Dear Friends,

Here is a riddle for you: what is unbelievable, yet you see it every day? Today’s devotional will give you the answer. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,

John Janney

• Philippians 3:18-19

  Philippians 3:18-19   English Standard Version (ESV)

  ¹⁸ For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. ¹⁹ Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.

Philippians 3:18-19

“Is it not startling to read of ‘enemies of the cross of Christ’? One would naturally have supposed that a remedy so wondrous and so effectual as the atonement would have been gladly received by souls sick unto death with sin. It might have been prognosticated by any man who judged concerning the future that, no sooner would the Son of God descend from heaven to earth, and die to put away human sin, than men would come flocking by millions to adore him, and would feel as if they could not give him a sufficiently hearty welcome. Ay, but the fact that there ever was a cross shows how depraved is the human heart, how great the fall that needed such a sacrifice, how deep the depravity that committed such a murder as that of Calvary. Man, thou art beside thyself, indeed, and gone back out of the way; and therefore it is not wonderful that thou shouldst be an enemy of the cross of Christ. Yet it seems very startling to me as I picture the scene, — a bleeding Christ, and enemies gathered about the cross whereon he dies for them! Then, a weeping apostle warning the church of God, the messenger of Christ in tears as he delivers the warning, yet Christ’s enemies still unmoved, perhaps pretending to be his friends, but remaining hostile to him all the while. It is a strange conglomerate of singular things, — a Savior full of love, and man full of hate; a preacher with a heart so broken that he rather weeps than preaches, and a congregation with hearts so hard that, though he has told them the truth again and again, they do not regard it.”

[Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XLIV, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1898), p. 37-38]