COME TO CHRIST WITH AN EMPTY HAND---J. C. RYLE

Beware of mistakes as to the manner of coming to Christ. Dismiss from your mind forever all idea of worthiness, merit, and fitness in yourself. Throw away all notions of goodness, righteousness, and personal deservings. Think not that you can bring anything to recommend you, or to make you deserving of Christ's notice. You must come to Him as a poor, guilty, undeserving sinner, or you cannot come at all. "But to him who doesn't work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness." (Rom. 4:5.) It is the peculiar mark of the faith that justifies and saves, that it brings to Christ nothing but an empty hand.

MY HOPE IS IN THEE- J.C. PHILPOT

"And now, Lord, what wait I for? my hope is in thee." Psalm 39:7

True religion is a very simple thing. Simplicity is stamped upon all the works of God, and especially upon the work of grace. The more genuine, therefore, our religion is, the more simple it will be. To be simple is to be child-like, and to be child-like is to have that mind and spirit without which no man can enter into the kingdom of heaven. Can we, then, with this child-like simplicity, walk step by step here with David, and follow him throughout?
Can we put our seal to these things, and say, "Lord, what wait I for?" Is your religion brought into this narrow point? "Truly, my soul waiteth upon God; from him cometh my salvation." "My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him." Such a frame of soul is indeed from the hand of God, for no man ever did, or could bring himself into it. And if we can enter into one part of these heavenly breathings, we shall be able also to enter into the others, and say, "My hope is in thee." Feeling the weight and burden of sin, we shall be constrained to cry, "Deliver me from all my transgressions;" and feeling our own weakness, and the evil of our hearts, we shall add, "Make me not the reproach of the foolish."


If, then, we can sincerely, before God, employ these petitions, may we not ask who produced them? Who wrought this experience in the soul? From whose hands did it come? Surely, surely, the same Lord that taught David, must have taught us; the same power that wrought in him, must have wrought in us, before we could, in sweet experience, enter into this feeling language, and adopt it as our own. Here, therefore, we see a little of what true religion is; here we see what are the genuine breathings of a child-like spirit, and what is the experience of a man of God; and it will be our mercy if we can see in his experience a sweet counterpart of our own.

From Through Baca's Veil-  J.C. PHILPOT - 1802-1869