Robert Traill
There are four things, for which we should both have cause to bless the Lord, who teaches His people to profit, if they were the fruit of my speaking and of your hearing so often from this text (Is 48:17):
An edited extract from Traill’s Works, vol 1. It is the conclusion to the last of his sermons on “the throne of grace” (Heb 4:16). See review on page 122.
1. If you learn to pray better and to ply prayer more.
David gave himself to prayer (Ps 109:4). The apostles, these extraordinary officers of the primitive Church, gave themselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word (Acts 6:4). There are times in which private Christians should give themselves to fasting and prayer (1 Cor 8:5). If you belong to God, He will make you pray, and teach you with briers and thorns if you will not yield to more gentle methods. How sad is the reflection that rises in the heart under some heavy trial: “This is brought on me for my indulged distance and estrangement from God”!
2. If you learn to remember Christ more and make more use of Him in your praying.
He is the King on this throne of grace. As much as Christ is out of your minds in praying, so much are you out in your praying and your praying is out from what it ought to be. What we beg is from Christ’s store. In whose name do we beg it but in His? For whose sake but for His? Out of whose hand do we receive what we ask and get but out of His? It is marvellous that people should pretend to prayer, and think they pray, who yet forget Jesus Christ, who is all in all, in all right prayer.
3. If, in your praying, you learn to remember more God’s free grace in Jesus Christ and to plead it more.
Free grace is the sensible humble man’s plea. He is a proud ignorant person that seeks or uses any other plea at God’s throne of grace. Free grace is the only thing that faith can first lay hold on. It is a plea that any man may use; it is the constant and powerful plea of a wise believer. It answers every case and suits every prayer, and best suits the lowest case and the highest prayer.
4. If you learn never to leave off making use of Christ, and pleading for grace at this throne of grace, till you have no more need of grace.
And that will never be as long as you live. If any man fall into such a dream, that he has got beyond the need of grace, and so of praying, he is one that never rightly knew himself, nor grace, nor Christ, nor praying. The believer knows he stands in need of Christ and grace and therefore prays as long as he lives, as David resolved (Ps 116:2). And when he comes to die and has prayed his last prayer, with Stephen: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59), and gets it answered, then praying, believing and the throne of grace itself, are for him at an end. And everlasting praises begin before the throne of glory, of God and of the Lamb, never to have an end.
“Even so come, Lord Jesus, come quickly. Finish Thy work; fulfil all Thy promises; answer fully all the prayers of all Thy people; put an end to sin and time and trouble and temptation; and hasten the marriage day, that Thy people may ‘be glad and rejoice, and give honour’ to Thee (Rev 19:7). Let the bride be made ready, and let the Bridegroom appear in His wedding garments of glory. O how blessed will the meeting and the marriage be! He married His bride when on earth, in garments dyed in His own precious blood; and the bride receives Him as glorious, even in His bloody raiment. This most precious blood was shed in love to His bride, and for her salvation; and therefore He is amiable to her in that dress. Believers in Christ are contracted to a slain husband, but she shall be married to Him in a far other manifestation of Himself.
“How great is the difference between our dearest Lord Jesus, under His cross and under His crown! And yet, under His cross, He is infinitely amiable to a believer’s heart and eye. Unless the light of that glorious day of His appearance will prevent all mistakes, the nations of them which are saved (as they are called, because they are such a multitude out of all nations (Rev 21:24)) might doubt. But they cannot doubt; but wonder they will, both at Him and at themselves (2 Th 1:10) and say, Is this that blessed Saviour I believed on so feebly; whom I trusted with my soul and its salvation, with so much fainting and with so many fears? Is this He whom I loved so little and so coldly? Is this He whom – all the time I lived on earth, after He had revealed Himself to me – I depended on and lived on by faith, and with so much staggering through unbelief, because I did not know as well the One whom I then believed as now I do?
“And until this blessed day come – and come it will, for it is promised and sworn by Him who cannot lie. It is not far off; for it is above 1600 years since He testified, ‘Surely I come quickly’ (Rev 22:20); it is His last promise to His bride. Let His most excellent name be poured out as ointments and let the savour of His knowledge be made manifest in every place. Let His saving blessed death be remembered, gloried in and fed upon, by all believers: it is the greatest token of His love to them, the only price of their redemption (1 Pet 1:19) and the only food for their souls. Let His justifying righteousness be the only righteousness mentioned before God on earth by believing sinners, as it will be the only righteousness mentioned by glorified praising saints in heaven. Let the throne of grace, reared up by the Father in His Son, and consecrated by the blood of His Son, God manifest in the flesh, be revealed to the darkened world and set up among the blinded nations; and let grace from thence be dispensed to many thousands of perishing sinners.
“Let the glory of God’s free, most free – in every way free – grace in Jesus Christ so shine in the nations, that it may (and when that glory shines, it will) darken, confound and put to shame all the Antichristian darkness (and dreams of false Christs of men’s making, and of works, hire, and merit, under all their names and pretences) and make it all hateful in sinners’ eyes, as it is hurtful to their souls, and as it is hateful in God’s sight. Let the praises of ‘my Lord and my God’, as recovered Thomas calls Him (Jn 20:28) fill heaven and earth and fill the hearts and fill the mouths, and shine in the lives, of all believers on His name; and let His praise fill all the gospel worship in all the churches till the day of the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ (Tts 2:13). And unto these wishes let every believer on, and sincere lover of, Jesus Christ say – and everyone that is such will say – Amen. So let it be; so will it be.”