1742 Zebulon Rd, Griffin, GA 30224

phone 770-584-6549

Owner Nolan Fant and myself …

It would be foolish to think that Christ and the Gospel would come and sit down at our fireside. No, we must leave our comfortable warm houses and seek after Christ and His Gospel. It is not the sunny side of Christ that we must expect, and we must not forsake him if we lack it. Let us set our faces against whatever we find in life, until He and we are though the briers and prickly bushes and on dry ground. Our soft nature would prefer to be carried through the troubles of this life in Christ’s arms. But it is His wisdom, who knows what we’re made of, that His bairns go with wet and cold feet to heaven. Oh, how sweet a thing it would be for us, if we would learn how to make our burdens light, by preparing our hearts for the burden, which requires us to make our Lord’s will the law of our hearts.

I find Christ and His cross not unpleasant or troublesome guests, as men would call them. No, I think patience makes the water Christ gives us good wine, and His dross silver and gold. We have a good reason for continuing to wait: before long our Master will be back for us and shine His light into the whole world, making visible the blacks and whites. Happy are those who will be found ready. Our hour-glass doesn’t have long enough to run for us to become weary. In fact, time itself will dissolve our cares and sorrow. Our heaven is in the bud and growing up until the harvest. Why shouldn’t we persevere, seeing that our whole life time is a few grains of sand? Therefore I commend Christ to you, as your last-living and longest-living Husband, the staff of your old age. Let Him now have the rest of your days. Don’t worry about the storm when you’re sailing in Christ’s ship: no passenger will ever fall overboard. Even the most sea-sick passenger is sure to come to land safely.

Written on March 13, 1637 by Samuel Rutherford in a letter to Jean Brown.

Again, do we attend to the Word with reverential devotion? When the judge is giving his charge on the bench, all attend. When the Word is preached, the great God is giving us his charge. Do we listen to it as to a matter of life and death? This is a good sign that we love the Word.

Again, do we love the holiness of the Word (Psalms 119:140)? The Word is preached to beat down sin and advance holiness. Do we love it for its spirituality and purity? Many love the Word preached only for its eloquence and notion (intellectual content). They come to a sermon as to a music lecture (Ezekiel 33:31-32) or as to a garden to pick flowers, but not to have their lusts subdued or their hearts bettered. These are like a foolish woman who paints her face but neglects her health.

Again, do we love the convictions of the Word? Do we love the Word when it comes home to our conscience and shoots arrows of reproof at our sins? It is the minister’s duty sometime to reprove. He who can speak smooth words in the pulpit, but does not know how to reprove, is like a sword with a fine hilt without an edge. ‘Rebuke them sharply’ (Titus 2:15). Dip the nail in oil, reprove in love, but strike the nail home. Now Christian, when the Word touches your sin and says, ‘You art the man’, do you love the reproof? Can you bless God that ‘the sword of the Spirit’ has divided between you and your lusts? This is indeed a sign of grace and shows that you are a lover of the Word.

A corrupt heart loves the comforts of the Word, but not the reproofs: ‘They hate him that rebuketh in the gate’ (Amos 5:10). ‘Their eyes flash with fire!’ Like venomous creatures that at the least touch spit poison, ‘when they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth’ (Acts 7:54). When Stephen touched them to the quick, they were mad and could not endure it.

The Godly Man’s Picture, Thomas Watson, Banner of Truth Trust, (originally published in 1666)

–Patrick Henry

Meekness, in the school of Christ, is one of the “fruits of the Spirit” (Gal 5:22-23). It is a grace (both gratis data, ‘freely given,’ and gratum faciens, ‘rendering kind’), wrought by the Holy Ghost both as a sanctifier and as a comforter in the hearts of all true believers, teaching and enabling them at all times to keep their passions under the conduct and government of religion and right reason. I observe that it is wrought in the hearts of all true believers because though there are some rough and knotty pieces that the Spirit works upon, whose natural temper is unhappily sour and harsh, which are long in the squaring; yet wheresoever there is true grace, there is a disposition to strive against, and strength in some measure to conquer, that distemper. And though in this, as in other graces, an absolute sinless perfection cannot be expected in this present state, yet we are to labor after it, and press toward it.

Matthew Henry, The Quest for Meekness and Quietness of Spirit –reprinted by Soli Deo Gloria Publications – pg 21-22 (first published in 1698).