1 Samuel 12:24

A FORGOTTEN DUTY

‘Consider how great things He hath done for you.’

1 Samuel 12:24

One of the great difficulties in the present day is to make time to consider. How are we to get at the truth about ourselves and our standing before God and men? Our text asks us to consider and see where we are. What is the test? How can we be really sure whether we are Christ’s or whether we are not. There is a test which we must apply again and again whenever the least doubt arises as to whether we are God’s children and the heirs of glory. It is this: Have you ever yet definitely by faith gone to God and asked Him, for Christ’s sake, to wash you in the Blood of the Lamb? Are you cleansed by faith in Calvary? ‘Consider how great things He hath done for you.’

I. In giving us His Son.—God so loved you that, before you were born, Jesus Christ, His Son, came down from Heaven to die on Calvary’s Cross for you. He thought of you and these black sins, and that evil nature which all of us inherited from Adam, and atonement was made for every one of us. We have not got to be good in order to be saved. We are saved by faith in the love and in the mercy and in the finished work of Jesus Christ, and because we trust in Him He brings forth in us the good works of holy living. We are good, if we are good, because the good God works in us; and any good works which we do are His works, and therefore the good works which we do, being His, give us no merit.

II. In giving us His Word.—‘We are filled who live to-day,’ writes a distinguished philosopher, ‘with a more present sense of the great love of God than those of old who, groping in the dawn of knowledge, saw only dark shadows of the Unknown.’ For we possess now the written Word of God, translated into all the vernaculars of the world; and those who read and mark and learn and inwardly digest God’s Holy Word are saved with His great salvation.

III. In changing our life.—‘Consider how great things He hath done for you,’ and is doing, and will yet do for all who trust in Him. Is it no great thing if you and I put forth our faith and expect God to fulfil the impossible in our lives?

—Rev. A. J. Poynder.

Illustration

‘John Gough, who, after thirteen times being overcome by delirium tremens—a wreck, a human wreck—was enabled before the end of his life to take hold by faith of God’s omnipotence, so that God raised him up to be one of the very greatest of temperance advocates in the last century. How was it? It was because he considered how great things God had done and could do in the life of humanity. So, because he trusted God to make the impossible possible in his life, the chains of drink were broken and he was no longer its captive; and, emancipated from his old besetting sin, he was enabled, both in England and in America, to win many converts who gladly accepted temperance and meekness and Christianity as their watchword.’