There is nothing sweeter than grace—the rich, unbounded grace of God! What child of His but recalls with delight his first discovery of it!
When, an unconverted youth, full of worldly hopes and none beyond, I first heard, with a faint glimmering of intelligence, the accents of this grace, my soul was filled with a kind of surprise! The effect was to present God in a totally different light from that in which I had naturally viewed Him.
Hitherto I had understood that He made such large demands which none could possibly render—that He required satisfaction for sins utterly beyond the power of the sinner to give—whose case became, therefore, doubly desperate. That God should be holy, and that He should judge sin in conformity with that holiness, I could only admit to be right; yet my difficulty lay in the conscious impossibility of appeasing Him.
Could this be effected by any reasonable surrender, on my part—of the loss of wealth or limb, or the performance of any amount of what may be called penance, it would gladly have been done; but, under the feeling that nothing of the kind could suffice, my soul yielded to the growing conviction that, as I could do nothing, it were better to resign myself to fate, and take my chance with others.
I daresay that a similar state is commonly to be found in the young. And what is the root of it? It is ignorance of God, which arises from the darkness of the natural mind. The true knowledge of God has been lost, and despair is proportionate to the thirst of soul after Him.
Well, the first faint glimmer of light that ever dawned upon my heart, and that surprised me by a sense of grace, came from the words of a well-known hymn:
“Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood.”
Ah! there is grace in this verse. Notice, Jesus sought, and interposed His blood on behalf of a stranger—who was wandering to certain danger—with the object of effecting the rescue of such. I could see nothing like demand, nor requirement—nothing “austere,” no reaping nor gathering where nothing had been sown or strawed—no cold inflexible law, hurling its dreadful curse on him who offended but in one point; nothing of that sort, but just the opposite—love; a love that sought, that rescued, that died; a love that could not possibly do more to prove its reality to one who deserved nothing. This is grace! How charming!
O! how the soul is filled with thanksgiving, when its living tidings are known in power! Like the breeze of the morning that lifts and scatters the night clouds, so does the sense of God’s saving grace chase away the darkness of the soul.
What is grace? It is divine love acting for the good of the guilty—its favors are, indeed, unmerited. It is the very opposite of law, although equally holy in nature and effects; but it gives to those who have nothing, it clothes the naked, it fills the hungry, it carries salvation to the lost, it makes God known to the soul.
Does there never lurk in your heart, dear reader, the secret wish that you might be right with God? You dread the moment when you must meet Him, yet you cannot tell what should be done to fit you. You have “done your best,” —turned over new leaves and soiled them; made good resolutions and broken them; sought counsel of many but without satisfaction—until your soul is one vast sea of difficulty, on which the clouds of black darkness are settling. Your cry is, “O, that I might find Him!” Be it so! Better to be tossed on every billow, than to incur Ephraim’s verdict, “Let him alone.”
My friend, “God is Love.” That note of exquisite gospel music may well thrill your soul. Do you hear it? and believe it? Ah! you say, “But God is Light, and must punish sin—and punish me because I have sinned.” True. Yet this, instead of being “the day of judgment,” is the “day of salvation.” And, O! what a difference!
Today there is not a poor, guilty sinner who, repenting of his sins, trusts in the Lord Jesus Christ, but gets a welcome to His bosom, and a home in His presence.
Yes, friend, let Him who seeks, find you, and rescue you by His blood. Let grace win your confidence. Cast aside every doubt and fear.
“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world;” and know, for certain, that you are saved through his death for you, and His resurrection; so that—
Rescued thus from sin and danger,
By your Savior’s precious blood,
You may walk on earth a stranger,
As a son and heir of God.