Transcendent, soul-attracting glories

 

Dear Sir,

I sympathize with you in your trials and trust the Lord will do you good by all, while He makes them a means to exercise your graces and to prepare you for your crown. Oh, that glory reserved for us in heaven! That incorruptible, undefiled, and unfadeable inheritance of which we are now heirs and shall before long be possessors! How delightfully shall our capacious souls drink their fill of these rivers of pleasures which are at God's right hand for evermore. We shall be done then with all our bitter things, sin and the effects of it, and be filled with the heavenly sweets of that everlasting feast prepared for us in the immediate vision of God and the Lamb to eternity.

My longing soul ofttimes stretches forth the wings of its desires after this glory, and is greatly comforted in believing views of that life and immortality which I shall enter into when this earthly tabernacle is taken down, which, through diseases and weakness is often, in my own apprehension, just ready to crumble into its original dust.

Oh, the transcendent, soul-attracting glories of that house, that building of God, eternal in the heavens, which I know through grace is prepared for me! I groan, being burdened in this tabernacle by reason of the sinfulness of my soul and the weakness of my body, both which hinder me from loving and serving my God as I would; and I long for immortality, not merely that I would be unclothed, but clothed with the glory prepared for me there.

The thoughts of death, as it will be to me an entering into life, have been very pleasant to me of late; and if a distant glimpse of that glory be so sweet, even while our views of it are so clouded with unbelief and darkness, what a ravishing prospect shall we have when taken home to be forever with the Lord, and shall see with the veil cast off!