Ben Zornes

I am currently reading through “The Treasury of David“ by CH Spurgeon (yes all 7 volumes, yes I’m not doing much else), for one of my Greyfriars Hall classes. It is all really wonderful, and only as Spurgeon can do wonderful. Psalm 25 grabbed my attention and so I thought I would share some of the excerpts. It was one of those sections of a book where you just keep highlighting and don’t know when to stop, sort of like your dad gets when he starts telling lame jokes when your friends are around! Like that. Only better…

Anyhow…enjoy:

• [David’s] sorrows remind him of his sins, and his sorrow for sin drives him to his God.
• Why should not all the wit and ingenuity of man be sanctified to noblest ends by being laid upon the altar of God?
• It is but a mockery to uplift the hands and the eyes unless we also bring our souls into our devotions. True prayer may be described as the soul rising from earth to have fellowship with heaven; it is taking a journey upon Jacob’s ladder, leaving our cares and fears at the foot, and meeting with a covenant God at the top. Very often the soul cannot rise, she has lost her wings, and is heavy and earth bound; more like a burrowing mole than a soaring eagle. At such dull seasons we must not give over prayer, but must, by God’s assistance, exert all our powers to lift up our hearts. Let faith be the lever and grace be the arm, and the dead lump will yet be stirred. But what a lift it has sometimes proved! With all our tugging and straining we have been utterly defeated, until the heavenly loadstone of our Saviour’s love has displayed its omnipotent attractions, and then our hearts have gone up to our Beloved like mounting flames of fire.
• Faith is the cable which binds our boat to the shore, and by pulling at it we draw ourselves to the land; faith unites us to God, and then draws us near to him.
• We must see to it that our faith is sound and strong, for otherwise prayer cannot prevail with God.
• We ought to be grateful for occasional griefs if they preserve us from chronic hardheartedness.
• [Men] sin because they will sin, not because it is either profitable or reasonable to do so.
• It were well for many professors if instead of following their own devices, and cutting out new paths of thought for themselves, they would enquire for the good old ways of God’s own truth, and beseech the Holy Ghost to give them sanctified understandings and teachable spirits.
• We shall not grow weary of waiting upon God if we remember how long and how graciously he once waited for us.
• The world winks at the sins of younger men, and yet they are none so little after all; the bones of our youthful feastings at Satan’s table will stick painfully in our throats when we are old men. He who presumes upon his youth is poisoning his old age.
• A painful sense of any one sin provokes the believer to repentance for the whole mass of his iniquities.
• God is good to those that be good.
• Gracious souls, by faith resting upon the finished work of the Lord Jesus, keep the covenant of the Lord, and, being sanctified by the Holy Spirit, they walk in his testimonies; these will find all things working together for their good, but to the sinner there is no such promise. Keepers of the covenant shall be kept by the covenant; those who follow the Lord’s commandments shall find the Lord’s mercy following them.

Note: Read more of my blog posts about or quoting Charles Spurgeon, which thing I am wont to do, as the King James might say it!