Dear Friends,
Well, it’s been some time since we have heard from Spurgeon. I’ve missed him. I hope you have too. Today’s devotional welcomes him back with some serious words to live by. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• James 4:14 (ESV)

  14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.

• I Corinthians 15:56-57 (ESV)

  56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

“What shadows we all are! What fleeting things! What mists, — what paintings on a cloud! We can scarcely say that we live, for, the moment we begin to live, that moment we begin to die, and —

‘Every beating pulse we tell

Leave but the number less.’

This earth is not “the land of the living.” This world is a dying world; the living world is beyond death’s cold river. Here are graves innumerable. What part of the globe is there that has never yet been a cemetery? Every particle of dust, which it blown in your face in the street, may once have formed a portion of some living being? O death, thou rulest over all! No, thou dost not, for there is One who rules over even thee, O death! Thou canst have no power over ‘the living God’; but thou art his servant, permitted to work out his purpose, for it is through death that we pass into life. By the death of our redeeming Lord, we have been redeemed from destruction; and, therefore, we can turn away from everything that wears the aspect of death and change, and turn to him who is ever the same, and of whose years there is no end, — the Eternal, in whom we trust.” [Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit LI, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1905), p. 583]