June 2

Everyone the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will never drive away. — John 6:37 BSB

Now, poor sinner, who feels the fiery beams of the law scorching your conscience, who is distressed in mind, guilty in heart, plagued with countless temptations, surrounded by endless doubts and fears—can’t you lift your eyes just a little from your gloom and sadness, and see that the eternal God is your refuge? Aren’t you clinging to Him with everything you’ve got, having been beaten down from every other refuge? Haven’t you grasped His strength that you might find peace with Him? Are you not looking to Him? And doesn’t He say, “Look unto me and be saved, all the ends of the earth?” He invites you to look to Him just as Moses invited the Israelites to look at the bronze serpent. Groaning under the weight of your sins, He tells you to look to Him.

Hasn’t the blessed Lord—He into whose lips grace was poured—said, “Whoever comes to me, I will never cast out?” So why not look? Why not come to Him? Will He cast you away? Don’t you feel the secret workings of His grace in your heart, drawing you often to come to Him with strong cries and tears, with deep groans and sighs, in earnest, fervent, and continual prayer? What are these but the inward teachings of God? As Jesus said, “It is written in the prophets, ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from Him comes to me.”

Do you not know that Jesus also said no one can come to Him unless the Father who sent Him draws them? These yearnings of your soul in earnest and fervent desire are, according to His own testimony, the result of the special teachings and gracious drawings of God in you. Having made His Son the refuge for your soul, He is now drawing you to Himself, so you may find pardon and peace in Him.

Perhaps you say, “But I’m so sinful, so guilty. I’ve been such a great sinner, worse than you can imagine, and this is what drags me so low.” Are you lower than Jonah when he was in the belly of the whale and, in his feelings, in the belly of hell? And yet what did Jonah say? “Yet I will look again toward your holy temple.” Can’t you look again toward the holy temple? Is God’s mercy gone forever? David feared this, but it wasn’t true, for “His mercy endures forever”—and that’s a powerful and eternal truth. Look and live, look and live!