August 28 Daily Devotional

Bible Verse

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted" (Matt. 5:4).

Devotional

You feel yourself to be the very chief of sinners. You seem to stand out from the great mass, a lone and solitary being—more vile, more polluted, more guilty, and more lost than all. Your sentiments in reference to yourself, to the world, to sin, to God, and to Christ, have undergone a rapid, total, and surprising change.

You see yourself to be guilty and condemned.

You feel the world to be a worthless portion, a cheat, and a lie.

You see sin to be the darkest and most hateful of all other things.

You regard God in a light of holiness, justice, and truth that you never did before.

You look up to Christ as possessing an interest entirely new and overpowering.

Your views in relation to the law of God have reversed. You now see it to be immaculately holy, strictly just, infinitely wise. You now see that your best attempts to obey its precepts are not only utterly powerless, but in themselves are so polluted by sin that you cannot look at them without the deepest self-loathing.

The justice of God shines with a glory unseen and unknown before. You now feel that in bringing the condemnatory sentence of the law into your conscience he is strictly holy, and were he now to send you to eternal woe he would be strictly just.

But ah! What seems to form the greatest burden? What is that which is more bitter to you than wormwood or gall? Oh, it is the thought that ever you should have lifted your arm of rebellion against so good, so holy, so just a God as he is. That ever you should have cherished one treasonous thought, or harbored one unkind feeling. That your whole life, thus far, should have been spent in bitter hostility to him, his law, his Son, his people; and that yet in the midst of it, yes, all day long, he has stretched out his hand to you, and you did not regard it!

Oh, the guilt that rests upon your conscience! Oh, the burden that presses your soul! Oh, the sorrow that wrings your heart! Oh, the pang that wounds your spirit! Is there a posture of lowliness more lowly than all others? You would assume it. Is there a place in the dust more humiliating than all others? You would lie in it. And now you are looking wistfully around you for a refuge, a resting-place, a balm, a quietness for the tossing of the soul.

Beloved, is this your real state? Are these your true feelings? Then you are blessed of the Lord! "Blessed, do you say?" Yes! Those tears are blessed! Those humbling, lowly views are blessed! That broken heart, that contrite spirit, that awakened, convinced, and wounded conscience, even with all its guilt, is blessed! Why? because the Spirit, who convinces men of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment, has entered your soul, and wrought this change in you. He has opened your eyes, to see yourself lost and wretched. He has broken the spell which the world had woven round you. He has dissolved the enchantment, discovered the delusion, and made you to feel the powers of the world to come. Therefore, you are blessed.

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted" (Matt. 5:4).

All hail the power of Jesus' Name!
let angels prostrate fall;
bring forth the royal diadem,
and crown him Lord of all.

(Edward Perronet, 1779, 1780, alt.)

Be sure to read the Preface by Octavius Winslow and A Note from the Editor by Larry E. Wilson.

Larry Wilson is an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In addition to having served as the General Secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the OPC (2000–2004) and having written a number of articles and booklets (such as God's Words for Worship and Why Does the OPC Baptize Infants) for New Horizons and elsewhere, he has pastored OPC churches in Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio. We are grateful to him for his editing of Morning Thoughts, the OPC Daily Devotional for 2011.