Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Faithless

I can talk a good talk about trusting God, but then throw a little curve my way-- say a stinking virus, a few migraine headaches, or a serious case of the hives, it doesn't even have to be life-threatening--- and I can actually feel justified in being mad at God.  At least from the comfy perspective of my own sinful heart I can smugly ask God, "Really?  Are you serious?".  But this morning Spurgeon reminded me that such thinking is faithlessness.  And weighing myself by anything other than God's word is fruitless.  And when I weigh myself by His word, I come up wanting, and throw myself back on the grace of Jesus.

Read the following from Spurgeon's Morning by Morning for June 12 below, Gentle Reader.  May it convict you as it did me:


"Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting."—Daniel 5:27.
T is well frequently to weigh ourselves in the scale of God's Word. You will find it a holy exercise to read some psalm of David, and, as you meditate upon each verse, to ask yourself, "Can I say this? Have I felt as David felt? Has my heart ever been broken on account of sin, as his was when he penned his penitential psalms? Has my soul been full of true confidence in the hour of difficulty as his was when he sang of God's mercies in the cave of Adullam, or in the holds of Engedi? Do I take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord?" Then turn to the life of Christ, and as you read, ask yourselves how far you are conformed to His likeness. Endeavour to discover whether you have the meekness, the humility, the lovely spirit which He constantly inculcated and displayed. Take, then, the epistles, and see whether you can go with the apostle in what he said of his experience. Have you ever cried out as he did—"O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death"? Have you ever felt his self-abasement? Have you seemed to yourself the chief of sinners, and less than the least of all saints? Have you known anything of his devotion? Could you join with him and say, "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain"? If we thus read God's Word as a test of our spiritual condition, we shall have good reason to stop many a time and say, "Lord, I feel I have never yet been here, O bring me here! give me true penitence, such as this I read of. Give me real faith; give me warmer zeal; inflame me with more fervent love; grant me the grace of meekness; make me more like Jesus. Let me no longer be 'found wanting,' when weighed in the balances of the sanctuary, lest I be found wanting in the scales of judgment." "Judge yourselves that ye be not judged."

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