Come, you who are tossed with tempest and not comforted. Come, you whose spirit is wounded, whose heart is broken, whose mind is bowed down to the dust. Hide for a little while within Christ's sheltering almightiness.

Jesus is equal to your condition. His strength is almighty. His love is almighty. His grace is almighty. His sympathy is almighty. His arm is almighty. His resources are infinite, fathomless, measureless. and all this almightiness is on your side and will bring you through the fire and through the water almighty to rescue he is also your brother and friend to sympathize and while his divine arm encircles upholds and keeps you his human soul touched with the feeling of your infirmities yearns over you with all the deep intensity of his compassionate tenderness, the astonishing, the marvelous love.

The cross of Jesus inspires our love to Him. It would seem impossible to be brought by the Holy Spirit to the foot of the cross and did not feel the inspiration of love. Surely a believing apprehension of the amazing, the unparalleled love of Jesus, bending his look of forgiveness upon us from the cross, will thaw our icy hearts into the warmest glow of affection. Believe that Jesus loves you, and your heart shall glow with a love in return which will bear it on in a willing obedience and unreserved surrender in faithful service and patient suffering enwrapped, consumed amid the flames of its own heaven-inspired and heaven-ascending affection.

the astonishing, the marvelous love he has exhibited in giving you his beloved son to die in your stead are chords by which he would draw your loving heart to himself because he loved her Jesus sustains no association to his church more expressive than that of the marriage relationship From all eternity, he forever betrothed her to himself. He asked her at the hands of her father, and the father gave her to him. He entered into a covenant that she would be his. The conditions of that covenant were great, but not too great for his love to undertake. They were that he should assume her nature, discharge her legal obligations, endure her punishment, repair her ruin, and bring her to glory. He undertook all, and he accomplished all, because he loved her.

The love of Jesus to his church is the love of the most tender husband. It is single, constant, affectionate, matchless, wonderful. Jesus sympathizes with her, nourishes her, provides for her, clothes her, watches over and indulges her with the most intimate and endearing tenderness in the bosom of Jesus.

Forward, believer in Christ, to the toils, duties, and trials of another stage of life's journey. Jesus is enough for them all. Jesus will be with you in them all. Jesus will triumphantly conduct you through them all.

Beloved one, live in the constant expectation of soon seeing Jesus face to face, conversing with He whom here below cheered, comforted, and sweetened many a weary step of your Christian pilgrimage. that moment is speeding on in a little while and all that now wounds and ruffles, tempts and pollutes will have disappeared like the foam up on the billow and you shall eternally repose your weary soul in the bosom of Jesus the solitary object of his love

It is a great mercy when we can retire from the crowd and deal with God individually, when we can take the precious promises to ourselves individually, when we can repair to Jesus with individual sins, infirmities and sorrows, feeling that his eye bends its glance upon us, his ear bows down to us, his hand is outstretched to us, his whole heart absorbed in us as though not another petitioner or sufferer offered a request or unveiled a sorrow as if in a word we were the solitary object of his love his invitation to you is come unto me he would have you come

You cannot honor him more than recognizing his personal relation to yourself and disclosing your personal circumstances, making personal confession of personal sin, presenting personal needs, and unveiling personal infirmities, backslidings, and sorrows.

Christ must be all. We cannot keep our eye too exclusively or too intently fixed on Jesus. All salvation is in Him. All salvation proceeds from Him. All salvation leads to Him. And for the assurance and comfort of our salvation, we are to repose believingly and entirely on Him.

Christ must be all, Christ the beginning, Christ the center, and Christ the end. O sweet truth to you who are sensible of your poverty, vileness, and insufficiency, and of the ten thousand flaws and failures, of which, perhaps, no one is cognizant but God and your own soul. Oh, to turn and rest in Christ, a full Christ, a loving Christ, a tender Christ, whose heart's love never chills, from whose eye darts no reproof, from whose lips breathes no sentence of condemnation.

Christ must be all.

That friend

There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. Proverbs 18, 24.

The power of human sympathy is amazing if it leads the heart to Christ. It is paralyzed if it leads only to ourselves. Oh, how feeble and inadequate are we to administer to a diseased mind, to heal a broken heart, to strengthen the feeble hand, and to confirm the trembling knees. Our mute sympathy, our prayerful silence, is often the best exponent of our affection and the most effectual expression of our aid.

But if, taking the object of our solicitude by the hand, we gently lead him to God, if we conduct him to Jesus, portraying to his view the depth of his love, the perfection of his atoning work, the sufficiency of his grace, his readiness to pardon, his power to save, the exquisite sensibility of his nature, and thus his perfect sympathy with every human sorrow, we have then most truly and most effectually soothed the sorrow, healed the wound, and strengthened the hand in God.

There is no sympathy, no love, no gentleness, no tenderness, no patience like Christ's Oh, how sweet, how encouraging to know that Jesus sympathetically enters into my afflictions, my temptations, my sorrows, my joys. May this truth endear Him to our souls. May it constrain us to unveil our whole heart to Him in the fullest confidence of the closest, most sacred, and precious friendship. May it urge us to do those things always which are most pleasing in His sight.

Beloved, never forget. Let these words linger upon your ear as the echoes of music that never die in all your sorrows, in all your trials, in all your needs, in all your assaults, in all your conscious wanderings, in life, in death, and at the day of judgment. You possess a friend that sticks closer than a brother. That friend is Jesus.

As though it had never been.

Beloved, soon? Oh, how soon! All that now loads the heart with care and rings it with sorrow, all that dims the eye with tears and renders the day anxious and the night sleepless, will be as though it had never been. Emerging from the entanglement, the dreariness, the solitude, the loneliness, and the temptations of the wilderness, you shall enter upon your everlasting rest, your unfading inheritance, where there is no sorrow, no declension, no sin, no sunset, no twilight, no evening shadows, no midnight darkness, but all is one perfect, cloudless, eternal day, for Jesus is the joy, the light, and the glory. thereof.

What is heaven? Beloved, what is heaven? What is the final glory of the saints? Is it not the best place, the richest inheritance provided by the Father for the people ransomed and brought home to glory by His Son? Heaven is a place designated by God, chosen and consecrated by Him for the church redeemed by the precious blood of His dear Son. And when we enter there, we shall enter as children welcomed to a Father's home. It will be the best that God can give us. He will bestow upon us who deserved the least the best in His power to bestow.

the best savior, the best robe, the best banquet, the best inheritance. In the new heaven and the new earth there will be nothing more to taint, nothing more to sully, nothing more to embitter, nothing more to wound, no serpent to beguile, no eve to ensnare, no spoiler to destroy, no sin to defile, no adversity to sadden. no misunderstanding to alienate, no tongue to defame, no suspicion to chill, no tear, nor sickness, nor death, nor parting. It will be the best part of the pure, radiant, glorified universe which God will assign to His people.

Saints of the Most High, Let the prospect cheer, sanctify, and comfort you. It will not be long that you are to labor and battle here on Earth. It is but a little while that you are to occupy your present sphere of conflict, of trial, and of sorrow. The time is coming. Oh, how fast it speeds! Soon the Lord Jesus Christ will bring you home to heaven.

Octavius Winslow, 1808 through 1878, was a descendant of Edward Winslow, a pilgrim leader. Born in New York, he later moved to England where he held pastoids in Leamington Spa, Bath and Brighton, England. There he became one of the most valued non-conformist ministers of the 19th century and in 1861 spoke at the opening of Spurgeon's Tabernacle in London. Winslow was the author of over 40 books which were filled with experimental knowledge of Christ and the doctrines of God's Word.