Evening and Morning
By Charles Haddon Spurgeon
June 30
Morning
"And the glory which Thou gavest
me I have given them."—John 17:22.
Behold the
superlative liberality of the Lord Jesus, for He hath given us His all.
Although a tithe of His possessions would have made a universe of angels rich beyond all thought, yet was He not content until
He had given us all that He had. It would have been surprising grace if He had
allowed us to eat the crumbs of His bounty beneath the table of His mercy; but
He will do nothing by halves, He makes us sit with Him and share the feast. Had
He given us some small pension from His royal coffers, we should have had cause
to love Him eternally; but no, He will have His bride as rich as Himself, and
He will not have a glory or a grace in which she shall not share. He has not been
content with less than making us joint-heirs with Himself, so that we might
have equal possessions. He has emptied all His estate into the coffers of the
Church, and hath all things common with His redeemed. There is not one room in
His house the key of which He will withhold from His people. He gives them full
liberty to take all that He hath to be their own; He loves them to make free
with His treasure, and appropriate as much as they can possibly carry. The
boundless fulness of His all-sufficiency is as free
to the believer as the air he breathes. Christ hath put the flagon of His love
and grace to the believer's lip, and bidden him drink on for ever; for could he
drain it, he is welcome to do so, and as he cannot exhaust it, he is bidden to
drink abundantly, for it is all his own. What truer proof of fellowship can
heaven or earth afford?
"When I stand before the throne
Dressed in beauty not my own;
When I see Thee as Thou art,
Love Thee with unsinning
heart;
Then, Lord, shall I fully know—
Not till then—how
much I owe."
Evening
"Ah Lord God, behold, Thou hast made the
heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is
nothing too hard for Thee."—Jeremiah 32:17.
At the very time when the
Chaldeans surrounded Jerusalem, and when the sword, famine and pestilence had
desolated the land, Jeremiah was commanded by God to purchase a field, and have
the deed of transfer legally sealed and witnessed. This was a strange purchase
for a rational man to make. Prudence could not justify it, for it was buying
with scarcely a probability that the person purchasing could ever enjoy the
possession. But it was enough for Jeremiah that his God had bidden him, for
well he knew that God will be justified of all His
children. He reasoned thus: "Ah, Lord God! Thou canst make this plot of
ground of use to me; Thou canst rid this land of these oppressors; Thou canst
make me yet sit under my vine and my fig-tree in the heritage which I have
bought; for Thou didst make the heavens and the earth, and there is nothing too
hard for Thee." This gave a majesty to the early
saints, that they dared to do at God's command things which carnal reason would
condemn. Whether it be a Noah who is to build a ship on dry land, an Abraham
who is to offer up his only son, or a Moses who is to despise the treasures of
Egypt, or a Joshua who is to besiege Jericho seven days, using no weapons but
the blasts of rams' horns, they all act upon God's command, contrary to the
dictates of carnal reason; and the Lord gives them a rich reward as the result
of their obedient faith. Would to God we had in the
religion of these modern times a more potent infusion of this heroic faith in
God. If we would venture more upon the naked promise of God, we should enter a world
of wonders to which as yet we are strangers. Let Jeremiah's place of confidence
be ours—nothing is too hard for the God that
created the heavens and the earth.