There are times when the believer suffers with heartache, when his sweet joy in the Lord and His great salvation gives way to grievous doubt and painful self-accusations. Those are the times when the Christian realizes most vividly his deep sinful depravity and his overwhelming debt of gratitude to the kind and gracious Lord for saving him like a brand from the burning. Then he falls to complaining about his weakness, his fickleness, his lukewarmness, in loving and serving his blessed Master, and he sighs with the poet:

But in such days it is well to remember that "God is greater than our heart and knoweth all things." He knows not only our sinful weakness, He knows all our thoughts afar off. He knows and sees also our desire to love and serve Him more and better, knows and sees our sorrow over our cold love to Him.

And what does He do? Instead of chiding us and rejecting us on account of our fickleness, He hastens to assure us that He will not break the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax (Isaiah 42:3). As a mother stills her weeping child, so He comes to us in His precious Word and stills all our fearing and sorrowing by telling us how He loved us in spite of our sin and guilt before the foundation of the world was laid. "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." (1 John 4:10). So we learn it again and again that we are not saved by the agony of our repentance or by the fervency of our faith and prayers or by the sanctity of our life, but only, absolutely only, by the free and unmerited grace of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

[devotion text by Rev. F. W. Herzberger (1920) -
from the Family Altar - CPH (1957 edition)]
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