Who made you to differ? By Charles Spurgeon. By the grace of God, I am what I am. 1 Corinthians 15 verse 10. It is grace, free, sovereign grace, which has made you to differ.

Should any here, supposing themselves to be the children of God, imagine that there is some reason in them why they should have been chosen? 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 less than the least, the offscoring of all things, unworthy, ill-deserving, undeserving, and hell-deserving, and ascribe it all to sovereign grace, which has made them to differ, and to distinguishing love, which has chosen them out from the rest of the world.

Great Christian, you would have been a great sinner if God had not made you to differ. O you who are valiant for truth, you would have been as valiant for the devil if 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 God's grace had not changed you. You can now sing His love, but a licentious song might have been on your lips if grace had not washed you in the blood of Jesus. You are now sanctified, you are quickened, you are justified. But what would you have been today if it had not been for the interposition of the divine hand? There is not a crime you may not have committed. There is not a folly into which you might not have run. Even murder itself you might have committed 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.

Never be proud, though you now have a wide domain of grace. You had once not a single thing to call yours own except your sin and misery. You are now wrapped up in the golden righteousness of the Savior and accepted in the garments of the beloved. But you would have been buried under the black mountain of sin and clothed with the filthy rags of unrighteousness If God had not changed you, and are you proud? Do you exalt yourself? O strange mystery, that you, who have borrowed everything, should exalt yourself! That you, who have nothing of your own, but have still to draw upon grace, should be proud! That you, a poor dependent pensioner upon the bounty of your Saviour, and yet proud! that you, one who has a life which can only live by fresh streams of life from Jesus, should be proud. Go, hang your pride upon the gallows as high as Haman, hang it there to rot, and you stand beneath and execrate it all to eternity.

Surely, of all things most to be cursed and despised is the pride of a Christian. 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 humbly toward his fellow creatures.

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