Category Archives: Looking Unto Jesus

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“But One Word to Speak”

Looking Unto Jesus

I started this year with the aim of reading two pages per day from Isaac Ambrose’s Looking Unto Jesus. That pace would allow me to finish the work in just over eleven months. Well, I finished it in less than one.

It was just too good to put down.

Never before have I read such a warmth in meditation on the beauty of Christ. Looking unto Jesus (Heb. 12:2) has taken on a fresh fullness. A section of Ambrose’s conclusion is worthy of mention and prolonged meditation:

If I had but one word more to speak to the world, it should be this; Oh! let all our spirits be taken up with Christ, let us not busy ourselves too much with toys, or trifles, with ordinary and low things, but look to Jesus.

Surely Christ is enough to fill all our thoughts, desires, hopes, loves, joys, or whatever is within us, or without us; Christ alone comprehends all the circumference of our happiness; Christ is the pearl hid in the large field of God’s word;

Christ is the scope of all the scripture:

all things and persons in the old world were types of him;

all the prophets foretold him,

all God’s love runs through him,

all the gifts and graces of the Spirit flow from him,

the whole eye of God is upon him,

and all his designs both in heaven and earth meet in him.

Oh! how should all hearts be taken with this Christ? Christians! turn your eyes upon the Lord: “Look, and look again unto Jesus.” Why stand ye gazing on the toys of this world, when such a Christ is offered to you in the gospel?

If there be any heaven upon earth, thou wilt find it in the practice and exercise of this gospel duty, in “Looking unto Jesus.”

And all God’s people said, “Amen.”

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Come Then, Let Us Look

Looking Unto Jesus

I continue to make my way, slowly, through Isaac Ambrose’s Looking Unto Jesus. I can only hope the final 650 pages are as good as the first 50. Explosions of joy and praise abound on page after page. Here’s just one example:

In this knowledge of Christ, there is an excellency above all other knowledge in the world; there is nothing more pleasing and comfortable, more animating and enlivening, more ravishing and soul contenting; only Christ is the sun and center of all divine revealed truths, we can preach nothing else as the object of our faith, as the necessary element of your soul’s salvation, which does not some way or other, either meet in Christ, or refer to Christ; only Christ is the whole of man’s happiness, the Sun to enlighten him, the Physician to heal him, the Wall of fire to defend him, the Friend to comfort him, the Pearl to enrich him, the Ark to support him, the Rock to sustain him under the heaviest pressures, “As a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of waters in a dry place and as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land” (Isa. 32:2). Only Christ is that ladder between earth and heaven, the Mediator between God and man, a mystery, which the angels of heaven desire to pry, and peep, and look into (1 Pet. 1:12).

Here is a blessed subject indeed; who would not be glad to pry into it, to be acquainted with it? “This is life eternal, to know God, and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent” (John 17:3).

Come then, let us look; on this Sun of righteousness: we cannot receive harm but good by such a look; indeed by looking long on the natural sun, we may have our eyes dazzled, and our faces blackened; but by looking unto Jesus Christ, we shall have our eyes clearer, and our faces fairer; if “the light of the eye rejoice the heart.” Prov. 15:30, how much more, when we have such a blessed object to look upon? As Christ is more excellent than all the world, so this sight transcends all other sights; it is the epitome of a Christian’s happiness, the quintessence of evangelical duties, “Looking unto Jesus.”

Tolle lege!