THE GOSPEL AND PURE GRACE

By on Sep 14, 2012 in Current Issues, Devotions, Features

So maybe you thought you had inadvertently arrived here at Apprising Ministries. Then you noticed your heart beat a little faster as you looked around.

Have you thought that it might be God stirring you; that He’s wanting you to know that there is repentance and forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ Name, it’s true.

Come to Him now, in The Shadow Of His Cross; and if you think you’ve gone too far away for Jesus to reach you, then take comfort in these words:

And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. (Acts 9:3-5)

Paul’s conversion would serve for an outline sketch of the conversion of any one of us. How was that conversion wrought? Well, it is clear that there was nothing at all in Paul to contribute to his salvation.

You might have sifted him in a sieve without finding anything upon which you could rest a hope that he would be converted to the faith of Jesus. His natural bent, his early training, his whole surroundings, and his life’s pursuits all fettered him to Judaism and made it most unlikely that he would ever become a Christian.

The first elder of the church that ever talked to him about divine things could hardly believe in his conversion. “Lord,” said he, “I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem” (Acts 9:13 KJV).

He could hardly think it possible that the ravening wolf should have changed into a lamb. Nothing favorable to faith in Jesus could have been found in Saul; the soil of his heart was very rocky, the plowshare could not touch it, and the good seed found no foothold.

Yet the Lord converted Saul, and he can do the like by other sinners, but it must be a work of pure grace and of divine power, for there is not in any man’s fallen nature a holy spot of the size of a pin’s point on which grace can light.

Transforming grace can find no natural lodgment in our hearts; it must create its own soil. And blessed be God, it can do it, for with God all things are possible. ((Charles Spurgeon, At the Master’s Feet [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005], September 14.))

Charles Spurgeon

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