The voice of God in the word has testified to us our Heavenly Father's dove; and the Holy Spirit has borne witness with our spirits that we are the children of God. The apostle opens with the grandest part of the inheritance first heirs of God heirs not of God's gifts, and God's works, but heirs of God himself. They are lambs in the harmlessness of their dispositions, but they have the courage of lions when they defend the honours of their King. may seem too mean to pray about. An unconverted man may love a God, as, for instance, the God of nature, and the God of the imagination; but the God of revelation no man can love, unless grace has been poured into his heart, to turn him from that natural enmity of the heart towards God, in which all of us are born. If I read in the Scriptures that in the most heroic acts of faith God the Holy Ghost helpeth his people, I can understand it; if I read that in the sweetest music of their songs when they worship best, and chant their loftiest strains before the Most High God, the Spirit helpeth them, I can understand it; and even if I hear that in their wrestling prayers and prevalent intercessions God the Holy Spirit helpeth them, I can understand it: but I bow with reverent amazement, my heart sinking into the dust with adoration, when I reflect that God the Holy Ghost helps us when we cannot speak, but only groan. Sustained by distinguishing grace, a man learns to glory in tribulations also; and strengthened by electing love, he defies the hatred of the world and the trials of life. Paul had been persuaded of this truth by his own experience. He said within himself, "Does Jesus love me? One man has ten talents, and oh how proud he is, and how he looks down upon another who has but one, and says: "Ah, you are a mean man; I have ten talents." If man alone call thee, thou art uncalled. If God should choose this morning to call the hardest-hearted wretch within hearing of the gospel, he must obey. As to his humanity our blessed Lord, when he came into this world, underwent a birth which was a remarkable type of our second birth. To atone for the sin of my soul there is the sorrow of his soul; if I poured out my soul in sin, he poured out his soul unto death, and he was numbered with the transgressors. I will count it to be my highest glory if I may be made a knight of the cross, and may carry that cross upon my shoulder: to the world a badge of dishonor, but to me the ensign of glory, the escutcheon of honor. Enemies in heaven? The old translators rendered the passage thus; "The mind of the flesh is enmity against God" that is to say, the natural mind, that soul which we inherit from our fathers, that which was born within us when our bodies were fashioned by God. Be the property much or little, we are co-heirs; if there be infinite treasures, Christ hath them, and we have them; but if there be no treasure whatever, and faith should end in disappointment, and hope in despair, the calamity which impoverishes us must also impoverish our great co-heir. The new life which God has given to us is not ours that we should ascribe its excellence to our own merit: the new nature is Christ's peculiarly; as it is Christ's image and Christ's creation, so it is for Christ's glory alone. True, many things are yet in the future, but even at this present moment, we have obtained an inheritance; we have already in our possession a heritage divine which is the beginning of our eternal portion. In this volume we give you Charles H. Spurgeon commentary on Paul's Epistle to the Romans. An exile, far away from his native country, has been long forgotten, but on a sudden a vessel brings him the pardon of his monarch, and presents from his friends who have called him to remembrance. And now we close by noticing the confidence with which the apostle speaks. 19. What the wealthiest man has is not his own, but God's, and if it be God's then it is Christ's, and if Christ's, then his children's; and Christ's children are often those who are hungry, and thirsty, and destitute, and afflicted, and tormented. Be just before you are generous, and especially before you are generous to yourselves. Is there anything to be proud of in having paid a farthing in the pound? He could not be persuaded that nothing could separate us from a thing which did not exist, so he is persuaded, first of all, of the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. What a heritage lies before us! No doubt, however, the text means that these will for ever love and honor the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Remarks upon the Catalogue of Commentaries. Purity, holiness, unselfishness, all the virtues, should glow in us as they shone in him. Suffering is the college of orthodoxy. Rather judge that such prayers are like Jabez, of whom it is written, that "he was more honourable than his brethren, because his mother bare him with sorrow." Overleap the boundaries of Christ's possession if you can, and then dream of ending a limit to the possessions of the elect of God. He was Lord of angels, seraphim and cherubim obeyed his behests; but the Son desired to be at the head of a race of beings more nearly allied to him than any existing spirits. 3. God's great love for us is supremely demonstrated in Christ Jesus our Lord, who gave Himself for us on the cross. "He had not persecuted Christ," you say, "it was only some poor men and women that he had haled to prison, or scourged in the synagogue, to compel them to blaspheme." is this the cause of thine enmity? What can you be at? "'We know;' In the mouth of two or three witnesses it shall all be established; but I have tens of thousands of witnesses." But all things pass away. Consider what you owe to his power; how he has raised you from your death in sin, and how he has preserved your spiritual life, how he has kept you from falling, and how, though a thousand enemies have beset your path, you have been able to hold on your way! If I promulgated the doctrine on my own authority, I could not blame you if you should turn against me, and reject it; but when, on the authority of Holy Scripture, I propound it, God forbid that any man should quarrel therewith. The same legacy that left peace with you, also left tribulation with you, while you are in this world. Our little debts we can pay. Firm as this rock I stand, though nature reels and all things pass away. He not only groaned in body, when beaten by the Roman soldiers, and pierced with nails and thorns; but in soul he was overwhelmed by exceeding heaviness, and by the desertion of his God. When we have broken his commandments, as we all of us have, we are debtors to his justice, and we owe to him a vast amount of punishment, which we are not able to pay. Do you suppose for a moment that there is any injustice in God in having given you grace which he did not give to another? "Surely," said he, "the minister knew me, and spoke something personally to me, because he knew my case." You know the contrast in the speech between different persons concerning this doctrine. With that attack upon his Sonship the fiend commenced the battle. There are few people who sincerely believe this. It may be read, "Nor anything in creation, nor anything that ever is to be created," nothing shall ever separate us-from the love of Christ. The Secret Power in Prayer January 8, 1888 by . The having those corruptions is our crime which should be confessed as an enormous evil; and if I, as a minister of the gospel, do not press home the sin of the thing, I have missed what is the very virus of it. Through many troubles you have passed, but you can say, they have all been for your good. We may say of the prayers which the Holy Spirit works in us that they are prayers of knowledge. There is still another foe that answers your challenge, "Who is he that condemneth?" Man as a necessary piece of political policy, may give to the heir that which surely he can have not more real right to in the sight of God, than the rest of the family may give him all the inheritance, while his brethren, equally true born, may go without; but it is not so in the family of God. There once was chaos and confusion, but the Holy Spirit brooded over all, and His mind is the originator of that beautiful arrangement which we so admire in the visible creation. "For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come nor height, nor depth nor any other creatures, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Yea, thy law is within my heart. The inheritance cannot be divided; if you will have the glory, you must have the shame. There is a third thing in which we are deficient, namely, liberty, the glorious liberty of the children of God. "Brethren, we are debtors.". Let us go on believing and repenting, as we have done; but let us not have to begin believing and begin repenting, let us go on to something beyond that stage of experience. If he had not been a Christian, his Jewish dignity would never have condescended to call a Roman "brother;" for a Jew sneered at the Gentile, and called him "dog." We have a work to do, as great as our forefathers, and, perhaps, far greater. There is not only a sea in which to drown our sins, but the very tops of the mountains of our guilt are covered. Rest thou secure. Edited by C. H. SPURGEON. And yet this is just through our ignorance and through the blindness of our eyes; for verily to the enlightened believer there is more consolation in Jesus arising from the tomb, than there is in Jesus nailed to the cross. 4. To us, indeed, the things are scarcely comparable, since we are deeply interested in one, though not in the other. But let the man that worketh, though it be with the sweat of his brow and with aching hands, remember that he, if he is seeking to bless the Lord's people, is in sympathy with all things not only in sympathy with their work, but in sympathy with their aim. Brethren, we are debtors to the past. I suppose you say, "Injustice, no; God has a right to do as he wills with his own; I could not claim grace, nor could my companions, God chose to give it to me, the other has rejected grace wilfully to his own fault, and I should have done the same, but that he gave 'more grace,' whereby my will was constrained." Romans 8:28-30 I. It is astonishing where men will go to seek salvation. If I may be allowed the simile, I would say that this represents in part the work of the Spirit of God in us, suggesting to us the right desire, and bringing all things to our remembrance whatsoever Christ has told us. What would you give, some of you, if you could have such a hope as this? And let me further remark, that the right hand is the place of power. Did he not tell us this as an encouragement to believe that we shall receive all needful blessings? It is as when a man doth marry. He aims at his own glory in the glory of his dear Son; if he blesses us the text of last Sabbath is still true, "not for your sakes do I this;" it is for the sake of a higher, a better one than we are, it is "that he might be the first-born." In illustrating the effectual call of grace, which is given to the predestinated ones, I must first use the picture of Lazarus. "All things work together for good," but not to all men; they only work together for the good of "them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. never let it be so. The curse has fallen on it since the fall, and thorns and thistles it bringeth forth, not from its soil alone, but from all that comes of it. God that cannot lie, in the person of the Holy Ghost, graciously condescendeth to say "Amen" to the testimony of our conscience. The sighing of a true heart is infinitely more acceptable, for it is the work of the Spirit of God. So we are persuaded of these three things: first, that God loves us; next, that God has shown his love to us by the gift of his Son Jesus Christ; and then, that his divine love comes streaming down to us because we are in Christ, and are loved for his sake. "All things work together," for that kind of good to God's people. Young man, didst thou do more than thou oughtest to have done? Well, in the first place, there is one part of the property which we may enjoy at once. He does not say, "I am persuaded;" he does not say, "I believe;" but with unblushing confidence he appears before you and says, "We" (I have many witnesses) we know that all things work together." We must be joined together, or else the apostle would not talk of separation. He was gentle and kind and tender; as he was, so are we to be in this world. "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up; that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life." 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