Once God was not in all our thoughts, but now our thoughts are sanctified and sweetened by a sense of his presence—and we find our greatest joy in feeling that he is all around us and within us—that in him we live and move and have our being. Blessed is the common salvation which has brought us near to God by the blood of Jesus and made us children and heirs of the Most High! We have also been saved from the gloom of heart which once hung over us because we were conscious of being under God’s displeasure. We thought that we could never be forgiven, but we are forgiven. We concluded that our heavenly Father would never accept us, but we are accepted in the Beloved. We wrote ourselves down among the condemned, but now we are justified by faith which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. The darkness has passed and the true light shines into the spirits of the faithful. Peace with God is a sweet part of the common salvation. Now we are delivered, also, from the love of sin. We cannot find pleasure in it as we once did. We sin, but it costs us dearly. When we do so, we lament it with our whole soul. It was our natural way to run the downward road, but now when our feet tread that path, it is as wanderers who are out of their way.1
Charles H. Spurgeon
3 Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.