work of Divine grace within—all that elevates or depresses, that grieves or cheers, that shades or brightens—that does not engage the thoughts of your God.

The thoughts of God, too, are occupied with the returns His people make. Nothing you do escapes His notice. What! is there anything done by you for God to which He is indifferent? Ah, no! He thinks of all your sincere desires to love Him, your lowly endeavors to serve Him, your earnest efforts to obey Him, your feeble, imperfect attempts to honor and glorify Him. He thinks of all the poor returns you make of loving toil, of patient endurance, of filial obedience. Have you a passing remembrance of Him as you thread your way through the crowd?—God thinks of it. Is there a gush of love welling up from

your heart in secret communion?—God thinks of it. Bear you with stealthy step to an obscure abode the cup of cold water to moisten the fevered lips of some poor suffering saint?—God thinks of it. Have you relinquished some fond idol, or mortified some darling sin, or resisted some potent temptation, or discharged some act of self-denial for the honor of His name?—God thinks of it. Every habit you lay down, or cross you take up, or burden you bear, or yoke to which you bow for Jesus, shall be treasured up in the thoughts of your God through eternity.

We have now, in the progress of our remarks, arrived at a delightful part of the subject—the preciousness of God's thoughts. And where is there a heart touched by divine grace that does not respond from its innermost shrine to the exclamation of David—“How precious are your thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!” They are in truth precious, than which nothing is really so. To feel that God has one loving thought of us, to know that He thinks of us—that He remembers us with a constancy which no forgetfulness on our part of Him can efface, to be quite sure that in His thoughts of love, His thoughts of peace, His thoughts of complacent delight, His true, constant, faithful thoughts we have a personal share—oh, there is a preciousness in this truth, a repose, a confidence, a sanctity, which distances all conception! “How precious are your thoughts unto me, O God!” Let us go into a few particulars.

God's thoughts are precious in themselves—they are essentially precious. They must be so, since they are a Father's thoughts. How precious are His thoughts of eternal love towards us! What! is there no preciousness in this truth to your soul, beloved? I trust the honey from the comb is not half so sweet. “I have loved you with an everlasting love, therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn you.” Is there no sweetness in this truth, in comparison of which all carnal sweetness is as gall? You have tasted the gracious stream, and found it sweet; but have you followed that stream to the fountain whence it flowed— the everlasting love of your covenant God—and tasted yet more sweetness there? Be you assured of this, not one drop of honey distills into your cup, but it comes from the heart of God. It exudes from that “Tree of Life” which He planted in this sinful, sorrow-stricken world, scathed, wounded, by His own hand of justice. “Stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted, it pleased the Lord

to bruise him; he has put him to grief,” that through this costly, touching, winning channel—the wounds of our Immanuel—might flow into our souls His everlasting thoughts of love. Then you exclaim, “Did God love me from all eternity? did He think of me then? was He preparing all my future happiness and eternal blessedness, treasuring up for me all grace here, and all glory hereafter?—O God! how precious are Your thoughts of love to me!” Yes, they are precious, because they are God's thoughts, and not man's—divine, and not human—thoughts of Divine love, and not of anger—of peace, and not of wrath.

As redeeming thoughts they are precious. It was a thought, which could only find its conception in the Divine Mind, that of saving sinners by the sacrifice of God's beloved Son. No finite mind would ever have thought of saving man; once lost, he would to that mind seem lost irrecoverably. To secure the integrity of His moral government intact, the glory of His Divine nature unsullied—to harmonize justice with mercy, holiness with love, truth with grace, and thus to reconcile all the jarring interests of heaven in the salvation of sinners, by the blood of the Cross, was a thought worthy of God. Go to the cross of Calvary, and learn how costly and precious are God's redeeming thoughts of you. His thought of rearing that cross in the center of a revolted part of His empire—of impaling upon it His only begotten and well-beloved Son, a sacrifice for the salvation of its rebellious subjects—His thought of laying all our sins and all our curse upon Jesus, extinguishing the fires of our hell by the life-blood of Immanuel—of opening the kingdom of heaven to us through the pierced, broken heart of Christ the Anointed One—oh, it were infinitely worthy of Him who is “wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working!” O God, when I read your heart in the cross, in the wounds, in the tears, in the anguish, in the blood of your Son, Jesus Christ, how precious are your thoughts unto me!—thoughts that planned and accomplished my redemption, by an expedient so vast, and at a cost so precious.

Trace these thoughts of God as they compassed our path through all the days of our unregeneracy—how precious are they! We too much overlook this—the patience and forbearance of God during the period of our unconverted days. Surely the 'long-suffering of God' through all these stages and acts of enmity and rebellion was 'salvation.' How often, when gliding upon

the treacherous rapid that bore us onward to the gulf, or when standing upon the brink of the yawning precipice, eternal wrath flaming beneath our feet, God thought of us in mercy and redeemed our life from instant and everlasting destruction! And along all the winding path of waywardness and sin, of worldliness and folly, still His thoughts of electing love and sovereign grace pursued us, nor lost their sight, nor relaxed their hold of us, until the appointed and happy hour that brought us into the bond of the covenant.

How precious His thoughts in conversion. What must the love and tenderness of those thoughts have been at the moment that saw us prostrate at His feet, all our self-righteousness, rebellion, and hostility, all our false dependencies and refuges falling in wreck and ruin from around us; and our soul in that blessed posture which He Himself has portrayed, as none but He could, in language the most tender and touching: “To this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and that trembles at my word!” Oh, what must have been His gracious, condescending, loving thoughts when He traced our first tear, saw our first sorrow, and heard our first appeal to His mercy! When afar off, he beheld us approaching in penitence and contrition, marked the downcast look, the hesitating step, the trembling heart, and heard the secret resolve, “I will arise and go to my Father, and will say unto Him, I have sinned.” And when He looked and beheld the glance, the touch, the venture of faith on Jesus—saw the trembling soul embrace His blessed Son, receive His unspeakable gift, and trust in His great salvation—how precious must have been His thoughts of us at that moment?

How precious are His restoring thoughts. These may, at times, appear greater than His thoughts in conversion. Why? Because these restoring thoughts are after all our sinful wanderings, repeated backslidings in the face of love the most tender, of goodness the most unwearying, of faithfulness the most unwavering, of dealings the most kind. That still His thoughts of pardon and of restoration should follow us, seeking us, bringing us back, and restoring to our souls the joys of His salvation, oh, how precious in themselves are God's thoughts! “I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant; for I do not forget your commandments.”

God's providential thoughts of His people are precious. God is thinking of our wants, of our circumstances, of our emergencies, every moment. His

providential thoughts of us are anticipative; they prevent us with their goodness. That same God who fed Elijah beneath the sycamore tree,—who prepared a dinner for the disciples, weary with their night of fruitless toil, as they landed upon the shore,—who feeds the ravens when they cry, and makes those ravens feed His children,—who, when the meal and the oil are well-near exhausted, sends support,—is our God of providence, all whose thoughts are acquainted with, anticipate, and supply our daily need and emergency. Blessed is it to trace a Father's thoughts of us in our providential mercies: to feel that this good has come, this mercy has been bestowed, this table spread, this want supplied, this pressure met, this evil averted, by God's careful providential thought of us. Oh, how precious are these thoughts to him who lives upon a Father's bounty, who can trace a Father's hand, feel a Father's heart, and hear a Father's voice responsive to the petition, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

But God's thoughts are not only precious in themselves, they are so also in the personal experience of the believer. David's language expresses this, “How precious are Your thoughts unto me, O God!” This is not an abstract truth—no revealed truth is so to the child of God. If through the truth he is sanctified—“Sanctify them through Your truth”—then every truth of God forms an essential ingredient in God's grand recipe for all believers. Christ pledged the promised, and now given, Spirit, that “when He is come He shall guide you into all truth.” Oh, did we more distinctly recognize this office of the Holy Spirit, and honor Him more by availing ourselves of His teaching— ceasing to “hear the instruction that causes to err;” especially ceasing from our own fancied wisdom and attainments—we should not be the children in knowledge and the dwarfs in holiness that we are, but men in both. Into the personal experience, then, of this truth the Holy Spirit is prepared to guide us—the preciousness of God's thoughts. Oh, yes, they are precious at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances. Wreathed in dark clouds or glowing in sunlight, whatever the form they assume or the tint they wear, they are still the thoughts of a covenant God, and as such are inexpressibly precious to the believing soul. Who will affirm that thoughts of love—a creature's love though it be—are not precious? The fond remembrance borne to us from some remote spot, assuring us that time has not effaced nor distance annihilated that sacred affection, that early love that first enstamped its image upon the heart,

is more precious to us than rubies. These thoughts of love thus wafted to us are more fragrant than the violet breath of spring. But oh, how do the thoughts of divine love distance this! That human heart must die, and in that very moment those thoughts of love perish. But God can fill and satisfy our souls with Himself in the entire absence of all creature good. How precious and soothing to our sad and lonely, perhaps aching and anguished hearts, is the reflection that God thinks of us in love! And when we deem no one bears us in fond remembrance—when our path is dreary, our faith is low, our comforts few—when resources are failing, and creatures are withdrawing, and Satan is tempting—when a train of untoward circumstances are weaving their net-work around our feet, forming a labyrinth to human ken of inexplicable and inextricable difficulties—and when, from the many and deep waters in which we sink, our appeal is heard, “My heart is overwhelmed; lead me to the rock that is higher than I”—oh, how precious to us then are the covenant, faithful, loving thoughts of our God!

There is another peculiar stage of Christian experience in which the soul experiences the preciousness of God's thoughts. We refer to the season of mental disquietude and depression, it may be of despondency and despair. You cannot at that moment command your mental powers, control your thoughts, or fix and concentrate them upon any consecutive train of serious and devout reflection. Oh, is it not then soothing and precious to be reminded that your heavenly Father has thoughts of you, that your High Priest in heaven has thoughts of you, that the Holy Spirit on earth has thoughts of you, that each Divine Person of the glorious Godhead has you in remembrance, breathing the words with which He once comforted His Church in the wilderness, “I know the thoughts that I think towards you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” Oh, let no child of God—around whose mind thick clouds are hovering, walking in darkness and having no light, tempted to doubt God, to cast away his confidence and abandon his hope in Christ—yield himself to the desponding reflection that he has no place in God's thoughts of peace. Christian sufferer! child of the light walking in darkness! your Father's thoughts of you never were more tender, compassionate, and faithful than at this season of mental gloom, of spiritual despondency. You may not behold Him through the cloud that shades Him

from your eye; but He, from whom no darkness hides, sees you, and knows the way that you take. Though you may have relaxed your hand of faith on Him, He has not withdrawn His hand of love from you, but is leading you by a right way to bring you to your heavenly and eternal home. “I am poor and needy, yet the Lord thinks upon me.”

Let this subject test the bearing of our minds towards God. What are our thoughts of Him? It is a mark of the ungodly, that “God is not in all their thoughts.” It is a distinctive feature of the children of God, that they “think upon His name.” Oh, is there an occupation of the mind to be compared with this? Thinking of God! meditating upon Christ! There is no other subject of meditation that can calm your perturbed thoughts, fix your wandering thoughts, purify your sinful thoughts, harmonize your perplexed thoughts, quench your panting thoughts, soothe and comfort your sad and mournful thoughts, as thinking upon God! Here is repose—here is peace—here is hope. Oh, that He did engage more of our thoughts! What an infinite, boundless, ennobling theme! “My meditations of Him shall be sweet.” Thoughts of His love will comfort you in sorrow, thoughts of His power will calm you in danger, thoughts of His holiness will check you in temptation, thoughts of His wisdom will encourage you in doubt, thoughts of His all-seeing, all-pervading, all- enshrouding presence will sweeten the solitude, smooth the roughness, and illumine the gloom of your path homeward across the desert.

And remember how precious to His heart are your thoughts of Him. “Those who feared the Lord spoke often one to another: and the Lord hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for those who feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name.” (Malachi 3:16.) Imperfect, transient, sinful as your thoughts of God are, yet there is not a humble, grateful, adoring thought of Him in your heart that is not more precious to Him than countless worlds. Those worlds, innumerable and glorious, will before long be swept from their spheres; but not one lowly, loving, holy thought of God, that once found a moment's home in your heart, shall ever be erased from His book of remembrance. These holy thoughts of God in Christ, that struggled amid indwelling corruption—that, like grains of gold amid beds of earth, sparkled in their veiled and lowly beauty, seen only by Him from whom nothing holy, as nothing sinful, is hidden—these thoughts of

His love and faithfulness which, in seasons of depression, and circumstances of trial, and scenes of sorrow, darted, sun-like, athwart your gloomy desponding mind—“My Father loves me now, cares for me now, is thinking of me now—how precious are Your thoughts unto me, O God!”—all, all comes up as a memorial before Him, more beauteous than morning light, more fragrant than the breath of spring, more costly, precious, and endurable than ocean's richest gems? No tongue can describe how precious and glorifying to Christ is a penitential, believing, loving, adoring, grateful remembrance of His name, welling up from the renewed heart of a poor sinner. He seems to say, “Have you, my disciple, one thought of Me? I have, for that one thought, ten thousand thoughts of you. And when I seem to be deaf to your voice, and silent to your petition, and you are led to exclaim, 'The Lord has forsaken me, and my Lord has forgotten me,' listen to my words—'Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yes, she may forget, yet will not I forget you.'“

Seek the daily purification of your thoughts of God in the atoning blood of Jesus. All your truant, unbelieving, murmuring, rebellious thoughts, oh, take them to the Fountain which alone can blot them out, leaving no tracings upon God's tablet but your penitential thoughts of His holiness, your grateful thoughts of His love, your adoring thoughts of His glory, your peaceful thoughts of His grace! One holy, loving, adoring thought of His name He will never, never forget.

And suffer no humbling conviction of personal unworthiness, or blinding influence of deep sorrow, to veil from your mind the precious truth that God still thinks of you. You may be forgotten by some, and may deem yourself too insignificant and obscure to be remembered by others; but He upon whom all worlds hang, and all beings depend, has thoughts of kindness and of love towards you. Listen to His gracious declaration addressed to you, “You shall not be forgotten of me, O Israel!” Oh, wondrous grace, matchless love, that entwines you, His beloved child, in His thoughts of peace, and care, and sympathy, with an intensity, individuality, and minuteness, which seem to exclude from His mind every other being in the universe, so completely does God absorb His people within Himself. Bereaved and desolate widow! God, your God, thinks of you, and of your little ones. Lone and friendless orphan!

God thinks of you, for “in Him the fatherless find mercy.” Mourning one! God thinks of you, for He has declared, “I, even I, am He that comforts you.” Wanderer, penitent and heart stricken! God thinks of you, for He says, “I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself. Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child? for since I spoke against him, I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my affections are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon him, says the Lord.” Tried, tempted, afflicted one! God thinks of you. “I know their sorrows,” says the Lord. “Come, my people, enter you into your chambers, and shut your doors about you: hide yourself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast.” Sick one! amid your languor, pain, and solitude, your God thinks of you, for “He knows our frame, He remembers that we are dust;” and He has promised “gently to lead those who are burdened.” Stay, then, your mind upon Jehovah-Jesus. “You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind (margin, whose thoughts) is stayed on you: because he trusts in you.” Let nothing inexplicable in God's dealings with you unhinge your mind from this confidence in the wisdom, love, and righteousness of His procedure. Remember His declaration, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8, 9.) Thus, confide in those covenant, unchanging, loving thoughts of God, and believe that, high as the billows mount, these divine thoughts of your Father's love tower infinitely above all your unworthiness, sins, sorrows, and fears. Although at times so absorbed in a sense of your sinfulness and littleness you may appear to yourself but like an animalcule swimming in the ocean, or a mote floating in the sunbeam, yet the God who gave to that insect its being, and sustains its life, thinks of, and cares for, and loves you. Go, then, and exclaim, “How precious are your thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!” “CASTING ALL YOUR CARE UPON HIM; FOR HE CARES FOR YOU.”

“Mighty God! on whom the cares Of the whole creation lie; And whose ample bosom bears The load so patiently: 'Midst the worlds that lean on Thee,

You have loving thoughts of me. “Ever quickly You do hear Your children's feeble cry; And do keep them everywhere Beneath Your watchful eye: 'Midst the worlds that lean on Thee, You have faithful thoughts of me. “Anxious care and heavy woes Often agitate my breast; And no balm that here grows Can give my spirit rest: But 'midst worlds that lean on Thee, You have gentle thoughts of me.”

## 5. THE PRECIOUSNESS OF THE