“When petition is grounded in thanksgiving, God and not self-interest becomes the focus. On the other hand, thanksgiving without petition proclaims God to be the Creator without trusting that he indeed is one who is able to provide for his people. In the Pauline epistles, petitions are often found precisely in the thanksgiving paragraphs that introduce the epistles. The two cannot be separated in the Pauline model of prayer.”
The Exchange
“I dare not say but my Lord Jesus Christ hath fully recompensed my sadness with his joys, my losses with his presence. I find it a sweet and rich thing to exchange my sorrows with Christ’s joys, my afflictions with that sweet peace I have with himself.”
The Demise of Pride
“Our pride must have winter weather to rot it,”
The Father of Light Corrects
“I pray you learn to be worthy of his pains who correcteth; and let him wring, and be ye washed; for he hath a Father’s heart, and a Father’s hand, who is training you up, and making you meet for the high hall.”
Lord God is the Light
“All the saints have their own measure of winter before their eternal summer. O! for the long day, and the high sun, and the fair garden, and the King’s great city up above these visible heavens!”
That Rock is Christ
“Your rock doth not ebb and flow; but your sea.”
Work of the Pulpit
“The work of the pulpit is to explain to people that the triune God has no needs, least of all a need for the love of his creatures. God is love, and so the Trinity is love—love expressed, received, and delighted in among three persons. The preacher must tell his hearers that God doesn’t need any of us, though we assume he does. Instead, the gospel is love, offered to all who seek the embrace of the ever-loving and already-loving God.
The preacher must teach people of God so that they can worship him with all their might. He must preach God so that they learn to adore the God who loves lost people because he chooses to, with no compulsion whatsoever, except the compulsion of the overflowing love of the Trinity. To know this God in his love in Christ is eternal life. The preacher’s task is to show them nothing less. Sunday by Sunday, our work must show our hearers that God is the one who lives, rules, loves, and speaks, all to his own glory.
We should never be so foolish as to wonder whether we should preach the gospel or instead teach the Trinity. The God of the gospel is the Trinity. The gospel message is a call to know God in his triune love, both now by faith and one day in eternity with sight and unbreakable joy. God has given the light of the knowledge of his triune glory in the face of Christ (2 Cor. 4:6). Preach the gospel, and you are preaching Trinity love..
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He is glorious. This is the God the Scriptures declare to us (and sing of to us, warn us about, and command us to come to, and urge us to delight in). There can never be a greater hope for the world than to know this God. He is waiting for us.”
Allen, Lewis. The Preacher’s Catechism, 37, 38)
Sight of Christ in Scriptures
“Whether God come to his children with a rod or a crown, if he come himself with it, it is well. Welcome, welcome Jesus, what may soever thou come, if we can get a sight of thee: and sure I am, it is better to be sick, providing Christ come to the bedside and draw the curtains, and say, Courage, I am thy salvation, than to enjoy health, being lusty and strong and never need to be visited by God.”
The Master Behind Providence
“It is impossible to be submissive and religiously patient, if ye stay your thoughts down among the confused rollings and wheels of second causes, as O, the place! O, the time! O, if this had been, this had not been followed! O, the linking of this accident with this time and place! Look up to the master motion and the first wheel.”
Be Patient
“Be patient; Christ went to heaven with many a wrong. His visage and countenance was all marred more than the sons of men. You may not be above your Master; many a black stroke received innocent Jesus, and he received no mends, but referred them all to the great court-day, when all things shall be righted.”
If We have Christ
“Neither need we fear crosses, or sigh, or be sad for anything that is on this side of heaven, if we have Christ.”
Kindness for the Father's Upbringing
“It is the Lord’s kindness that he will take the scum off us in the fire. Who knows how needful winnowing is to us, and what dross we must want ere we enter into the kingdom of God? So narrow is the entry to heaven, that our knots, our bunches and lumps of pride, and self-love, and idol-love, and world-love must be hammered off us, that we may throng in, stooping low, and creeping through that narrow and thorny entry.”