Dear Friends,
Is your heart big enough or does it need enlarging? That’s the question
today’s attached devotional raises. Think carefully about it. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Psalm 119:32 (ESV)

  32 I will run in the way of your commandments
  when you enlarge my heart!

“Surely a temple for the great God, such as our hearts should be, should be fair and ample. If we would have God dwell in our hearts, and shed abroad his influences, we should make room for God in our souls by a greater largeness of faith and expectation, The rich man thought of enlarging his barns when his store was increased upon him; Luke xii; so should we stretch out the curtains of Christ’s tent and habitation, have larger expectations of God, if we would receive more from him. The vessels failed before the oil failed. We are not straitened in God, but in ourselves, by the scantiness of our own thoughts; we do not make room for him, nor greaten God: Luke i.46, ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord.’ Faith doth greaten God. Why, can we made God greater than he is? …We can have greater and larger apprehensions of his greatness, goodness and truth….

“1. There needs a large heart because the command is exceeding broad: Ps. cxix.96, ‘I have seen an end of all perfection; but thy commandment is exceeding broad.’ A broad law and a narrow heart will never suit. We need love, faith, knowledge, and all to carry us through this work, which is of such a vast extent and latitude.

“2. We need an enlarged heart because of the…hindrances within ourselves. There is lust drawing off from God to sensual objects: James i.14, ‘Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed’. Therefore there needs something to poise us, to incline us, to draw us on, to carry us out with strength and life another way, to urge us in the service of God. Lust sits as a clog upon us; it is a weight of corruption, Heb. xii.1, retarding us in all our flights and motions, thwarting, opposing, breaking the force of spiritual impulsions, if not hindering them altogether, Gal. v.17. Well then, lust drawing so strongly one way, God needs to draw us more strongly the other way. When there is a weight to poise us to worldly and sensual objects, we need a strength to carry us on with vigorous and lively motions of soul towards God, an earnest bent upon our souls, which is this enlargement of heart.” [The Works of Thomas Manton VI, (Homewood, AL: Solid Ground Christian Books, 1871), p. 328-329]