From “Morning and Evening” by C. H. Spurgeon

“Who of God is made unto us wisdom.”- 1Co_1:30

Man’s intellect seeks after rest, and by nature seeks it apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. Men of education are apt, even when converted, to look upon the simplicities of the cross of Christ with an eye too little reverent and loving. They are snared in the old net in which the Grecians were taken, and have a hankering to mix philosophy with revelation. The temptation with a man of refined thought and high education is to depart from the simple truth of Christ crucified, and to invent, as the term is, a more intellectual doctrine. This led the early Christian churches into Gnosticism, and bewitched them with all sorts of heresies. This is the root of Neology, and the other fine things which in days gone by were so fashionable in Germany, and are now so ensnaring to certain classes of divines. Whoever you are, good reader, and whatever your education may be, if you be the Lord’s, be assured you will find no rest in philosophizing divinity. You may receive this dogma of one great thinker, or that dream of another profound reasoner, but what the chaff is to the wheat, that will these be to the pure word of God. All that reason, when best guided, can find out is but the A B C of truth, and even that lacks certainty, while in Christ Jesus there is treasured up all the fulness of wisdom and knowledge. All attempts on the part of Christians to be content with systems such as Unitarian and Broad-church thinkers would approve of, must fail; true heirs of heaven must come back to the grandly simple reality which makes the ploughboy’s eye flash with joy, and gladens the pious pauper’s heart-”Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.” Jesus satisfies the most elevated intellect when he is believingly received, but apart from him the mind of the regenerate discovers no rest. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” “A good understanding have all they that do his commandments.”

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From “Morning and Evening” by C. H. Spurgeon

“This man receiveth sinners.” – Luk_15:2

Observe the condescension of this fact. This Man, who towers above all other men, holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners-this Man receiveth sinners. This Man, who is no other than the eternal God, before whom angels veil their faces-this Man receiveth sinners. It needs an angel’s tongue to describe such a mighty stoop of love. That any of us should be willing to seek after the lost is nothing wonderful- they are of our own race; but that he, the offended God, against whom the transgression has been committed, should take upon himself the form of a servant, and bear the sin of many, and should then be willing to receive the vilest of the vile, this is marvellous.

“This Man receiveth sinners”; not, however, that they may remain sinners, but he receives them that he may pardon their sins, justify their persons, cleanse their hearts by his purifying word, preserve their souls by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, and enable them to serve him, to show forth his praise, and to have communion with him. Into his heart’s love he receives sinners, takes them from the dunghill, and wears them as jewels in his crown; plucks them as brands from the burning, and preserves them as costly monuments of his mercy. None are so precious in Jesus’ sight as the sinners for whom he died. When Jesus receives sinners, he has not some out-of-doors reception place, no casual ward where he charitably entertains them as men do passing beggars, but he opens the golden gates of his royal heart, and receives the sinner right into himself-yea, he admits the humble penitent into personal union and makes him a member of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. There was never such a reception as this! This fact is still most sure this evening, he is still receiving sinners: would to God sinners would receive him.

A Thought on the Secret Destroyer of Men in our Society

     Did you know that the men of this country are under attack, and that many of them have been destroyed, and the people around them destroyed as well?  Did you know that our young boys are being targeted before they’re even old enough to know that they’re under attack?  Do you know why they’re being attacked, and how, and that the method of attack is so devious and so subtle that our men and boys are being taken out before they have any awareness of what’s going on?

          Why would anyone want to destroy men in our country?  What would be the purpose?   Think about it.  In order to answer those questions I believe it’s of vital importance to talk about what a man is, and why he’s important.  What is a man?  King David asked the question this way in Psalms 144:3 “Lord, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of him!  or the son of man, that thou makest account of him!”  People have been pondering this ever since. 

    So what is man?  Man is a spiritual, moral being.  He was created, and intended to be this.  Creation is the first and foremost witness of the creator.  To deny the Creator is to look up at the night-time sky with its’ billions of stars twinkling overhead, and say you can’t see them.  Man, as a created being, cannot be and will not be a man in the way God designed him apart from his spiritual and moral development.  He was made in the image of God, and the more man denies the imprint of the God who created him, and the further away he moves from that knowledge, the more he devolves into a being of little worth and little virtue. 

   Why is man important?  What is his purpose?  From the dawn of creation, these questions have been pondered and debated, and the fact they have been so is a witness to the ignorance and inability of man on his own to see what’s right in front of him.  There’s no great mystery, no indiscernible theory, to contemplate here because the answer has been implanted in the heart of man since his Creator breathed the breath of life into his dust-formed body.  At the risk of oversimplification, man is important because God made him.  God made him in his image, as a representation of all that is holy, good, and perfect.  The purpose of man is to display the glory and perfection of God in all of His unequaled love and holiness. 

     To look at man in view of what he was intended to be, and what he is now is to see what happens when God is set aside and the things of God ignored.  Man’s downfall and his subsequent degeneration wasn’t due, as some believe, to Eve’s taking and eating of the apple.  Nowhere in the Bible does it say sin entered into the world through Eve, or that it was Eve’s sin that precipitated the downfall of man.  It was through Adam that sin entered the world, and through sin (which is rebellion against God) that the true nature of man was and is corrupted.

     Man, being corrupted, had lost his value, and was worthless for the purpose which God intended, and would have remained so had not God in His infinite love not made a way for man to be redeemed.  Man, in and of himself, had no way to save himself, could do nothing to earn his redemption.  Like mold on bread, sugar in gas, man’s corrupted nature had to be thrown out and replaced.  Only a perfect representation of what man was intended to be could restore corrupted man to his God intended condition, and so Christ Jesus took the sin that corrupted man on himself, and paid the price of sin by his death on the cross and His resurrection thus offering man the gift of restoration to what he was originally intended to be.  God made the way for man to be redeemed, but left man with the choice whether or not to be so.

      Now, I’ve said that men are under attack, and that’s true, but if that’s true, then it’s truer still that the man who follows Christ is even more so.  Every man makes a decision about the man he’s going to be.  Either he decides he’s going to choose to be the man God intended by taking the gift God offered through his son, or continue to live in the corruption he was born into.

     Now, we live in a country where I think that the kind of man God intended for man to be is being attacked in a way never before seen in history.  Think about it.  Look at the corruption in our society, in government, in business, in religion; in the way that men are constantly and incessantly being bombarded with every form of vice that can be hurled at them.  In our society, a man is not a man if he doesn’t drink, make a lot of money, look rough and tough, be sexy and attractive, and be powerful in bed and in the boardroom. 

    The secret destroyer of men in our society is the forever enemy of God, and he’s alive and well.   Men are being destroyed in this country.  Make no doubt of it.  They’re being destroyed not by sex or alcohol, or the love of money though they are the destroyer’s favorite tools, but rather they are being destroyed by those who are trying to destroy the Definer, the one who defined His creation and gave man his true idenity.  The sucess of the destroyer is the result of our failure to be vigilant, to be forthright, to be courageous, to be the full representation of what God called us to be.

     I say this again.  The men of this country are under attack, and I say the following to all christian men: if we don’t unite  and take our responsibility to be what God designed and calls us to be seriously our country will fail.   Christian men we must be willing to stand in front of our children and fight for them.  We must live before our boys as Christ lived before us.  We, as men of God, must stand firm in our belief and love of our Creator, our children, and ourselves.  If our country is to survive and remain great, we must have and train our men to be great . . . .