SPEAKER_00: Good morning, First Baptist Wimberly.
SPEAKER_00: This is Mike Gibbons.
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Friday.
SPEAKER_00: We are back in Nehemiah this Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: I would encourage you to prepare yourself for worship in the Word by reading through all of Nehemiah 10 before Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: As I did that this week, I went back to Nehemiah 9 just to review and remind myself of the context and was captured by a phrase in Nehemiah 9:17.
SPEAKER_00: Let me read that verse.
SPEAKER_00: They refused to obey and were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them.
SPEAKER_00: But they stiffened their neck and appointed the leader to return to their slavery in Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and did not forsake them.
SPEAKER_00: Here is the phrase, but you are a God ready to forgive.
SPEAKER_00: Now I'm recording this at 9 a.m.
SPEAKER_00: on Thursday.
SPEAKER_00: The day has barely started, and I need that forgiveness already.
SPEAKER_00: So this really captured my attention.
SPEAKER_00: I went to the Prince of Preachers, Charles Spurgeon, to see if he had any commentary on that verse.
SPEAKER_00: Now he obviously used the King James Version, and in that translation, this phrase reads as Thou art a God ready to pardon.
SPEAKER_00: But listen to what Spurgeon says.
SPEAKER_00: Quote, we have this book of holy scripture written by the pen of the Holy Spirit, which tells us over and over again that the God whom we have offended is a God ready to pardon, a God whose mercy endureth forever.
SPEAKER_00: I would call your attention to the expression a God ready to pardon.
SPEAKER_00: Not a God who may possibly pardon, neither a God who, upon strong persuasion and earnest pleadings may at length be induced to forgive.
SPEAKER_00: Not one who, perchance, at some remote period, after we have undergone a long purgation, may manifest a mercy which is now in the background, but a God ready to pardon, willing and more than willing, ready, standing prepared, or to use another scriptural expression, waiting to be gracious.
SPEAKER_00: Not only are all things ready, but God Himself is ready, his own heart and hand already to bestow pardon upon the guilty ones who come before him.
SPEAKER_00: There is forgiveness with him that he may be feared.
SPEAKER_00: May the Holy Spirit lead us to feel the power of his mercy.