Reading Iain Murray’s The Puritan Hope has certainly helped to stir up my estimation of the value and necessity of hope for God’s people, both individually and corporately, which I pray come through while studying the helmet of salvation. In the introduction, Murray provides the following quotation from J. H. Thornwell regarding the need for the church to be awakened to the hope of glory still set before us. I wanted very much to work it into Sunday’s sermon; however, no placement seemed right. But since it is too good not to share in some form, I present it here.

If the church could be aroused to a deeper sense of the glories that awaits her, she would enter with warmer spirit into the struggles that are before her. Hope would inspire ardour. She would even now arise from the dust, and like the eagle, plume her pinions for loftier flights than she has yet taken. What she wants, and what every individual Christian wants, is faith– faith in her sublime vocation, in her Divine resources, in the presence and efficacy of the Spirit that dwells in her– faith in the truth, faith in Jesus, and faith in God. With such a faith there would be no need to speculate about the future. That would speedily reveal itself. It is our unfaithfulness, our negligence and unbelief, our low and carnal aims, that retard the chariot of the Redeemer. The Bridegroom cannot come until the Bride has made herself ready. Let the Church be in earnest after greater holiness in her own members, and in faith and love undertake the conquest of the world, and she will soon settle the question whether her resources are competent to change the face of the earth.

Pp. xxii-xxiii