posted by Phil Johnson
The PyroManiacs devote space at the beginning of each week to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive.
Sunday morning, a good friend reminded me of this excerpt from "Strengthening Words from the Savior's Lips," a sermon on 2 Corinthians 12:9, preached April 2, 1876, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. It occurred to me that a double dose of Spurgeon would be a good way to begin this week:
"My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness."
have often read in Scripture of the holy laughter of Abraham, when he fell upon his face and laughed; but I do not know that I ever experienced that laughter till a few evenings ago, When this text came home to me with such sacred power as literally to cause me to laugh.I had been looking it through, looking at its original meaning, and trying to fathom it, till at last I got hold of it this way: "My grace," says Jesus, "is sufficient for thee, "and it looked almost as if it were meant to ridicule my unbelief: for surely the grace of such a one as my Lord Jesus is indeed sufficient for so insignificant a being as I am.
It seemed to me as if some tiny fish, being very thirsty, was troubled with fear of drinking the river dry, and Father Thames said to him, "Poor little fish, my stream is sufficient for thee." I should think it is, and inconceivably more.
My Lord seems to say to me, "Poor little creature that thou art, remember what grace there is in me, and believe that it is all thine. Surely it is sufficient for thee."
I replied, "Ah, my Lord, it is indeed."
Put one mouse down in all the granaries of Egypt when they were fullest after seven years of plenty, and imagine that one mouse complaining that it might die of famine. "Cheer up," says Pharaoh, "poor mouse, my granaries are sufficient for thee."
Imagine a man standing on a mountain, and saying, "I breathe so many cubic feet of air in a year; I am afraid that I shall ultimately inhale all the oxygen which surrounds the globe." Surely the earth on which the man would stand might reply, "My atmosphere is sufficient for thee." I should think it; let him fill his lungs as full as ever he can, he will never breathe all the oxygen, nor will the fish drink up all the river, nor the mouse eat up all the stores in the granaries of Egypt.
Does it not make unbelief seem altogether ridiculous, so that you laugh it out of the house, and say, "Never come this way any more, for with a mediatorial fullness to go to, with such a Redeemer to rest in, how dare I for a moment think that my wants cannot be supplied."
Our great Lord feeds all the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air, and the cattle on the hills, and guides the stars, and upholds all things by the power of his hand, how then can we be straitened for supplies, or be destitute of help? If our needs were a thousand times larger than they are they would not approach the vastness of his power to provide.
The Father hath committed all things into his hand. Doubt him no more. Listen, and let him speak to thee: "My grace is sufficient for thee. What if thou hast little grace, yet I have much: it is my grace thou hast to look to, not thine own, and my grace will surely be sufficient for thee."
John Bunyan has the following passage, which exactly expresses what I myself have experienced. He says that he was full of sadness and terror, but suddenly these words broke in upon him with great power, and three times together the words sounded in his ears, "My grace is sufficient for thee; my grace is sufficient for thee; my grace is sufficient for thee." And "Oh! Bethought," says he, "that every word was a mighty word unto me; as 'My,' and 'grace,' and 'sufficient,' and 'for thee'; they were then, and sometimes are still, far bigger than others be." He who knows, like the bee, how to suck honey from flowers, may well linger over each one of these words and drink in unutterable content.
ou know some men who are too wise to be just simple believers; they know such a lot that they do not believe anything that is plain and simple. Their souls have been fed so daintily that they cannot live on anything but Chinese birds'-nest, and such luxuries. There is no milk that ever came fresh from a cow that is good enough for them, they are far too superfine to drink such a beverage as that. Everything they have must be incomparable.
ast year, just three days after the launch of my original blog, 
The same reality works in reverse. Consider these statements:
everal days ago, (as if writing a blog weren't already narcissistic enough) I added a box in the right sidebar that lists what I'm reading, what I'm listening to, and what I've seen here and there that I like. In honor of our own Frank Turk, I titled it "Where I Am Right Now.®"
y 
Then Jonathan just kept on yacking happily about God, heaven, Jesus, salvation. It was sheer pleasure. And as Jonathan chatters on, this other guy walks up, starts looking at shoes by us.
That's the fear of being publicly made a fool by my own hands. It isn't the fear that I'll be asked a question that has no good answer; it's that I won't have the answer, the perfect answer, and will simply do a passable imitation of a wet trout on a dry, flat, hot rock.
his, in Paul's own words, is what it means to "preach Christ." The verse is set in a context where the apostle Paul is describing his own role as an evangelist and ambassador for Christ. This is his one-verse summary of the evangelistic message. It is accompanied by an evangelistic appeal, verse 20: "Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead [as His ambassadors, speaking for Him, making the same appeal He would make if He were here speaking Himself], be ye reconciled to God."
ere is the apostle Paul's most succinct statement about the meaning of the cross. This could be the shortest, simplest verse among many in the Pauline epistles that make the meaning of justification inescapable: "He hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him."
And yet he wasn't. "[He] knew no sin." Again, that speaks of His perfect life. Born under the law, He fulfilled every jot and tittle of God's commandments perfectly, in every degree. Hebrews 7:26: "[He was] holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners." "[He] did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth" (1 Peter 2:22). According to 1 John 3:5, "He was manifested to take away our sins; [but] in him [there was] no sin." He was the spotless, sinless lamb of God—innocent, pure, without sin—as far from sin as anyone could ever be. But He was manifested to take away the sin of the world by bearing it and paying the awful price of it.
n a previous post 
In 1961, the Banner of Truth Trust published a reprint of a book that was then 97 years old. The Doctrine of Justification, by James Buchanan, was originally published in 1867. The first Banner reprint in 1961 carried a Foreword by J. I. Packer in which Packer wrote this:
The great doctrine, the greatest of all, is this, that God, seeing men to be lost by reason of their sin, hath taken that sin of theirs and laid it upon his only begotten Son, making him to be sin for us, even him who knew no sin; and that in consequence of this transference of sin he that believeth in Christ Jesus is made just and righteous, yea, is made to be the righteousness of God in Christ. Christ was made sin that sinners might be made righteousness. That is the doctrine of the substitution of our Lord Jesus Christ on the behalf of guilty men.
Paul is writing to a problem-church. They are messed up, from Dan to Beersheba. They're schismatic, they're elitist; they've got some people who are confused about the resurrection, they've got others who get drunk at Communion (-- must be that curiously strong first-century grape juice). They've even got a guy having an illicit relationship with his dad's wife, and the goofs at New Life Abundant Dynamic Impacted Living Worship Center of Corinth wear it as a badge of courage. They're a mess.
category. Eternal life and death is not trivial. If you don't think that way, the apostle Paul clearly did.
John MacArthur takes the manuscript I produce from his sermons, and he edits it exhaustively. Sometimes, he'll supply new illustrations. Sometimes, he'll totally reorganize material. He might rewrite a few transitions, tone down an expression here and there, turn up the volume on a salient point, delete anything that strikes him as redundant, or whatever. (He does all this by hand with a classy fountain pen in a nearly-illegible kind of printing. I have never known him to use a computer.) His marked-up copy comes back to me and I insert his changes into the electronic manuscript and do a final polish and edit. We normally exchange several chapters at a time this way, so I'm constantly working on two or three sections of the book all at once.
The Truth War is going to be a powerful, and very controversial, book.
As you can see, he was having a fairly leisure look at me. And why shouldn't he? I'm sure I was an interesting study to him, and he could safely gaze on.
