The birth of Christ was notified to the Jewish shepherds by an angel, to the Gentile philosophers by a star: to both God spoke in their own language, and in the way they were best acquainted with.
-Matthew Henry on Matt. 2
Christ can meet you in unexpected places, such as where you currently are. In the field, in the stars, in the womb, on the back of a horse, in the fishing boat, in the tax booth, in a movie…even on a blog.
[Note] that they were scholars. They dealt in arts, curious arts; good scholars should be good Christians, and then they complete their learning when they learn Christ.
-Matthew Henry on the Wise Men of Matthew 2.
I.e. Learning is not complete until it terminates in Christ.
Matthew Henry gives some great suggestions for how to start off the day in prayer for your work and family. Quotes are taken from Daily Communion with God: How to Make the Most of Each Day.
1) Pray for your family:
We have families to look after, it may be, and to provide for, and are in care to do well for them; let us then every morning by prayer commit them to God, put them under the conduct and government of his grace, and then we effectually put them under the care and protection of his providence. Holy Job rose up early in the morning to offer burnt-offerings for his children, and we should do so to offer up prayers and supplications for them, according to the number of them all (Job 1:5) (Kindle Loc. 636).
2) Pray for your work
a) for wisdom, for success, for God’s blessing and presence:
We are going about the business of our callings perhaps, let us look up to God in the first place for wisdom and grace to manage them well, in the fear of God, and to abide with him in them; and then we may in faith beg of him to prosper and succeed us in them, to strengthen us for the services of them, to support us under the fatigues of them, to direct the designs of them, and to give us comfort in the gains of them. We have journeys to go, it may be, let us look up to God for his presence with us, and go no whither, where we cannot in faith beg of God to go with us (Loc. 640).
b) for skill and strength:
We have a prospect perhaps of opportunities of doing or getting good, let us look up to God for a heart to every price in our hands, for skill, and will, and courage to improve it, that it may not be a price in the hand of a fool (Loc. 645).
c) for deliverance from temptations particular to that day:
Every day has its temptations too, some perhaps we foresee, but there may be many more that we think not of, and are therefore concerned to be earnest with God, that we may not be led into any temptation, but guarded against every one; that whatever company we come into, we may have wisdom to do good, and no hurt to them; and to get good, and no hurt by them (Loc. 646).
d) for God’s general grace to carry us through the difficulties of the day:
We know not what a day may bring forth; little think in the morning what tidings we may hear, and what events may befall us before night, and should therefore beg of God, grace to carry us through the duties and difficulties which we do not foresee, as well as those which we do; that in order to our standing complete in all the will of God, as the day is, so the strength may be (Loc. 650).
My father was a Christian who believed in prayer but I knew and understood little of his praying until after my own conversion at the age of seventeen. From that time as I listened to my father’s petitions I concurred with them all – all, that is, except one, and this one had to do with a subject which was so much a part of his praying that I could not miss the divergence in our thought. Our difference concerned the extent to which the success of the kingdom of Christ is to be expected in the earth. My father would pray for its universal spread and global triumph, for the day when ‘nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’, and when great multitudes in all lands will be found numbered among the travail of Christ’s soul…
-Iain Murray, The Puritan Hope, p. xv
I was deeply convicted by this paragraph. My prayer life, public and private, has already changed as a result of it.
The fact of the matter is that we too often pray by sight, basing all petitions on what we see, rather than laying ahold of the promises of God. Our pessimism leads us to forget the promises of Christ that his kingdom will not only endure, but flourish. Can you imagine that Americans, to whom the gospel traveled so far to reach, are pessimistic about God’s ability to lengthen its arm?
In the context of the latest headlines, I remember Abraham, who pleaded with God for Sodom, for the sake of ten righteous men who might be there. There weren’t ten righteous to be found. But today we surely know that there is one righteous Man for whose sake we can plead. We can plead the name of Jesus, and plead the cause of Jesus, and plead the love of Jesus, and plead the death and resurrection of Jesus. Should we not be more optimistic than Abraham, who had only seen the shadow of Christ’s righteousness?
Plead with God that his kingdom would increase – not that he would crush his enemies, but that he would win his enemies; that he would spare them for the sake of his righteous Son, and for the sake of his kingdom. That he would see the travail of his soul and be satisfied to increase the number of his kingdom and family.
Matthew Henry once wrote, based on Zechariah 12:10, that when God wants to move in this world, he sets his people to praying. Surely this is the sort of prayer he inspires – the type of prayer Calvin had in mind when he wrote in the Institutes, that “we dig up by prayer the treasures that were pointed out by the Lord’s Gospel, and which our faith has gazed upon.”
Note, When God intends great mercy for his people the first thing he does is to set them a praying…
-Matthew Henry, Commentary on Zechariah 12:9-14
Romans 8:2 has been interpreted in various ways, the primary issue being the term, ‘law.’ The interpretations of Herman Ridderbos and Matthew Henry seem to make the best sense of the passage (to me):
Then the law that was given unto life becomes unto death, then Christ, in order to be able to give the law its rightful place in the life of his own…must first become the end of the law unto righteousness to everyone who believes…and those who are to belong to God and live for him must first die to the law in Christ an through his body (on the cross)…Here a distinction must clearly be made, therefore, between law and law, between the law as it functions before and outside Christ and the law whose requirement is fulfilled in those who walk after the Spirit (Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology, p. 155).
Ridderbos says we distinguish the law (as law and law) depending upon the position of the one who is relating to the law – whether he be in Christ or not. Matthew Henry (in his commentary on the whole Bible) adds:
The law could not do it, Rom 8:3. It could neither justify nor sanctify, neither free us from the guilt nor from the power of sin, having not the promises either of pardon or grace. The law made nothing perfect: It was weak. Some attempt the law made towards these blessed ends, but, alas! it was weak, it could not accomplish them: yet that weakness was not through any defect in the law, but through the flesh, through the corruption of human nature, by which we became incapable either of being justified or sanctified by the law. We had become unable to keep the law, and, in case of failure, the law, as a covenant of works, made no provision, and so left us as it found us. Or understand it of the ceremonial law; that was a plaster not wide enough for the wound, it could never take away sin, Heb 10:4. (2.) The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus does it, Rom 8:2. The covenant of grace made with us in Christ is a treasury of merit and grace, and thence we receive pardon and a new nature, are freed from the law of sin and death, that is, both from the guilt and power of sin – from the curse of the law, and the dominion of the flesh. We are under another covenant, another master, another husband, under the law of the Spirit, the law that gives the Spirit, spiritual life to qualify us for eternal. The foundation of this freedom is laid in Christ’s undertaking for us, of which he speaks Rom 8:3, God sending his own Son. Observe, When the law failed, God provided another method. Christ comes to do that which the law could not do.
Henry seems to see the ‘law of the Spirit of life’ as the law in relation to those in the Covenant of Grace and the ‘law of sin and death’ as the same law (but) in relation to those under the covenant of works.
To summarize, the Law of God, which is summarized in the 10 Commandments, and further summarized, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart…’ and ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ can be to you either a ‘law of sin and death’ or ‘the law of the Spirit of life.’ Which of the two it is for you depends upon your relationship to Christ. If you are outside of Christ you are under the law as a covenant of works (as you are ‘in Adam’). It demands from you perfect obedience and sets forth life and death as the consequences of that obedience – life for obedience, death for disobedience. If this is your position, the law will do nothing but bring forth sin and death, for it is rendered powerless on account of your sinful nature, which does not, and indeed cannot, keep it.
However, your relation to the law utterly changes once you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as your Substitute and Savior. He fulfills the law in your behalf. He earns life through his keeping of the law and yet takes sin and death upon himself. He pleads guilty and takes condemnation upon himself that all those in him might be acquitted, in order that your relationship to God, and relation to the law, might change. In Christ the law is fulfilled as a covenant of works, and now becomes ‘the law of the Spirit of life.’
We are freed from the moral law: freed from it, first, as a covenant, say our divines. It would save a great deal of trouble to say we are freed from the law as that from which life might be expected on the condition that due obedience was rendered (Samuel Bolton, The True Bounds of Christian Freedom, p. 28).
As a result, the Christian looks at the law in a different light:
He looks not to it for life; he rests not in it for hope; he renounces it as a saving covenant, and under the influence of another and a higher obligation- his marriage to Christ- he brings forth fruit unto God. (Ocatavius Winslow)
The law sends us to the gospel for our justification; the gospel sends us to the law to frame our way of life (Samuel Bolton).
The ‘righteous requirement of the law’ begins to be fulfilled in us, for we now delight in the law, not as a means of gaining favor with God, but as a means of living out the life of Christ, which, indeed, he is living out in us by the Spirit. We are living now utterly in light of the gospel. The indicative comes before the imperative. We are free, in Christ, from the law as a covenant. It can no longer bring death.
Therefore there are only two options for us:
Either we obey in order to be accepted (in which place we are under the covenant of works, and condemned). Or we are accepted, and obey wholly in the light of this:
The Law commands and makes us know
What duties to our God we owe
But ’tis the Gospel must reveal
Where lies our strength to do His will (Isaac Watts)
Ralph Erskine summarizes it perfectly:
The law says, Do, and life you’ll win;
But grace says, Live, for all is done.
So which is the law to you – the law of sin and death or the law of the Spirit of life? Is it a Covenant of Works or a Covenant of Grace? It all depends on your relationship to Christ. There could therefore be no more important issue – are you in or outside of Christ?
