Dear Friends,
Some of you may be saying, “John, your devotionals on the Ten Commandments depressed me.” If that is so, today’s devotional should pick you up. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Romans 1:16 (ESV)

  16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

“‘Ah!’ said one to me yesterday, ‘I suppose you sometimes feel cast down.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do.’ ‘Why,’ said he, ‘I should think the best men at times can hardly look back upon their lives with pleasure, and therefore they must feel a little afraid for the future.’ ‘Oh!’ I said, ‘if I had to look on my past life as the ground of my expectations for the future, I should be cast down indeed; but do you not know that all my good works will not save me, and that all the sins I have ever committed in the past will never damn me?’ ‘No,’ said he, and he looked astonished at such queer doctrine as that. The gospel teacheth, indeed, that when a man believeth in Christ the sin of the past is all blotted out, and Christ’s righteousness is given to him, so the man is not saved by what he is, not damned for who he was; but he is ‘saved through Jesus Christ and through Jesus Christ alone.” [Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit LI, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1905), p. 267]