the great love and mercy of our God — C.H. Spurgeon

“If it comes to a pitched battle between sin and Grace, you shall not be so bad as God shall be good. I will prove it to you. You can only sin as a man, but God can forgive as a God! You sin as a finite creature, but the Lord forgives as the infinite Creator…
The riches of the Grace of God are above all limit… the grace of God surpasses all you know, all you see and all you think…
 We cannot allow you to apply the word “great” to your sin, we need to reserve it for the mercy of God. We must monopolize the word; for all greatness dwells in the love and mercy of our God. However much you may have wandered, however black you may be, however defiled, God delights in mercy: it is the joy of his heart to pass by transgression and sin through the precious blood of Christ. Do not do my Lord so great a dishonor as to measure your sin and affirm that it outstrips his mercy. It cannot be! You know nothing about the glorious nature of my Lord. A child may fill its little cup out of the great sea, but the sea never misses it. Your sin is like that cup, and you may fill it to the brim with mercy, but the ocean of love will never miss all that you can take from it. Come, take all that you can take, and none shall question you. Wash out your crimson stains in this pure flood, and it shall remain as pure as at the first. I would not speak lightly of your sin: it is an exceeding great and grievous thing: but still I do say over again that as compared with the infinite mercy of God it is but as a shadow to the sun, or a grain of sand to the full ocean at its flood.”

— C.H. Spurgeon

The freer gospel, the more sanctifying is the gospel — Thomas Chalmers

"The freer gospel, the more sanctifying is the gospel; and the more it is received as a doctrine of grace, the more will it be felt as a doctrine according to godliness…
Salvation by grace—salvation by free grace—salvation not of works, but according to the mercy of God, salvation on such a footing is not more indispensable to the deliverance of our persons from the hand of justice than it is to the deliverance of our hearts from the chill and the weight of ungodliness. Retain a single shred or fragment of legality with the gospel, and you raise a topic of distrust between man and God. You take away from the power of the gospel to melt and to conciliate. For this purpose the freer it is the better it is. That very peculiarity which so many dread as the germ of Antinomianism, is, in fact, the germ of a new spirit and a new inclination against it. Along with the lights of a free gospel does there enter the love of the gospel, which, in proportion as you impair the freeness, you are sure to chase away. And never does the sinner find within himself so mighty a moral transformation as when, under the belief that he is saved by grace, he feels constrained thereby to offer his heart a devoted thing, and to deny ungodliness."

 — Thomas Chalmers. The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. The World’s Great Sermons, Volume 4: L. Beecher to Bushnell (G. Kleiser, Ed.) (75–76).

spiritual strengthening ― B.B. Warfield

“The spiritual strengthening is contingent on, or let us rather say, is dependent on the abiding presence of Christ in their hearts. The indwelling Christ is the source of the Christian's spiritual strength...

Your strength is grounded in the indwelling Christ, wrought by the Spirit by means of faith. Thus we have laid before us the sources of the Christian's strength. It is rooted in Christ, the Christ within us, abiding there by virtue of the Spirit's action quickening and upholding faith in us. And only as by the Spirit our faith is kept firm and clear, will Christ abide in us, and will we accordingly be strong in the inner man (Ephesians 3:16:19)…

Here then is an intermediate link between the strengthening by the Spirit and the enlargement of our spiritual understanding. It is "love." The proximate effect of the Spirit's work in empowering the inner man with might is not knowledge but love; and the proximate cause of our enlarged spiritual apprehension is not the strengthening of our inner man, but love. The Spirit does not immediately work this enlargement of mind in us; He immediately works love, and only through working this love, enlarges our apprehension (Ephesians 3:16:19). The Holy Ghost "sheds love abroad in our hearts." Love is the great enlarger. It is love which stretches the intellect. He who is not filled with love is necessarily small, withered, shrivelled in his outlook on life and things. And conversely he who is filled with love is large and copious in his apprehensions. Only he can apprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth of things. The order of things in spiritual strengthening is therefore: (1) the working by the Spirit of a true faith in the heart, and the cherishing by the Spirit of this faith in a constant flame; (2) the abiding of Christ by this faith in the heart; (3) the shedding abroad of love in the soul and its firm rooting in the heart; (4) the enlargement of the spiritual apprehension to know the unknowable greatness of the things of Christ.”

― B.B. Warfield