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Free Grace!
From Spurgeon's, "The Voice Behind You"
Some men have "right-handed sins"--
respectable iniquities which challenge little censure
from their fellows; not black, but whitewashed sins.
Such men are not thieves, they are not licentious, they are not
drunkards, but their sins take a quieter form; they mock God
with their self-righteousness, and insult him with their prayers,
which are no prayers, but only pretences and fictions,
and not the real prayers of God's elect ones.
Others have "left-handed sins"--
they plunge into the sins of the flesh;
no vice is too black for them.
Only propose to have a little pleasure and they will
plunge into any vice to gain it: yes, and almost without
pleasure, altogether without present profit,
they will sin, as if for sin's own sake.
When they have burned their finger in the candle,
they will after that hold their arm in the fire.
When they have brought disease into their bodies by sin,
they will return to the evil which caused it.
When they have beggared their purse by their extravagant lusts,
yet still they will go on playing the profligate.
When they have filled themselves with despair till they are as a
bucket filled with gall and wormwood, and this has been emptied
out for them by God's grace, they will fill it up again,
for they are infatuated with sin.
They find a delight in it and they will not, they cannot give it up.
They choose all shapes of evil, but the good they will not have.
They will follow all these eagerly, but unless God by his own
omnipotent voice shall call them back, they will not come to him,
to Jesus, to grace, to holiness, and heaven.
Tell it, tell it, tell it; sound it forth beneath the sky
for ever and ever, that the Lord does call to himself
such wanton wanderers.
"Go and proclaim these words toward the north, says the Lord:
Turn, O backsliding children; for I am married unto you."
Oh, the pity of God, not only for the miserable,
but for the wicked- it surpasses thought.
"In due time Christ died for the ungodly."
Favor to the guilty, is the choicest of favor.
We come not to preach salvation to the righteous--
for where shall we find them?
But we proclaim it to the unrighteous and to the ungodly.
"The whole have no need of a physician; but they that are sick"
Christ has come after the sick, calling,
not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
Oh, if anything will touch the heart it should be this word of
free grace, this fact that God does bid
sinful men return to him.
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