by Jonathan Edwards
Christian, consider the freeness and wonderfulness of the grace of God towards yourself. You had such a wicked heart, you lived such a wicked life, and it would have been most just with God to have cast you off forever. But he has had mercy upon you; he has made his glorious grace appear in your eternal salvation.
You had no love to God; but yet he has exercised unspeakable love to you.
You have despised God, and set light by him; but so great a value has God's grace set on you and your happiness, that you have been redeemed at the price of the blood of his own Son.
You chose to be with Satan in his service; but yet God has made you a joint heir with Christ of his glory.
You were ungrateful for past mercies; yet God not only continued those mercies, but bestowed unspeakably greater mercies upon you.
You refused to hear when God called; yet God heard you when you called.
You abused the infiniteness of God's mercy to encourage yourself in sin against him; yet God has manifested the infiniteness of that mercy, in the exercises of it towards you.
You have rejected Christ, and set him at nothing; and yet he is become your Savior.
You have neglected your own salvation; but God has not neglected it.
You would have destroyed yourself; but yet in God has been your help.
God has magnified his free grace towards you, and not to others; because he has chosen you, and it has pleased him to set his love upon you.
Christian, you shall never open your mouth in boasting; but lie the lower before God for his mercy to you. You have abundant reasons to open your mouth in God's praises, that they may be continually in your mouth, both here and to all eternity, for his rich, unspeakable, and sovereign mercy to you, whereby he, and he alone, has made you to differ from others.
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From Jonathan Edwards' sermon, "The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners"