Dear Friends,
Well, I turned 81 this last week. It was a good week. I saw my son who is a pastor yesterday in celebration of that birthday. What a blessing! But at this age one should be thinking about the day when he is called upstairs. What will we be thinking about when we see heaven (not that I deserve it – far from it – but because Christ deserved it for me. Today’s devotional consider all this. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Hebrews 9:27 (ESV)

  27 Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment,

“…There is a day coming; it will come very soon to some of our venerable friends around me: it will come very soon — perhaps quite as soon — to some of us in middle life who are still in health, the day when we shall be called to go upstairs, because the Master has a message for us. When we read the message, it will say, ‘The time has come for thee to gather up thy feet in thy bed and to meet thy father’s God.’ O brothers and sisters, the Lord alone will be exalted in that day if we be indeed his people. I fancy I see the dying minister when they bring up to him his sermons. Can he glory in them? He says, ‘I bless God that he enabled me to preach his truth. “Unto me who am less than the least of all saints is this grace given that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ,” but I cannot glory in these.’ If you shall bring up to him the number of his converted, and shall tell him of the churches that he built up, and the places that he has evangelized; I will tell you what he will say, ‘God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ There take the best saint among us and put him on the borders of Emmanuel’s land, and let him hear the bells of heaven ring out the never-ending Sabbath: listen whether he will talk about himself or about the little church to which he belongs as if it were the whole Church of God. Oh no, no, no, a thousand times no. On the borders of Emmanuel’s land all the glory is to the Lord alone. Redeeming blood, electing love, effectual calling, persevering grace, all these will be sung about, but there will be no songs about ourselves or aught else but God, when we come there.” [Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit LI, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1905), p. 81]