radkinso
Puritan Board Freshman
I recently purchased and began reading this volume, based mainly upon Spurgeon's review of it in Commenting and Commentaries. I am still in the introductory material, and have not even reached the first sermon. In fact, I just finished the Dedication, written not by Durham, but by his brother-in-law and fellow minister, John Carstairs. But WOW - to steal a phrase from Joel Beeke, the dedication by Carstairs is worth the price of the whole book! It is essentially an entire separate sermon on the excellence and reasonableness of yielding ourselves up to the providential will of God in afflictions.
Anyways, I see plenty of reviews of Durham's sermons themselves (which I am looking forward to even more, at this point), but I just thought I would commend Carstairs' dedication, since I have found it absolutely soul-searching. Not what I expected, absolutely what I needed, in God's providence.
Here is a sample:
Let all mutinous thoughts about His dealings with you be silenced with, It's the Lord. Let not too much dwelling on the thoughts of your affliction, to the filling of your heart still with sorrow, incapacitate you for, nor divert you from humbly asking the Lord what He aims at by all these dispensations, what He would have you to learn out of them, what He reproves and contends for, what He would have you amending your hands in, and what He would have you more weaned, self-denied and mortified in, and what He would have you a further length and a greater proficient in. He has told you 'the truth, that these things are expedient for you' [John 16:7]; study to find them to be so in your experience. Surely He has by them written in great, legible and capital characters, yea, even as with a sunbeam, vanity, emptiness, uncertainty, mutability, unsatisfactoriness and disappointment upon the forehead of all creature-comforts, and with a loud voice called your Lordship, yet more seriously then ever, to seek after solid soul-satisfaction in His own blessed and all-sufficient Self, where it is most certainly to be found, without all peradventure or possibility of misgiving.
Make haste, my Lord, yet to come by a more close confining of all your desires and expectations of happiness and satisfaction to your soul, to God only, contracting and gathering them in from the vast and wearisome circumference of earthly comforts, and concentering them all in Himself as their point; study through grace in a sweet soliloquy to bespeak your soul, thus, "My soul, wait thou only upon God, for my expectation is from Him" (Ps. 62:5). O blessed confinement of desires and expectations of happiness and satisfaction to the soul! where it is as impossible to meet with disappointment as it is impossible not to meet with it from every airth (compass, point, quarter) whence it is looked for. Alas! it is the scattering of our expectations and desires of happiness among other objects besides Him, that breeds us all the disquiet, anxiety and vexation. Whereas if we kept ourselves through grace under a more close and constant confinement to Him, when this and that and the other creature-comfort, whether person or thing, were taken from us, there would be no deduction made from, nor any diminution made of our true happiness, none of these, how dear and desirable soever, being essentially constitutive of it, nor so much as trenching thereupon; and He in whom only all our happiness lies, being "the same yesterday, today, and forever," "without any variableness or shadow of turning" [Heb 13:8; James 1:17].
Anyways, I see plenty of reviews of Durham's sermons themselves (which I am looking forward to even more, at this point), but I just thought I would commend Carstairs' dedication, since I have found it absolutely soul-searching. Not what I expected, absolutely what I needed, in God's providence.
Here is a sample:
Let all mutinous thoughts about His dealings with you be silenced with, It's the Lord. Let not too much dwelling on the thoughts of your affliction, to the filling of your heart still with sorrow, incapacitate you for, nor divert you from humbly asking the Lord what He aims at by all these dispensations, what He would have you to learn out of them, what He reproves and contends for, what He would have you amending your hands in, and what He would have you more weaned, self-denied and mortified in, and what He would have you a further length and a greater proficient in. He has told you 'the truth, that these things are expedient for you' [John 16:7]; study to find them to be so in your experience. Surely He has by them written in great, legible and capital characters, yea, even as with a sunbeam, vanity, emptiness, uncertainty, mutability, unsatisfactoriness and disappointment upon the forehead of all creature-comforts, and with a loud voice called your Lordship, yet more seriously then ever, to seek after solid soul-satisfaction in His own blessed and all-sufficient Self, where it is most certainly to be found, without all peradventure or possibility of misgiving.
Make haste, my Lord, yet to come by a more close confining of all your desires and expectations of happiness and satisfaction to your soul, to God only, contracting and gathering them in from the vast and wearisome circumference of earthly comforts, and concentering them all in Himself as their point; study through grace in a sweet soliloquy to bespeak your soul, thus, "My soul, wait thou only upon God, for my expectation is from Him" (Ps. 62:5). O blessed confinement of desires and expectations of happiness and satisfaction to the soul! where it is as impossible to meet with disappointment as it is impossible not to meet with it from every airth (compass, point, quarter) whence it is looked for. Alas! it is the scattering of our expectations and desires of happiness among other objects besides Him, that breeds us all the disquiet, anxiety and vexation. Whereas if we kept ourselves through grace under a more close and constant confinement to Him, when this and that and the other creature-comfort, whether person or thing, were taken from us, there would be no deduction made from, nor any diminution made of our true happiness, none of these, how dear and desirable soever, being essentially constitutive of it, nor so much as trenching thereupon; and He in whom only all our happiness lies, being "the same yesterday, today, and forever," "without any variableness or shadow of turning" [Heb 13:8; James 1:17].
