Horatius Bonar emphasizes the debilitating effects of uncertainty in our relationship with God, asserting that assurance brings vigor and strength to our faith. He highlights that true faith is rooted in the acknowledgment of our own inadequacies and the sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice. Bonar warns against measuring doctrine by its popularity rather than its ability to glorify God, and he encourages believers to trust in God's wisdom amidst conflicting opinions. He reminds us that life is a journey towards eternal rest, urging earnestness in our spiritual pursuits. Ultimately, Bonar proclaims the gospel as a message of free love and complete forgiveness, which empowers believers to live holy lives.

Uncertainty as to our relationship with God is one of the most enfeebling and dispiriting of things. It makes a man heartless. It takes the pith out of him. He cannot fight; he cannot run. He is easily dismayed and gives way. He can do nothing for God. But when we know that we are of God, we are vigorous, brave, invincible. There is no more quickening truth than this of assurance. No man can quench his thirst with sand, or with water from the Dead Sea; so no man can find rest from his own character, however good, or from his own acts, however religious. Upon a life I did not live, upon a death I did not die; anothers life, anothers death, I stake my whole eternity. We have come to a place in time where we measure the correctness of our plans simply by their seeming to contribute to our favorite aim. We estimate the soundness of our doctrine, not from its tendency to exalt and glorify God but entirely by the apparent facility with which it enables us to get sinners to turn from their ways. In religion faith does not spring out of feeling, but feeling out of faith. The less we feel the more we should trust. We cannot feel right till we have believed. Faith is the acknowledgment of the entire absence of all goodness in us, and the recognition of the cross as the substitute for all the want on our part. The whole work is His, not ours, from first to last. In the day of prosperity we have many refuges to resort to; in the day of adversity only one. Free and warm reception into the divine favor is the strongest of all motives in leading a man to seek conformity to Him who has thus freely forgiven him all trespasses Do not heed the jar of man's warring opinions. Let God be true and every man a liar. The Bible is the Bible still. If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God. You have an unction from the Holy One, and you know all things. Life is a journey, not a home; a road, not a city of habitation; and the enjoyments and blessings we have are but little inns on the roadside of life, where we may be refreshed for a moment, that we may with new strength press on to the end - to the rest that remaineth for the people of God. 'Tis not for man to trifle; life is brief, and sin is here. We have no time to sport away the hours; all must be earnest in a world like ours. All unbelief is the belief of a lie. Thy way, not mine, O Lord, however dark it be; lead me by thine own hand; choose out the path for me. The more fully that the gospel is preached, in the grand old apostolic way, the more likely is it to accomplish the results which it did in the apostolic days. In all unbelief there are these two things: a good opinion of one's self, and a bad opinion of God. The gospel is the proclamation of free love; the revelation of the boundless charity of God. Nothing less than this will suit our world; nothing else is so likely to touch the heart, to go down to the lowest depths of depraved humanity, as the assurance that the sinner has been loved - loved by God, loved with a righteous love, loved with a free love that makes no bargain as to merit, or fitness, or goodness. The gospel comes to the sinner at once with nothing short of complete forgiveness as the starting-point of all his efforts to be holy. It does not say, "Go and sin no more, and I will not condemn thee." It says at once, "Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more." How fast we learn in a day of sorrow! Scripture shines out in a new effulgence; every verse seems to contain a sunbeam, every promise stands out in illuminated splendor; things hard to be understood become in a moment plain.