Who makes you different from anyone else? by Charles Spurgeon

1 Corinthians 4, 7

Who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not? It is grace, free, sovereign grace, which alone has made you to differ.

Should any reader, supposing themselves to be a child of God, imagine that there is some reason in them why God should have chosen them, let them know that as yet they are in the dark concerning the first principles of grace, and have not yet learned the gospel. If ever they had known the gospel, they would on the other hand confess that they were, the offscouring of all things, undeserving, ill-deserving, and hell-deserving. They would ascribe their salvation to God's distinguishing grace, which alone has made them to differ from the unsaved, and to His discriminating love, which has chosen them out from the rest of the world.

Great Christian, you would have been a highness reprobate if God had not made you to differ. You who are valiant for truth, you would have been as valiant for the devil if sovereign grace had not laid hold of you. A seat in heaven shall one day be yours, but a chain in hell would have been yours if sovereign grace had not saved you. You can now sing His love, but a licentious song would have been on your lips if grace had not washed you in the sin-atoning blood of Jesus.

You are now quickened, you are now justified, you are now sanctified. But what would you have been today if it had not been for the interposition of God's omnipotent hand? There is not a crime you might not have committed, There is not a folly into which you might not have run. You might have committed murder itself, if grace had not preserved you. You shall be like the angels, but you would have been like the devil, if you had not been changed by grace.

Therefore never be proud, though you now have a wide domain of grace. Once you had not a single thing to call your own, except your sin and misery, You are now wrapped up in the golden righteousness of the Saviour and accepted in the spotless garments of the Beloved. But you would have been buried under the black mountain of sin and clothed in the filthy rags of your unrighteousness if He had not changed you.

And are you proud? Do you exalt yourself? O strange mystery, that you who have nothing but sin and misery should exalt yourself. That you, a poor dependent pensioner upon the bounty of your Saviour, should be proud. Go, hang your pride upon the gallows as high as Haman's. Hang it there to rot, and execrate it to all eternity. Surely of all things most to be despised by the Christian is the vile sin of pride. He, of all men, has ten thousand times more reason than any other to be humble and walk lowly with his God and kindly and meekly toward his fellow creatures.

By the grace of God, I am what I am. 1 Corinthians chapter 15 verse 10