Maidenbower Baptist Church

If Acts has two streams (the ministries of Peter and of Paul) then it also has three waves, as Christ's gospel spreads from Jerusalem, through Judea and Samaria, to the end of the earth. Here we are in Antioch, as the church separates Barnabas and Saul to the work of gospel preaching beyond the Mediterranean. We look at the men involved, the ministry they had, the motion of the Holy Spirit, and then the mission on which they were sent.

Though the last days can be fearfully dark, they are wonderfully bright because in them God is speaking to us by his Son. The opening verses of the letter to the Hebrews provide us with one of the most splendid testimonies to the glory of the Messiah, the Jesus of whom the writer speaks with such delight and reverence. He is the heir of all things, the agent of creation, the revealer of God, the upholder of all, the purger of sin, the ruler on high, and the name over all. Do we trust and adore this Jesus, our Christ, as he set before us in the Scripture?

In 2 Corinthians 5:20, the apostle Paul tells God's people that "we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God." If you want a demonstration of this spirit in a gospel preacher after the time of the apostles, you could not do much better that read this sermon from Charles Spurgeon. He begins by insisting that the voice we must hear in the sermon is not that of the prophet who first spoke these words, nor that of the preacher who repeats them, but that of the God who makes known his own gospel grace: "Incline your ear, and come to me. Hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you—the sure mercies of David" (Is 55:3). Here, then, we find—first—two saving precepts, to hear and to come. Then we have, for each precept, a saving promise, each of which Spurgeon explores with spiritual sensitivity and experiential insight. Then, broadening his scope to embrace the direction and tone of the whole chapter, we come to the saving pleadings, the Lord God himself calling on sinners to come, and removing all obstacles and addressing all objections. Spurgeon really climbs inside his text, and makes the voice of God his own, not with the intention of clouding the call of the Lord, but of ensuring that it is indeed Jehovah's voice alone which the congregation hears, and God alone to whom the congregation responds.

We do not contemplate the wonder of salvation as we ought. We do not count mercy the marvel that it really is. Paul drives it home: once we were far off, ignorant, twisted, condemned, alienated, hopeless. Now we are brought near, brought into a covenant, a family, a home, a church, a kingdom, a hope. How was this secured? By nothing less than the blood of Jesus Christ. It is in him as our Saviour and Mediator that we enter into all the privileges and promises.

Do we really dwell upon the fullness of God's love for us in Christ? How much have we grasped the freeness of divine grace? In a sermon of almost relentless focus and intensity, Spurgeon insists upon the freeness of God's grace, of his grace upon grace. He first considers the things the things which are freely given to us by God, ranging across salvation in all its fulness, and concluding with the crowning blessing, which is God giving himself—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—to his chosen ones. However, there is grace upon grace, for not only are these things given, but God also gives us the power to receive them! We could never have grasped these blessings unless the Lord in his mercy had given us grace to receive his grace. However, there is again grace upon grace, for not only do we receive grace to receive grace, but the Spirit also graciously gives us the knowledge of these things, a saving, experiential knowledges of them. With this goes a particular warning, too, about the spirit of the world which contends against the Spirit of God, a spirit which we cannot entertain if we are to receive these blessings. So we come into true possession of "the things that have been freely given to us by God" (1Cor 2:12).