It is the very best word in the Bible. By Charles Spurgeon. 2 Thessalonians chapter 2, verses 16 and 17. Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and our God and Father, who has loved us and given us everlasting consolation and good hope by grace, comfort your hearts and establish you in every good word and work. Divine love is the foundation of our consolation and hope of heaven. No everlasting consolation could have visited our hearts if the Father and the Son had not first loved us.

I always feel inclined to stop and meditate when I come across the great truth of God's eternal love to His elect people. It is not so much a truth to speak upon with the tongue as to enjoy in silence in the heart. I can fully understand that God should pity my misery. I can comprehend God's caring for my weakness. But I am filled with sacred amazement when I am told that He loves me.

What can there be in me for Him to love? Brother, what can there be in you that Jesus should set His heart on you? It is the wonder of wonders that the Lord should love us poor nobodies, defiled with sin, with such evil tempers and such rebellious natures. We marvel that the Lord Jesus should love us, so as actually to have died for us.

This fact out-miracles all other miracles put together. Jesus so loved us that He, being by nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man. He humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. Yes, the sin-atoning love and death of Jesus is the source and fountain of our every mercy and consolation. As if the Apostle Paul feared that we would get away from the doctrine of salvation by sovereign grace alone, he added, he has given us everlasting consolation and good hope through grace. Some people do not like the sound of that word, grace. It sounds too Calvinistic. We do not care what you call it. but it is the very best word in the Bible, next to the precious name of our Savior.

It is from the grace of God that our only hope of salvation comes. Sinful man, through his own merits, can never earn anything but damnation. Grace must reign, or man must be forever damned. Every blessing that can ever come to condemned sinners such as we are must come because God is gracious and full of compassion. Everlasting consolation is not a blessing given to us as the result of our own works.

All the virtues which adorn the Christian character are the result of God's grace and not the cause of it. By the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace to me was not in vain. No, I worked harder than all of them, Yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.