Through the Apostle Peter, the Lord calls His people in 1 Pet. 1:3-16 to think much upon the riches of His glorious, life-transforming mercy in Jesus Christ. Focusing our minds upon these truths in God’s Word strengthens our faith, enlarges our hope, intensifies our joy, and motivates our obedience. In a sermon entitled Sorrowful, Yet Always Rejoicing, Alexander MacLaren offers these encouragements:
“The reason why so many Christian people have only religion enough to make them gloomy, or to weight them with a sense of burdens and unfulfilled aspirations and broken resolutions, and have not enough to make them glad, is mainly because they do not think enough about the [great truths] in which they might ‘greatly rejoice.’ I believe that most of us would be altogether different people, as professing Christians, if we honestly tried to keep the mightiest things uppermost, and to fill heart and mind far more than we do with the contemplation of these great facts and truths which, when once they are beheld and cleaved to, are certain to minister gladness to men’s souls.”
Let’s be praying for, and encouraging one another to think upon, and cleave to the mightiest things!