GIFTS FREELY GIVEN TO A PURCHASED PEOPLE

It is needful that we understand that the entire eternal inheritance is the gift of God’s grace. Everything from faith to heaven is said to be a gift. God’s elect are blessed with all spiritual blessings, even eternal life being a gift. Christ did not purchase that which was already freely given. But all these gifts are given to a people who are enslaved, imprisoned, blind and spiritually dead. They are not in a position either legally or spiritually to enjoy them! They require a work to release them and a work to make them alive to enjoy them. The first is the work Christ accomplished. He redeemed His people from the bondage of Satan, sin and the curse of the law. His death and sacrifice was the ransom payment and the satisfaction of divine justice against them. By His cross death Christ purchased them and thus afforded for them a complete liberation from all that would keep them from the total enjoyment of every gift of God. His redeeming blood even accomplished a redemption not yet enjoyed by them but born witness to by the Holy Spirit, the redemption of their body. “Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory.” (Eph. 1:14) (Rom. 8:23) Thus, Christ purchased THE CHURCH with His own blood. (Acts 20:28) “For YE are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.” (1Co 6:20) He has redeemed US! (Gal. 3:13; I Peter 1:18; Rev. 5:9, 14:3,4) The second work is that of the Holy Spirit regenerating us and giving us spiritual life which is manifested by faith. The Spirit of God is given to us “that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.” (I Cor. 2:12) If you were left a large inheritance, it would do you no good if you were in prison, sitting on death row, or even dead. Christ has “set the captives free” and the Spirit makes them alive that they might know and enjoy all that God has freely given them! Thus Paul says, “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:” (Rom. 3:24)

Gary Shepard

A MATTER OF JUSTICE

The pardon which God gives us is not a smothering-up of our sins, nor a blinding of justice. God is as just in His pardons as in His punishments. It shall be seen at the last, when believers enter into their glory, that they rise there by law, just as surely as the lost sink down to hell by law: that is to say that the Lord Jesus hath rendered to the law such recompense by His perfect obedience, and His matchless atonement, that it shall be as just on God's part to save His elect as to condemn the unbelieving world.

C.H. Spurgeon

The Spirit of God is a Spirit of conviction. He convinces men of sin, original, actual, of all their sins of thought, word, and deed, of the demerit of sin, and of the inability of men to make atonement for it. He brings God's elect to such a sense of sin as to loath it, and themselves for it, to blush and be ashamed of it, and to have a godly sorrow for it, which works repentance unto salvation.

John Gill

ELECTION

The book of life, or decree of election, is the marriage-register of the saints; in which their everlasting espousal to Christ stands indelibly recorded by the pen of God's free and eternal love. As the gold of which money is made is the king's property even before it is struck into coin, and before it visibly bears the royal image and superscription; so the unregenerate elect are God's own heritage, though they do not appear to be such, until the Holy Spirit has made them pass through the mint of effectual calling, and actually stamped them into current coin for the kingdom of heaven. The elect are betrothed to Christ from everlasting in the covenant of grace; they are actually married to Him, and join hands with Him, in conversion; but they are not take home to the bridegroom's house until death dismisses them from the body.

Augustus Toplady

THE CONSCIENCE PURGED

When the Holy Spirit shows us the necessity, the beauty and the sufficiency of the death of Christ, we repent of our own foolish “dead works,” we forsake every other way of seeking to please God, we look to Christ and His substitutionary death as the only ground of our acceptance with God and our conscience rests in the quiet assurance that Christ has satisfied God on our behalf and saved us in a way that glorifies God in all His holy character. Thus the “blood” purges our consciences of every false hope, of natural self-righteousness, and all fear and doubt!

GS

THE BELIEVER’S SCAPEGOAT

Christ is our spiritual scapegoat on whom all the sins of His people were laid, and He carried them into the land of forgetfulness, never more to return, Lev. 16:21,22. “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all… He was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors,” Isaiah 53:6,12. “He hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin (by nature or practice, being holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sin) that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him, 2 Cor. 5:21.

John Kershaw

Since all men by nature have stony hearts, all the threatenings in the world will do no good; the stony heart of natural man must be pierced by THE POWER OF GOD in order to be tender! One with a tender heart desires to know the will of God, has a readiness for spiritual things, has a disposition to obey revealed truth, and has a desire to make the things of God his chief business.

Scott Richardson

Sweet is the peace that the Spirit brings from the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ through the gospel of peace. It is the peace that passes human understanding but which is given by God’s grace and received by God-given faith. It resides in the Prince of peace!