Dear Friends,

Today’s devotional deals with one of the most encouraging doctrines in the Bible if you understand it. Hope this will help you rejoice! God bless you.

Because of Calvary,

John Janney

• Ephesians 1:3-7 (ESV)

  Spiritual Blessings in Christ

  3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace,

“Now, the doctrine that ‘Salvation is of the Lord,’ — that glorious doctrine which I believe with all my heart, and which I desire to preach all my days, — the doctrine that salvation is of God, and God alone, from first to last, in every point of the compass, was never intended to be a soporific, and to discourage the action of man. The fact that God goes before us does not encourage us in sloth. Yet some talk as if it did. Take the doctrine of election, for instance. ‘God has a chosen people; therefore I need not preach to them.’ No, no, sir; God has a chosen people; therefore I do preach to them. It would not be of any use for me to preach if he had not ordained any unto eternal life; but as he has a people who shall assuredly be saved, I will thrust the gospel magnet in among the mass, and these people whom the Lord has chosen shall be attracted by it. The Lord Jesus Christ will not die in vain. Precisely so; therefore I need not preach him, I suppose! But the very reason why I do preach him is because he did not die in vain. The death of Christ that does not effect its purpose, is not worth preaching; but the death of Christ that is effectual for the end for which it was designed, is worth preaching, and more and mere do we rejoice to preach it. The grand doctrines of the gospel are not doctrines that lead men to slumber. There are some who pervert them, as they do the other Scriptures, and it will be so throughout all time; for men will turn the holiest things into reasons for sloth and sin; we cannot help that, but there is nothing in the truths themselves that should produce such effects. Our forefathers, of the olden time, who went everywhere preaching the Word, the Calvinists of France who, in the Desert and wherever they went, hazarded their lives unto the death, the Huguenots, who could bravely do and dare and die for Christ, were, to a man, believers in these principles, which are supposed by some to send men to sleep. The most energetic Christianity that ever was upon the face of the earth has been just this form of Christianity; and therefore it cannot possibly be that the doctrine rightly used will encourage idleness or sloth. How can it? If you yourself were told tonight, ‘Proceed on such an errand, and your God will go with you,’ would that be a reason why you should not go? If you were bidden to fight a battle, and you were told, ‘God will be with you in the battle,’ would the fact that God would be with you, and would win the victory, be a reason why you should not fight? You must be made of strange material if that were to be the result of the promise of victory and the assurance of the divine presence. Nothing makes man labor so energetically as the expectation of success; and the certainty of succeeding, because God is with them, nerves their arm, and makes them do what otherwise would be impossible.” [Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XL, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1894), p. 77-78]