God has a People Everywhere

Posted on 27th January 201627th January 2016 by Providence Chapel

“I have much people in this city.” – Acts 18:10

This should be a great encouragement to try to do good, since God has among the vilest of the vile, the most reprobate, and the most debauched, an elect people who must be saved. When you take the Word to them, you do so because God has ordained you to be the messenger of life to their souls, and they must receive it, for so the decree of predestination runs. They are as much redeemed by blood as the saints before the eternal throne. They are Christ’s property, and yet perhaps they are lovers of the drinking bar, and haters of holiness; but if Jesus Christ purchased them He will have them. God is not unfaithful to forget the price which His Son has paid. He will not suffer His substitution to be in any case an ineffectual, dead thing. Tens of thousands of redeemed ones are not regenerated yet, but regenerated they must be; and this is our comfort when we go forth to them with the quickening Word of God.

And even more, these ungodly ones are prayed for by Christ before the throne. “Neither pray I for these alone,” saith the great Intercessor, “but for them also which shall believe on Me through their word.” Poor, ignorant souls, they know nothing about prayer for themselves, but Jesus prays for them. Their names are on His breastplate, and ere long they must bow their stubborn knee, breathing the penitential sigh before the throne of grace. “The time of figs is not yet.” The predestinated moment has not struck; but, when it comes, they shall obey, for God will have His own; they must, for the Spirit is not to be withstood when He cometh forth with fulness of power—they must become the willing servants of the living God. “My people shall be willing in the day of my power.” “He shall justify many.” “He shall see of the travail of His soul.” “I will divide him a portion with the great, and He shall divide the spoil with the strong.”

C. H. Spurgeon

Where Confidence and Hope are Found

Posted on 22nd January 201622nd January 2016 by Providence Chapel

I hear the words of love,

I gaze upon the blood;

I see the mighty sacrifice,

And I have peace with God.

‘Tis everlasting peace!

Sure as Jehovah’s name;

‘Tis stable as his steadfast throne,

For evermore the same.

I change, He changes not,

The Christ can never die;

His love, not mine, the resting place,

His truth, not mine, the tie.

The clouds may go and come,

And storms may sweep my sky;

This blood-sealed friendship changes not,

The cross is ever nigh.

– Horatius Bonar

Am I my Brother’s Keeper? – Genesis 4:9

Posted on 17th January 201617th January 2016 by Providence Chapel

The whole example of Jesus Christ, whom we call Master and Lord, lies in the direction of our being the keeper of our brother. For what was Jesus’ life but entire unselfishness? What was said of Him at his death that described Him–‘He saved others, himself he cannot save’. The very fact that there is a Christ at all means that there was one who cared for others, and the fact that our Lord became a man means that He loved His enemies and came here to rescue those who rebelled against His authority.

If we are selfish and think we can make our own going to heaven be the one end of our life, then we are not Christians. We may call Him Master and Lord, but we are not following Jesus Christ. Do you shed tears? Do you weep over Jerusalem? Tears are a poor thing if they are only for ourselves and never for others. You pray and agonize, but is your grief ever caused by bearing the burden of other men’s souls? Are you like Him, with whose name Gethsemane must ever be connected in our memories?

Even if we give our bodies to be burned, yet if we have not love for mankind, it profits us nothing. If Jesus were here now, what would He say to anyone who calls himself His disciple and yet never lifts his hand or moves his tongue to snatch the firebrand from the flame or save a sinner from the error of his ways? This is the way we must be our brothers’ keeper.

– C. H. Spurgeon

Fuzzy Christianity?

Posted on 16th January 201616th January 2016 by Providence Chapel

Fuzzy Christianity? Are we speaking of the traditional definition, which is “frizzy, fluffy, or frayed in appearance”, such as in a person’s hair or on a sweater? Or rather are we referring to the secondary meaning the dictionary gives to the word ‘fuzzy”– “difficult to perceive clearly, understand, and explain precisely; indistinct or vague.” Dr. Al Mohler uses the word “fuzzy” about those who hold to a fuzzy Christianity.

It causes me to think of how much fuzzy Christianity there is out there— fuzzy-thinking religious people, who profess to be Christians, but who cannot even define clearly what a Christian is, who attend fuzzy churches, hearing fuzzy sermons from fuzzy Bibles by fuzzy preachers, and people sitting in fuzzy Sunday school classes with other fuzzy people, or sitting in fuzzy home-groups, pooling their ignorance about passages that are not unclear, but they make them unclear by their fuzzy approach, saying that the passage “can have different meanings to different people.” Perfect fuzziness!

So we are in an age of fuzzy “Christians” attending fuzzy churches, hearing fuzzy sermons from fuzzy preachers who make the clearest things fuzzy, and they leave their fuzzy church more fuzzy than when they went in. This is why the devil loves fuzzy.

In our increasingly fuzzy age, how fuzzy is your Christianty? How fuzzy is your gospel, your church, or your professed faith? Fuzziness may work on some sweaters or hair styles, but not in the things of God. Jesus’ death wasn’t fuzzy; the gospel isn’t fuzzy; full precision, accuracy, dogmatism, distinctness, and clarity are always true when describing biblical truth and the gospel. Let us not be fuzzy on the greatest issues of life when it pertains to eternal life, the Bible, the Christian life, the gospel, and the eternal destiny of men’s souls. On these issues, no one can afford to be fuzzy because theological and moral fuzziness sends people to hell. Isn’t it a great tragedy that people will find themselves in hell, primarily because they were fuzzy about the gospel, and never cared enough to believe the real truth. Fuzziness–does that describe you and me?

g mo

– Mack Tomlinson

A Lie of Thanks and Praise

Posted on 16th January 201616th January 2016 by Providence Chapel

As I read in Hebrews, I came upon a cause for very great thankfulness that I had not noticed before. Suppose the Old Testament promises were only for those to whom they were first given; suppose we had no right to take them for ourselves (some teach that this is so); what a tremendous loss it would be. Hebrews 13:5 was the word that brought this home to me just now. There we have the essence of three glorious verses from the Old Testament, from the Scriptures that belonged to other people (from ancient history), now given to us for our own use. I take it that the Spirit of God guided the writer of Hebrews, both in the choice of His quotations and in the translation of them, so that we have the very words which can help us most. “I will in no way fail thee, neither will I in any way forsake thee;” (Gen. 28:15; Deut. 31:6,8; Josh. 1:5) and then “The Lord is my helper, I will not fear: what shall man do to me?” (Psalm 118:6; Psalm 56:9-13). So what can man, the devil, or even myself do to me, if I truly know that the Lord of heaven and earth is my Helper, and that He truly says to me, “I will in no way fail thee, neither will I in any way forsake thee.”

So let us cherish thankfulness–“In God’s word will I rejoice; in the Lord’s word will I comfort myself.” For though my soul is among lions every day of my life, with me is the most high God, that shall perform the cause which I have in hand.

From the midst of frustrations in central Africa, Fred Arnot, who was considered the David Livingstone of those regions, wrote, “I am learning never to be disappointed, but only to praise.” I read that journal letter of his when it came home from Africa forty years ago. But that vital word, in an ordinary letter, remained with me, ready for a moment of need. I am learning never to be disappointed, but only to praise. God keeps us so near to Himself that there will be little shining seeds in our letters, seeds that will bear harvests of joy somewhere, sometime, and be melody to others in their heaviness. Let us learn to not be disappointed in anything, but instead to praise.

– Amy Carmichael

The Arm of the Lord is not Shortened

Posted on 11th January 201611th January 2016 by Providence Chapel

We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us what work Thou didst in their days, in the times of old. – Psalm 44:1

When people hear about what God used to do, one of the things they say is, “Oh, that was a very long time ago.” They imagine that times have changed since then . . . “Things were in a different state then from what they are now.” Granted, but I want to know what it means by “the things” and what that has to do with. I thought it was God that did the things. Has God changed? Is He not an immutable God, the same yesterday, today, and forever? Does that not furnish an argument to prove that, what God has done at one time, He can do at another time?

Others say, “Oh, well, I look upon these things as great one-time miracles. We are not to expect them now.” But that is the very reason we do not get them and see them occur. If we had learned to expect them, we should no doubt obtain them, but we put them up on the shelf, as being out of the common order of our regular faith, and as being only the special rare curiosities of biblical history. We imagine such supernatural and divine things, however true they might be, to be prodigies of providence; we cannot imagine them to be according to the ordinary working of God’s mighty power.

I beseech you, my friends, to reject that idea, and put it out of your mind. Whatever God has done in the past in the way of converting sinners is to be looked upon as a precedent, for “His arm is not shortened, that He cannot save, nor His ear heavy, that He cannot hear.”

– C. H. Spurgeon

Distress Enlarges Us

Posted on 3rd January 20163rd January 2016 by Providence Chapel

“Thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress.” – Psalm 4:1

The more one thinks of these words, the more they open their wonderful meaning to us. Darby renders it, “In pressure, Thou hast enlarged me”; and the translator Kay renders it, “In straits Thou madest wide room for me.”

Whatever the pressure be, in that pressure—think of it—enlargement is ours, the very opposite of what the word pressure suggests. We may sometimes feel distressed; here, then, is a word of pure hope and strong consolation. No distress need cramp us or crowd us into ourselves, making us smaller and poorer in anything that matters. Largeness, like the largeness of the sea, is His gift to us. We shall not be flattened in spirit by pressures, but instead enlarged; in the narrow ways of pain or temptation, He will make wide room for us.