Determining to “walk in love” with our children also frees us from the fear that they may someday fail in life.  And they will fail, no matter how perfect we are, because they are human.  And we will fail, too, because we are fallen.  God does not ask us to be in perfect control of our children and their lives.  He only asks us to emulate His model of daily, lived love for His own disciples.

–from The Mom Walk by Sally Clarkson

To make what Spurgeon has written a little easier to understand and follow I’m going to break the devotion down and number the points. Hopefully this will make what he has to say a little easier to understand and apply. (Note: Again, Spurgeon does not number his points. I am taking liberties and doing this for the sake of clarity. This is exactly what my morning journal entry looked like.)

What is Everlasting consolation? (2 Thessalonians 2:16)

1.  It includes a sense of pardon from sin.  A Christian has received in his heart the witness of the Spirit that his iniquities are “blotted out…as a cloud” and his transgressions “as a thick cloud” (Isa. 44:22).

2.  The Lord gives His people an abiding sense of acceptance in Christ.  The Christian knows that God looks upon him as standing in union with Jesus.  (In sickness and even in death we have this consolation.)

3.  The Christian has a conviction of his security.  God has promised to save those who trust in Christ.

“The Christian does trust in Christ.  He believes that God will be as good as His Word and will save him.  He believes that he is safe by virtue of his being bound up with the person and work of Jesus.”

-Charles H. Spurgeon

I have blotted out your transgressions like a cloud and your sins like mist; return to me, for I have redeemed you. –Isaiah 45:22

If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed.  And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

                                           –John 8:31-32, 36

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It is as if the Holy Spirit reproduces Jesus’ death and resurrection in our lives when we believe in Christ.  We become so unresponsive to the pressures, demands and attractions of our previous, sinful way of life, that Paul can say we are “dead” to those influences, because we have died with Christ (Rom. 7:6; Gal. 2:20; 5:24; 6:14; Col. 2:20).  On the other hand, we find ourselves wanting to serve God much more, and able to serve him with greater power and success, so much so that Paul says we are “alive” to God, because we have been raised up with Christ:  “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4).  “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom.  6:11; see also 1 Peter 1:3; 2:24).  Because we died and rose with Christ, we have power to overcome personal sin more and more (Rom. 6:12-14, 19); we have come to “fullness of life” in Christ (Col.  2:10-13); in fact, we have become a “new creation in him (2 Cor. 5:17, with vv. 14-15), and should therefore set our minds on things that are above, where Christ is (Col. 3:1-3).

And

“He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit” (John 15:5).  It is not only true that we are in Christ; he is also in us, to give us power to live the Christian life.  “I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

And

“Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ,” writes Paul (1 Cor.  11:1).   John reminds us, “He who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked” (1 John 2:6).  So union with Christ implies that we should imitate Christ.  Our lives ought so to reflect what his life was like that we bring honor to him in everything we do (Phil. 1:20). Thus, the New Testament pictures the Christian life as one of striving to imitate Christ in all our actions. (sic)… in imitating him we are becoming more and more like him:  when we act like Christ we become like Christ.  We grow up into maturity in Christ (Eph. 4:13, 15) as we are “being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18).  The final result is that we shall become perfectly like Christ, for God has predestined us “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29; 1 Cor. 15:49), and “When he appears, we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2).  When this happens, Christ will be fully glorified in us (2 Thess.  1:10-12; John 17:10).

– all of the above can be found in Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology chapter 43 entitled Union With Christ.

One of the central ways we give our children the gift of faith is to base everything we do on the Word of God. –Sally Clarkson, The Ministry of Motherhood

There will likely be a time in our Christian journeys when, like Jacob, we will wrestle with God all night long…But there must eventually come a dawn when we say, “Ok, God, You win…Not my will but Thine be done.  –Gary Thomas

Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing yet had been done.
                                 -C.S. Lewis

It is the mark of a true saint that his sorrows remind him of his sins, and his sorrow for sin drives him to his God.

                                                             -Charles H. Spurgeon