The Tender Grapes

Childlike faith in the person of Jesus is of vital importance.  The Precious Blood of the Lamb of God puts our sins to death and our fears to rest. Leave all other trusts, trust only to Jesus Himself, give up your self-righteousness, leave your vain religiousness, forsake all ways and modes of self-salvation, come to the Cross, trust entirely to Christ Jesus' sin-forgiving Blood.  Faith in God Incarnate's Blood is the most important matter which is vital to your soul's eternal interests.  Faith, the actual coming to Jesus by believing on His name and blood, is the vital point to press upon men's minds.  

Humbly ask the Lord Jesus daily to make you sensitive to His desires and will.  Jesus was peculiarly sensitive when He came into any contact with sin, and so should we.  Sin is the source of wretchedness and misery.  Sin pains the heart of the born again Christian.  As we grow in grace, we become delicately sensitive to every form of sin.  As a man traversing a forest filled with briars and thorns whose flesh is pricked and torn; we should have a painful sensitiveness to evil of sin as we travel through this world.  Have a gracious tenderness toward the sorrow of others.  The tender grape gives a good smell.  Regenerate souls have sensitive minds toward words wrongly spoken, evil thoughts, and unclean desires.  The renewed mind dreads the horror of sin and shudders inwardly at the very thought of sin.

Sin is a deadly poison; a saved man with the mind of Christ abhors the very odor of sin. We should ask the Holy Spirit to cultivate within us a living, sensitive, warm, thankful, pure, sincere, tender, gracious heart.  The saved soul is sensitive to Eternity, to divine love, to gratitude, to grieving the Holy Spirit.  We should have pity toward others, a sensitive conscience, and be sensitive toward the things of God, to the summons and warnings of the Holy Spirit, to the word and will of God. I am nothing, but Christ Jesus is everything; a mass of sin in myself, but accepted in the Beloved for Jesus' sake.  

O Holy Spirit, please move in my heart and quicken Thou me.  Seek the words of God and the inward working of the Holy Spirit.  Know the value of men's souls, become tender and sensitive to the faintest motions of the Holy Spirit.  Be a tree planted and rooted deeply in Jesus' love and bearing fruit through the Spirit, not just a religious leaf tossed to and fro in the wind. Believe on Jesus, and then behave in the Spirit. Ask God for a sensitive heart that can be moved to shame for sinning, to repentance, to abhorring sin, to abstaining from the appearance of evil.  Always be desiring, seeking, panting, and longing after God.  The teachable heart is willing to be led, changed, governed by the divine will of God.  Inward purity, sincere piety, and outward godliness is the fruit of the Spirit. We must remain sensitive to the Holy Spirit, or we shall lose the delights of communion with Him.

We should be like sensitive plants that close up at the touch of sin, and open out in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Be sensitive to receive the impressions of the Holy Spirit, so that on your heart will be stamped the mind and will of Christ.  New converts have fervor, simplicity, sincerity, and a childlike confidence in the Lamb of God.  Forgetting Christ takes away the strength of our Christianity.  Through the help of the Holy Spirit, seek close and vital union with Christ Jesus, live upon Him daily and continually.  Love God with all your heart, trust to His Son with all your confidence, give to Him all the glory due unto His name.  Lord Jesus, please show me what You would have me do today.  Christ is All!  Your gratitude should compel you to do everything to the glory of Jesus.  We need a tender spiritual sensitiveness that shrinks with horror at the presence of evil.  We need to maintain personal, actual communion with the Holy Spirit. Be sensitive to the divine workings of the Holy Spirit in your heart and mind.  

True Christianity deals directly with the person of the living Redeemer.  Do all in word and deed in the name of the Lord Jesus, drawing all your spiritual energy from Him.  Real grace results in true godliness.  Christianity is most effective and useful when it is most full of Christ Jesus.  We are most practical and useful when we are nearest to Jesus. Inward working faith from the Holy Spirit is the energy within us that perfects our walk with God.  Be thankful, be gracious, love one another, listen closely to the words of God, do as the Spirit bids you, and have faith in Jesus. Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.