October 19

Have you not brought this on yourself by forsaking the LORD your God when He led you in the way? — Jer 2:17 BSB

No one knows better than I do that we cannot, by any spiritual effort of our own, bring ourselves near to God. But I am equally certain that we can do many things that set us very far from Him. All the guilt and shame are ours; all the grace and glory belong to God. Every drop of mercy we feel, every ray of hope we experience, every sweet application of truth to our hearts, every sense of our saving interest in Him, every blessed testimony, every tender desire, every heavenly smile, and every spiritual feeling—all of these come from God. If ever my heart is softened, my soul blessed, my spirit refreshed, or if I feel the preciousness of Christ—it is all from His grace. It is all freely given, sovereignly, without money and without price.

Yet, I cannot deny—and none of us should deny—that through our carnality, inconsistency, worldliness, neglect, ingratitude, and forgetfulness of the God who blesses us, we continually bring spiritual leanness, deadness, and darkness into our souls. Because of this, we are often forced to plead guilty, to put our mouths in the dust, acknowledge our vileness, and confess ourselves as “the chief of sinners and the least of saints.”

But even in this state of brokenness, God, in His mysterious ways, opens a door for His sovereign grace and mercy to visit the soul. The more we feel condemned, cut off, wounded, and distressed by a sense of our sin and foolishness, backslidings, and wanderings from God, the lower we will bow before Him, confessing our utter baseness. And in these solemn moments, if the Lord chooses to open our blind eyes to catch a glimpse of the precious blood of the Lamb, to apply a sweet promise to our soul, or to give us a sense of His goodness and mercy, how sweet and suitable that grace becomes. It washes over all the mountains and hills of our sin and shame like sunlight shining on a black cloud. The very blackness of our sin only serves to heighten the glory of God’s free grace, as the dark cloud only makes the bright rays of the Sun of Righteousness more radiant.