This makes us prize the gospel, embrace the Savior, and fly to His cross!

(Letters of John Berridge, 1716-1793)

Dear Sir,
In November I gathered strength enough to preach, and through mercy have continued preaching ever since. For the last month I have shared with my neighbors in a bad cold, which has kept me wheezing and coughing, and pulled me down, but not laid me up.

Oh, how needful is the furnace, both to reveal our dross, and to purge it away! How little do we know of ourselves, of the pride, sensuality, and idolatry of our hearts-until the Lord lays us on a bed of suffering, and searches all our inward parts with His candles. My heart, I knew, was bad enough, but I scarcely thought there was half the baseness in it which I find, and yet I know not half its plague!

How sweet is the mercy of God, and how rich is the grace of Jesus-when we have had an awful peep into our hearts! This makes us prize the gospel, embrace the Savior, and fly to His cross! At times I am so overwhelmed with the filth and mire of my nature, that I can scarcely look through it unto Jesus. And when he has put on a little of his eye-salve, and scoured the scales off my eyes-I stand amazed to think that He can touch such a leper! And yet where the sun shines clear for a season, and my dung-hill is covered with snow, I forget my leprosy, or become a leper only in notion. I think it perhaps, but do not feel it, nor am I humbled by it. What a heap of absurd contradiction is man!

After an affliction, I think I can say with David: It is good for me to have been afflicted. I can see and feel some profit attending it. Indeed, I never grow really wiser or better, unless when I am baptized both with the Holy Spirit and with fire. If the Dove comes without a furnace, my heart is soon lifted up; pride steals in, and Heaven's blessed beams turn everything sour within me! We learn nothing truly of ourselves, or of grace, but in a furnace.

The heaviest afflictions on this side of Hell are less, far less than my iniquities have deserved! Oh, boundless grace! The chastening rod of a reconciled Father, might have been the flaming sword of an avenging Judge! I might now have been weeping and wailing with devils and damned spirits in Hell! I will bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned against Him. It is of His mercy alone, that I am not consumed!