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The grace of God!
The following is from Jonathan Edwards sermon,
"The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners"
Christian, consider the freeness and wonderfulness
of the grace of God towards yourself.
You had such a wicked heart, you lived such a
wicked life, and it would have been most just
with God to have cast you off forever. But he
has had mercy upon you; he has made his
glorious grace appear in your eternal salvation.
You had no love to God; but yet he has
exercised unspeakable love to you.
You have despised God, and set light by him;
but so great a value has God's grace set on
you and your happiness, that you have been
redeemed at the price of the blood of his own Son.
You chose to be with Satan in his service; but yet
God has made you a joint heir with Christ of his glory.
You were ungrateful for past mercies; yet God
not only continued those mercies, but bestowed
unspeakably greater mercies upon you.
You refused to hear when God called;
yet God heard you when you called.
You abused the infiniteness of God's mercy
to encourage yourself in sin against him;
yet God has manifested the infiniteness of
that mercy, in the exercises of it towards you.
You have rejected Christ, and set him at
nothing; and yet he is become your Savior.
You have neglected your own salvation;
but God has not neglected it.
You would have destroyed yourself;
but yet in God has been your help.
God has magnified his free grace towards
you, and not to others; because he has chosen
you, and it has pleased him to set his love upon you.
Christian, you shall never open your mouth in
boasting; but lie the lower before God for his
mercy to you. You have abundant reasons to
open your mouth in God's praises, that they
may be continually in your mouth, both here
and to all eternity, for his rich, unspeakable,
and sovereign mercy to you, whereby he, and
he alone, has made you to differ from others.
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