glorycloud's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- to behold the beauty of the LORD It is now in the flow 4:18 PM Tuesday late afternoon. It has been raining ice all afternoon. I dozed for a couple of hours in the living room easy chair. I woke myself up around 3 o'clock PM. I fixed myself a cup of tea and got out to read a sermon by the Puritan Richard Sibbes titled, "A Breathing After God" Text "One thing I have desired of the Lord, that I will seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life; to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple" Psalm 27:4. I have been reading the WORKS OF RICHARD SIBBES for many years. When I was in seminary the sermons of Richard Sibbes on the Song of Solomon helped me get through a very dark time/a minor break down. When I was a seminary student it was a very hard and lonely time for me. I have lived a hard disappointing life, but the Lord has always stood by me/kept me going. I have been breathing after God. What else is there in this short troublesome life? I am no writer. I am no gospel preacher. All I am is a old man reading the old Puritans as ice rains down from a gray dark sky. I will close with a quote from the treatise A BREATHING AFTER GOD. "Question. But how shall we come to have these desires that David had, to see the beauty of God? This St. Paul calleth the 'Spirit of revelation,' Eph.i.17. Let us pray to God that in his ordinances he would discover that amiable love of his in Christ, to shine on us in the face of his Son, in his ordinances; for the Spirit must help us to see the beauty of God. When we have spiritual senses, except the Spirit give us a spiritual light to see, we cannot see. Therefore let us desire that God would give us spiritual senses, to the spiritual light. When God made the world, light was the first creature. Why? That all the excellency of the creature might be discerned by light. If God had made never so many excellent creatures, if the light had not discovered them, where had been his glory? So there are many excellent, beautiful things in Christ, wonderful grace and comfort; if these be discovered in the word and we have no senses, and no light, if there be not light in the understanding, God shall want his glory, and we the comfort. It is light that makes things that are beautiful to be beautiful to us. A blind man cannot judge of colours, nor a deaf man of sounds and harmony. A man that hath lost his taste cannot judge of sweetness, so that there must be senses, and the Spirit of God must reveal these things unto us. And likewise let us labour more and more to see our own deformity, and then we shall see Christ's beauty, the more we desire to know our own vileness. Indeed the Spirit of God carries these parallel one with another. He discovers by the same light our own deformity and necessity, and the beauty and excellency of God in Jesus Christ. The one will set an edge on the other, and he that will come to see the height and breath, and depth of God's love in Christ, must see the height and breadth, and depth of his own corruption, and our misery by it out of Christ. And they are good thoughts for us, every day to think of these two objects, the misery of the condition of man out of Christ, and the excellency now that we have in Jesus Christ; the amiableness of Christ towards us, and our amiable condition in him. He delights in us, as we delight in him. The consideration of this, and of the loathsome, terrible, fearful condition out of him, will keep us closer to Christ, and make us value the ordinances more, that we may grow up in faith and knowledge of Christ more and more, till we come to a fulness in Christ." pg. 238,239 Richard Sibbes Volume 2 WORKS OF RICHARD SIBBES 4:57 p.m. - 2016-02-02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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