Evening and Morning
By Charles Haddon Spurgeon
April 23
Morning
"Nay, in all these things we are more than
conquerors through Him that loved us."—Romans 8:37.
We go to Christ for
forgiveness, and then too often look to the law for power to fight our sins.
Paul thus rebukes us, "O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that
ye should not obey the truth? This only would I learn of you, Received ye the
Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? are
ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now
made perfect by the flesh?" Take your sins to Christ's cross, for the old
man can only be crucified there: we are crucified with Him. The only
weapon to fight sin with is the spear which pierced
the side of Jesus. To give an illustration—you want to overcome an angry
temper, how do you go to work? It is very possible you have never tried the
right way of going to Jesus with it. How did I get salvation? I came to Jesus
just as I was, and I trusted Him to save me. I must kill my angry temper in the
same way? It is the only way in which I can ever kill it. I must go to the
cross with it, and say to Jesus, "Lord, I trust Thee to deliver me from
it." This is the only way to give it a death-blow.
Are you covetous? Do you feel the world entangle you? You may struggle against
this evil so long as you please, but if it be your
besetting sin, you will never be delivered from it in any way but by the blood
of Jesus. Take it to Christ. Tell Him, "Lord, I have trusted Thee, and Thy
name is Jesus, for Thou dost save Thy people from their sins; Lord, this is one
of my sins; save me from it!" Ordinances are nothing without Christ as a
means of mortification. Your prayers, and your repentances, and your
tears—the whole of them put together—are worth nothing apart from
Him. "None but Jesus can do helpless sinners good;" or helpless
saints either. You must be conquerors through Him who hath loved you, if
conquerors at all. Our laurels must grow among His olives in Gethsemane.
Evening
"Lo, in the midst of the throne . . . stood a
Lamb as it had been slain."—Revelation 5:6.
Why should our
exalted Lord appear in His wounds in glory? The wounds of Jesus are His
glories, His jewels, His sacred ornaments. To the eye
of the believer, Jesus is passing fair because He is "white and
ruddy" white with innocence, and ruddy with His own blood. We see Him as
the lily of matchless purity, and as the rose crimsoned with His own gore.
Christ is lovely upon Olivet and Tabor, and by the sea, but oh! there never was such a matchless Christ as He that did hang
upon the cross. There we beheld all His beauties in perfection, all His
attributes developed, all His love drawn out, all His character expressed.
Beloved, the wounds of Jesus are far more fair in our
eyes than all the splendour and pomp of kings. The
thorny crown is more than an imperial diadem. It is true that He bears not now
the sceptre of reed, but there was a glory in it that
never flashed from sceptre of gold. Jesus wears the
appearance of a slain Lamb as His court dress in which He wooed our souls, and
redeemed them by His complete atonement. Nor are these only the ornaments of
Christ: they are the trophies of His love and of His victory. He has
divided the spoil with the strong. He has redeemed for Himself a great
multitude whom no man can number, and these scars are
the memorials of the fight. Ah! if Christ thus loves
to retain the thought of His sufferings for His people, how precious should
his wounds be to us!
"Behold how every wound of His
A precious balm distils,
Which heals the scars that sin had made,
And cures all mortal ills.
"Those wounds are mouths that preach His grace;
The ensigns of His love;
The seals of our expected bliss
In paradise
above."