March 26

Bless the Lord, O my soul, who healeth all thy diseases, who redeemeth thy life from destruction. - Psalms 103:2-4.

WHAT is required of those who have experienced at the hand of the great Physician his recovering mercy? First, To be adoringly thankful; and shall not we call upon our souls, and all that is within us, to bless his holy name that he restoreth our souls, that he healeth our bruised hearts, and bindeth up our wounds; and shall we not make the grateful acknowledgment, “Thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling; therefore will I walk before the Lord in the land of the living;” presenting “our bodies unto him as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God, which is our reasonable service.”

Secondly, If we are healed, it is our duty to recommend our gracious deliverer to others, to tell them “what a dear Saviour we have found.” We often observe in the public prints acknowledgments from patients when they have obtained relief, and those acknowledgments arise from two things-from compassion towards their fellow sufferers, and also a regard to the physician. If all the cases which our Saviour has cured from the beginning had been so testified of, the world, I suppose, would not contain the books that would be written. Hereafter they will all be made known, to the honour of this Physician, “when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and admired in all them that believe.” Let us be concerned, therefore, to seize every opportunity to tell what God hath done for our souls. If we do this with simplicity and sincerity, we maybe the means of saving souls from death; and the deliverance of one soul from Spiritual death is of more consequence than the delivering of an empire from civil bondage. But let us be careful to recommend the great Physician by our lives as well as our lips, by our tempers as well as our tongues.

“Thus shall we best proclaim abroad

The honours of our Saviour God,

When the salvation reigns within,

And grace subdues the power of sin.”

Thirdly, If we have been healed, let us avoid a relapse, and abstain from those indulgences from which we have suffered so much already. Let us guard against the sin which doth so easily beset, and by which we have been so degraded and injured, and brought down to the very gates of death and hell, taking heed to what our Saviour said: “Go thy way and sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee;” and as David said: “Ye that fear the Lord hate evil.”