The Whole Life of a Christian

The whole life of a Christian should be nothing but praises and thanks to God;

we should neither eat nor sleep, but eat to God and sleep to God

and work to God and talk to God.

Do all to his glory and praise.

Richard Sibbes 1577-1635

photography by Kate Long

What may seem defeat to us may be victory to him

Taken from Morning and Evening by C.H. Spurgeon

The night also is thine. Psalms 74:16

Yes, Lord, you do not abdicate your throne when the sun goes down, nor do you leave the world all through these long wintry nights to be the prey of evil; your eyes watch us as the stars, and your arms surround us as the zodiac belts the sky. The dews of kindly sleep and all the influences of the moon are in your hand, and the alarms and solemnities of night are equally with you. This is very sweet to me when watching through the midnight hours, or tossing to and fro in anguish. There are precious fruits put forth by the moon as well as by the sun: may my Lord make me to be a favoured partaker in them.

The night of affliction is as much under the arrangement and control of the Lord of Love as the bright summer days when all is bliss. Jesus is in the tempest. His love wraps the night about itself as a mantle, but to the eye of faith the sable robe is scarce a disguise. From the first watch of the night even unto the break of day the eternal Watcher observes his saints, and overrules the shades and dews of midnight for his people’s highest good. We believe in no rival deities of good and evil contending for the mastery, but we hear the voice of Jehovah saying, “I create light and I create darkness; I, the Lord, do all these things.”

Gloomy seasons of religious indifference and social sin are not exempted from the divine purpose. When the altars of truth are defiled, and the ways of God forsaken, the Lord’s servants weep with bitter sorrow, but they may not despair, for the darkest eras are governed by the Lord, and shall come to their end at his bidding. What may seem defeat to us may be victory to him.

“Though enwrapt in gloomy night,
We perceive no ray of light;
Since the Lord himself is here,
‘Tis not meet that we should fear.”

A GREAT quote by Charles Spurgeon

True repentance has a distinct and constant reference to the Lord Jesus Christ. If you repent of sin without looking to Christ, away with your repentance. If you are so lamenting your sin as to forget the Savior, you have a need to begin all this work over again.Whenever we repent of sin, we must have one eye upon sin and another upon the cross; or, better still, let us have both eyes upon Christ, seeing our sin punished in him, and by no means let us look at sin except as we look at Jesus. A man may hate sin just as a murder hates the gallows but this does not prove repentance. If I hate sin because of the punishment, I have not repented of sin; I merely regret that God is just. But if I can see sin as an offense against Jesus Christ, and loathe myself because I have wounded him, then I have a true brokenness of heart. If I see the Savior and believe that those thorns upon his head were put there by my sinful words; if I believe that those wounds in his heart were made by my heart-sins; if I believe that those wounds inhis feet were made by my wandering steps, and that the wounds in hishands were made by my sinful deeds, then I repent after a right fashion. Only under the cross can you repent. Repentance elsewhere is remorse, which clings to the sin and only dreads the punishment. Letus then seek, under God, to have a hatred of sin caused by a sight ofChrist's love"