Sweet Mercy

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JM

Puritan Board Doctor
by Thomas Bradbury
Preached in Grove Chapel, Camberwell, Sunday Morning, April 21st, 1878

"Accepted in the Beloved." (Ephesians 1:6)

Such precious words as these, appear too full of glorious grace for "a poor vile sinner" like me to take upon my lips. I say not this to produce effect, or to awaken any fleshly sensation in your minds, for I know that such productions last only for the moment, and pulpit effects, arising from the flesh and the devil, will perish with the experience of them. I have no desire to appear pre-eminent in sinnership, or in the experience of sin in its heinousness, but I speak thus, because God, in spite of my desires and determinations, makes me both know and feel the truthfulness of what I have declared.

It is a sweet mercy to me to be enabled intelligently, and I believe spiritually, through the teaching of the Holy Ghost, to trace out a God-given and a God-wrought experience in harmony with those whom He has made conspicuous in the display of His sovereign, rich, and all-conquering grace.

As I read my Bible and my Bible reads me I love this blessed reciprocity

I find the longer a redeemed sinner lives, and is blessed with the company and confidence of the Lord Jesus Christ as the Revealer of the Father's secrets, the Executor of the Father's will, and the more he will want to know Him. I will tell you something more. The brighter the revelation of God's Christ to his soul, and the blacker self will be in his spiritual apprehension. The more his heart is warmed with a sense of the love of his God, and the more he will mourn because of his coldness and deadness.

This is a paradox which no hypocrite or mere professor can understand for a single moment. As the child of God grows in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and he sees more of His beauty, enjoys more of His bounty, and feels more of His blessedness, the more he is brought into a true conception of what he is in himself as a wretched, ruined, undeserving, and hell-deserving sinner.

See!

Left to himself, all that he can do is to disbelieve every word of God's Book. Left to himself, though he takes up the hymn book and with his lips joins in singing these precious hymns, yet his heart is cold and listless, over which he mourns and weeps. He meets with God's dear people and he judges himself the vilest of them all. He meets with the children of the devil, and though his own heart shows him the wickedness of every one of them, yet he hates to be found amongst them. But amongst them he must be found, for to shun them altogether, "then must he needs go out of the world." (1 Cor. 5:10) The wheat will grow amongst the tares, and the tares amongst the wheat, but there is no spiritual association. Business and other matters necessitate the meeting of the children of God and the children of the devil, but the heaven-born one quits the other's company as quickly as possible, not because he thinks himself better than they, for he judges his wretched nature to be a thousand times worse. Yes, he discovers in himself a concentration of all the sins of all the people in the universe, and he discovers something else a heart, yearning, longing, panting and desiring after communion with a glorious God, and fellowship with a precious Christ. He would embrace God's Christ with warmth of love hitherto unknown, and he would remain in the heart-reviving embrace of the arms of everlasting love. It is no mean privilege to be brought into such as experience as this. When it is developed in the heart and understanding by the grace and indwelling of God the ever-blessed Spirit, Christ is exalted and self is ignored and excluded.

We are Accepted in the Beloved
 
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