Milo

July 10

“I called upon him, but he gave me no answer.” (S. of Sol. 5:6)

THE Lord, when He hath given great faith, hath been known to try it by long delayings. He has suffered His servants’ voices to echo in their ears as from a brazen sky. They have knocked at the golden gate, but it has remained unmovable, as though it were rusted upon its hinges. Like Jeremiah, they have cried, “Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through.” Thus have true saints continued long in patient waiting without reply, not because their prayers were not vehement, nor because they were unaccepted, but because it so pleased Him who is a Sovereign, and who gives according to His own pleasure. If it pleases Him to bid our patience exercise itself, shall He not do as He will with His own!
No prayer is lost. Praying breath was never spent in vain. There is no such thing as prayer unanswered or unnoticed by God, and some things that we count refusals or denials are simply delays.—H. Bonar.
Christ sometimes delays His help that He may try our faith and quicken our prayers. The boat may be covered with the waves, and He sleeps on; but He will wake up before it sinks. He sleeps, but He never oversleeps; and there are no “too lates” with Him.—Alexander Maclaren.

Be still, sad soul! lift thou no passionate cry,
But spread the desert of thy being bare
To the full searching of the All-seeing eye;
Wait! and through dark misgiving, black despair,
God will come down in pity, and fill the dry
Dead place with light, and life, and vernal air.
—J. C. Shairp.

10 JULY

A great salvation

‘How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation …?’ Hebrews 2:3
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Hebrews 1:1–2:4

The love of God towards sinners is most amazing and wonderful. When they deserved death and misery, he revealed unto them a great salvation. The wonders of his grace afford a wonderful proof of man’s depravity. This salvation, so great, so necessary, so undeserved, has been, and is, too generally neglected. Consider the danger of this neglect. How shall we escape? You may observe a comparison between the Jewish and the gospel dispensation in the preceding verses. The Israelites had seen the Lord’s salvation—he freed them from bondage, maintained them in the wilderness, gave them his covenant, and placed them in Canaan. Yet many of [them] neglected their salvation, despised the word given by angels, and were for their disobedience destroyed. And all that happened to them was written for our instruction (1 Corinthians 10:11). Their salvation was typical of ours, but fell short in every respect—so that this is emphatically called a great salvation:
(i) with respect to the objects: miserable sinners, who might justly have been left to perish, groaning under worse than Egyptian bondage, upon the very brink of hell, as brands in the burning (Romans 5:6, 8).
(ii) with respect to the means: the deliverance from Egypt was only a display of divine power, but this salvation was the price of blood, the blood of God (Acts 20:28; Revelation 5:9). He saved others, himself he could not save.
(iii) the application of this salvation to a sinner’s heart is a great work, compared to creation (2 Corinthians 4:6), raising the dead (Ephesians 2:5; Colossians 2:13).
(iv) with respect to the end. What is a temporal Canaan, if compared with spiritual blessings—children of God here and heirs of glory hereafter?

FOR MEDITATION: I recommend it as a great salvation—sufficient to pardon the greatest sins (Isaiah 1:18); sufficient to save the greatest sinners—instance in Paul, Mary Magdalene, the malefactor. We are assured by our Lord himself in John 6:37, Isaiah 45:22 and Matthew 11:28. Do not think it humility to say, My sins are too great to be forgiven. It is unbelief, pride and a direct affront to the truth and power of Christ.

SERMON: HEBREWS 2:3 [1/1]

July 9th

The great probing

Ye cannot serve the Lord. Joshua 24:19.

Have you the slightest reliance on any thing other than God? Is there a remnant of reliance left on any natural virtue, any set of circumstances? Are you relying on yourself in any particular in this new proposition which God has put before you? That is what the probing means. It is quite true to say—‘I cannot live a holy life’; but you can decide to let Jesus Christ make you holy. “Ye cannot serve the Lord God”—but you can put yourself in the place where God’s Almighty power will work through you. Are you sufficiently right with God to expect Him to manifest His wonderful life in you?
“Nay, but we will serve the Lord.” It is not an impulse, but a deliberate commitment. You say—‘But God can never have called me to this, I am too unworthy, it can’t mean me.’ It does mean you, and the weaker and feebler you are, the better. The one who has something to trust in is the last one to come anywhere near saying—‘I will serve the Lord.’
We say—‘If I really could believe!’ The point is—If I really will believe. No wonder Jesus Christ lays such emphasis on the sin of unbelief. “And He did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief.” If we really believed that God meant what He said—what should we be like! Dare I really let God be to me all that He says He will be?

July 9

“I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction.” (Isa. 48:10.)

DOES not the Word come like a soft shower, assuaging the fury of the flame? Yes, is it not an asbestos armor, against which the heat has no power? Let the affliction come—God has chosen me. Poverty, thou mayest stride in at my door; but God is in the house already, and He has chosen me. Sickness, thou mayest intrude; but I have a balsam ready—God has chosen me. Whatever befall me in this vale of tears, I know that He has chosen me.
Fear not, Christian; Jesus is with thee. In all thy fiery trials, His presence is both thy comfort and safety. He will never leave one whom He has chosen for His own. “Fear not, for I am with thee,” is His sure word of promise to His chosen ones in “the furnace of affliction.”—C. H. Spurgeon.

Pain’s furnace heat within me quivers,
  God’s breath upon the flame doth blow;
And all my heart in anguish shivers
  And trembles at the fiery glow;
And yet I whisper, “As God will!”
And in the hottest fire hold still.

He comes and lays my heart, all heated,
  On the hard anvil, minded so
Into His own fair shape to beat it
  With His great hammer, blow on blow;
And yet I whisper, “As God will!”
And at His heaviest blows hold still.

He takes my softened heart and beats it;
  The sparks fly off at every blow;
He turns it o’er and o’er and heats it,
  And lets it cool, and makes it glow;
And yet I whisper, “As God will!”
And in His mighty hand hold still.

Why should I murmur? for the sorrow
  Thus only longer-lived would be;
The end may come, and will tomorrow,
  When God has done His work in me;
So I say trusting, “As God will!”
And, trusting to the end, hold still.

—Julius Sturm.
The burden of suffering seems a tombstone hung about our necks, while in reality it is only the weight which is necessary to keep down the diver while he is hunting for pearls.—Richter.

9 JULY

A hardened heart

‘And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Genesis 4:9
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING: Zechariah 7:1–14

Cain did not escape. The Lord called to him. By his answer you may perceive how sin had hardened his heart. What ignorance to think his way hid from the Lord. What insolence in asking, Am I my brother’s keeper? But he was soon silenced, the fact pressed home upon his conscience and, though he was suffered to live, his life was a burden. He was driven from the presence of the Lord, from his ordinances and the society of his people, and made, for a season at least, a terror to himself. If he afterwards recovered his spirits, he seems to have done it by getting the better of his conscience and to have been given up judicially to an impenitent mind. This is the greatest punishment on this side hell, when a man has been convinced and distressed for sin and yet afterwards finds a way, without the application of the blood of sprinkling, to make himself whole, and can busy himself for the rest of his time with a worldly life, till at length his hour comes and he falls with all his sins unpardoned into the hands of the living God.

FOR MEDITATION: ‘Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith, Today if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years …) Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily, while it is called Today; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end; While it is said, Today if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation (Hebrews 3:7–9, 12–15).

SERMON SERIES: GENESIS, NO. 12 [4/4], GENESIS 4:8