Sermons 'The Believer's Love to an Unseen Christ' and 'For Jesus Christ is Precious to Believers'

Extract

Sermons ‘The Believer’s Love to an Unseen Christ’ and ‘For Jesus Christ is Precious to Believers’
Andrew Gray

The Believer’s Love to an Unseen Christ “Who having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable, and full of glory” 1 Peter 1:8.
Amongst all the debates and controversies in these days, this is without all debate and controversy, that godliness is a great mystery; and we conceive that it were your advantage to take up a mystery in it. We think the truths of the gospel are not only mysteries to our judgments, but much more mysteries to our practices. We conceive they are so elevated above sense and reason, that these depths of the gospel are not easily taken up. A natural man, who, in things human, hath his knowledge and understanding enlarged as the sand by the sea-shore, who hath attained unto an eminent pitch of knowledge of things natural and moral, above even those that are endued with a more divine light in things that are more sublime in their nature and useful in their knowledge; yet bring him to search out the mysterious truths in the gospel, and there he is as an infant of days, and without understanding in these things, they being spiritually discerned. O what a mystery it is, for flesh and blood to love Him whom they never saw. The first words of our text are a riddle which we cannot take up, to love an invisible object, but he that is spiritually enlightened, to embrace that precious object Jesus Christ, by these two glorious arms, faith and love, can easily unfold it. Though He be now entered into the holiest of all, and is set down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, and exalted out of our sight; yet faith doth travail above the clouds, to embrace and encircle that invisible object, whose name is Immanuel.

There are two great riddles and mysteries in the words which we have read, which, though a natural man had seven days to unfold them, he should be as wise at the close of these seven days, as he was at the beginning, these mysteries being above his sense and …