Acts 7:60

REFLECTIONS

Reader! let you and I bless God the Spirit, for this most precious sermon of his servant Stephen. Surely God the Holy Ghost would not have caused it to have been so fully recorded, (since we have already the whole subject contained in it, at large in the scriptures before written), had not this Almighty Teacher in the Church intended from it some sweet instructions, and which are here very particularly set forth. It is our mercy therefore to attend to them, and bless the Lord for his grace in giving them. And what a light is thrown upon the history of Moses, by Stephen's sermon, in that part of it (which without this information we should not have known), of his early apprehension, that the Lord would use him, as an instrument, for the delivery of his brethren? And what a blessed proof we draw from Stephen's sermon, in addition to the other relations we have in Scripture, that it was the Lord Jesus, which spake to Moses from the bush. Reader! these are sweet things. May you and I learn to prize them very highly; and bless God the Holy Ghost, in having given them to us, by his servant Stephen.

Precious Lord Jesus! be thou eternally loved, and praised, for the grace manifested to thy dying martyr, in such a season of peculiar trial. Oh! let thine whole Church, from age to age, be refreshed in the sweet assurance, such a memorable instance affords, of thy continual presence with thy people. May my soul, and the souls of all thy redeemed, learn from it, how we are to commit our departing spirits into thine Almighty hand, in the hour of death, as unto a faithful Creator!