YOU ARE BOUGHT WITH A PRICE!

from Spurgeon's, "BOUGHT WITH A PRICE"

If I had the power to do it, how would I seek to
refresh in your souls a sense of the fact that you
are "bought with a price."

There in the midnight hour, amidst the olives of Gethsemane,
kneels Immanuel the Son of God; he groans, he pleads in prayer,
he wrestles; see the beady drops stand on his brow, drops of
sweat, but not of such sweat as pours from men when they earn
the bread of life, but the sweat of him who is procuring life
itself for us. It is blood, it is crimson blood; great gouts
of it are falling to the ground.

O soul, your Savior speaks to you from out Gethsemane at this
hour, and he says: "Here and thus I bought you with a price."

Come, stand and view him in the agony of the olive garden,
and understand at what a cost he procured your deliverance.
Track him in all his path of shame and sorrow until you see
him on the Pavement; mark how they bind his hands and fasten
him to the whipping-post; see, they bring the scourges and
the cruel Roman whips; they tear his flesh; the ploughers
make deep furrows on his blessed body, and the blood gushes
forth in streams, while rivulets from his temples, where the
crown of thorns has pierced them, join to swell the purple
stream. From beneath the scourges he speaks to you with
accents soft and low, and he says, "My child, it is here
and thus I bought you with a price."

But see him on the cross itself when the consummation of
all has come; his hands and feet are fountains of blood,
his soul is full of anguish even to heartbreak; and there,
before the soldier pierces his side with a spear, bowing
down he whispers to you and to me, "It was here and thus,
I bought you with a price."

O by Gethsemane, by Gabbatha, by Golgotha, by every sacred
name collected with the passion of our Lord, by sponge and
vinegar, and nail and spear, and everything that helped the
pang and increased the anguish of his death, I conjure you,
my beloved brethren, to remember that you were "bought with
a price," and "are not your own."

I push you to this; you either were or were not so bought; if
you were, it is the grand fact of your life; if you were, it
is the greatest fact that ever will occur to you: let it
operate upon you, let it dominate your entire nature, let it
govern your body, your soul, your spirit, and from this day
let it be said of you not only that you are a man, a man of
good morals and respectable conduct, but this, above all things,
that you are a man filled with love to him who bought you, a
man who lives for Christ, and knows no other passion.

O! that REDEMPTION would become the paramount influence,
the lord of our soul, and dictator of our being; then were
we indeed true to our obligations: short of this we are
not what love and justice both demand.