This convicting yet encouraging excerpt is taken from a 1730 Jonathan Edwards sermon called Honey from the Rock. His text was Deuteronomy 32:13, "...and he suckled him with honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock." Read the entire sermon and background information at the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. Edwards original manuscript can be seen and studied at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Learn hereby not to be discouraged. Are you in a wilderness? Does it seem that there is nothing that can yield you any good: everything seems to conspire for your damnation? Do you see nothing but a wilderness in your own heart? Do you see no help on which side soever you turn? Do you see nothing but pits and rocks?
Don't be discouraged. God is able to bring forth honey out of those rocks. However unlikely it seems to you that you should receive any spiritual and saving good (you are so wicked a creature, you have committed so much sin, and you see so much wilderness in your own hearts); as unlikely than that water or honey or oil should be fetched out of the flinty rock; yet God hath often done that.
Go on therefore seeking diligently and perseveringly for God's salvation. And O, that you could take encouragement from hence to look to Jesus Christ as one sufficient to supply all your wants and relieve your soul, however miserable a condition it is now in!
Earnestly seek that you may be brought to see that you are in such a state thus remote from the good that you need. You must seek to see that you are in a wilderness, that you are thus remote from blessedness, that your state is thus miserable, and that you are thus helpless. And then you will be in the likeliest way to be delivered. Don't flatter yourself that your condition is not so bad that you are able to help yourself, but beg of God that you may have your eyes opened to see that if ever your soul is fed, your food must be fetched out of the flinty rock.
