Meditations on Jesus Christ

I’ve told you before of my great appreciation for Private Thoughts on Religion by Thomas Adam. Today I would like to share with you some of the entries in his chapter on Jesus Christ. Read these thoughtfully, a few times over, and let the depth of what he’s saying reach your heart. Mull it over in your mind until it impresses you in the way it’s meant to. Meditation–deep, prayerful thinking with an eye to change–is a forgotten and neglected means of grace and Christian growth. We would do well to recover it.  The Lord’s Christ is the soul’s joy, support, and confidence in all states and conditions; [He is the soul’s] riches in poverty, comfort in trouble, ease in pain, health in sickness, life in death.

The salvation of man is as much the gift of God, and the work of Christ, as his life and being.

Christ never comes into the soul unattended; he brings the Holy Spirit with him, and the Spirit his train of gifts and graces.

Let him who rejects the righteousness of Christ consider well what ground he stands upon and what he has to trust to.

To comprehend the breadth and length, and depth and height of the love of Christ, we must first take the dimensions of our own sin.

Without Christ we should never have known what sin is; without the knowledge of sin we should never have known what Christ is. O, my soul, magnify the Lord, and rejoice in God thy Saviour.

The two main pillars of Christ’s religion are the depth of sin, and the height of righteousness; and none but he could atone for the one and perform the other.

I know so much of Christ as not to be afraid to look my sins in the face.

Christ is God, stooping to the senses and speaking to the heart of man.

Christ brings God down to the capacity of man and raises man to the nature of God.

Christ stands between the wrath of God and the sin of man, intercepting the one and purging the other.

Christ saw and felt every sin of mine distinctly, when he sweat great drops of blood in the garden and cried out upon the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Christ can be nothing but himself in every soul where he comes, loving his own life, doing his own works, rejecting all sin, and seeking only to please God.

Christ in me will be the same God-devoted, sin-hating, soul-loving, self-denying, suffering, laboring Christ that he is in himself.

I owe Christ ten thousand thousand times more than I can pay; and all he requires of me is to accept a discharge, and settle my love upon him; not as any part of payment, but because he knows I cannot otherwise be happy.

If we ever get to heaven we shall know that we do not sing praises to the Lamb for nothing.

I owe Christ a heart, a will, a life.