Recent Gleanings from Chalmers

"If it be true that love cast out fear, it is just as true that fear keepeth out love."

"Unbelief is an intelligent turning away from the Word of God. It is not rooted in ignorance but in negligence."

"At the fall, men were not demoralized out of all virtue, rather we were desecrated of all godliness--and thus in our own flesh, bereft of all enduring good."

"There is nought more undeniable than the antipathy of fallen nature to the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel."

"The handwriting of ordinances that was against us, and contrary to us, has been taken out of the way, having been nailed to the cross of Christ; but the hand of Jesus, as the Lord our sanctifier, is ever on us: beautifying us with His salvation and spreading over our characters all the graces of holiness."

"The sacrament we hold to be not merely a privilege but a means of grace: a privilege to all for whom the Savior is our alone dependence for time and eternity; and a means of grace to all who, humbled at our distance and deficiency from the perfections of the sanctuary above, seek the instituted ordinances below, for the advancement of our meetness for the inheritance. Come--but come with a sincere purpose. Come in honesty. Come aware of the total renovation which your personal Christianity implies. Come free of all those superficial and meagre conceptions of it which are so current in the midst of this infidel world. Come resolved to be and to do all that the Master of our Assembly would have you be and do. Come and look to Him for the perfection of His own work upon your character, that in you He may see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied."

"Though no longer under the economy of 'do-and-live,' still, Christians are under the economy of 'live-and-do.'"

"Whenever we bethinks ourselves of God having passed over the magnitude of our own provocations; whenever we dwell on the agony of that endurance laid on Christ for sinners; whenever we behold the cross of our atonement and we are solemnized into a reverence for the sacredness of His sacrifice; whenever we look onward to the glories of that inheritance which Christ hath purchased by His blood and the gates of which He hath unbarred for the welcome access of the guiltiest of us all; whenever we look upon Jesus--then it is that we lay hold of our blessed hope, our certain assurance. Therefore beloved, turn your eyes upon Jesus; look full upon His wondrous grace. Oh, consider Jesus."

"Let us not be over-sanguine nor over-melancholy of immediate results. Our perspective of time is only slowly synchronized to the clock of providence."

"Deliverance from condemnation is not the goal, but the starting post of the Christian race; and so instead of laboring to make good a remote and inaccessible station where forgiveness shall be awarded to him, he is sent forth with a full deed of amnesty in his hand, and lightened of all his fears; he goes forth upon his course rejoicing."

"Selectiveness in the decrees of God will not do. Mutilate the truth and you cripple it. Pare it down and you paralyze all its energies. The Spirit is grieved with the duplicity and disingenuousness of men, when they offer to divide God's testimony in accord with their own preferences and devices."