Very Close indeed.

“God’s goodness is near us.  It is not a goodness far away, but God follows us with his goodness in whatever situation we are.  He attaches himself to us, he has made himself close, that he might be near us in goodness.  He is a father, and everywhere to maintain us.  He is a husband, and everywhere to help.  He is a friend, and everywhere to comfort and counsel.  His love is a near love.  He has taken upon himself the closest kinds of relationships, so that we may never lack God and the evidences of his love.”
     
---Richard Sibbes

How Jesus and Satan treat the Weak

“See the contrary disposition of Christ and Satan and his instruments.  Satan attacks us when we are weakest.  

But Christ will mend in us all the breaches sin and Satan have made.  He ‘binds up the brokenhearted’ (Isaiah 61:1).  And as a mother treats most tenderly the most diseased and weakest child, so does Christ most mercifully bend down to the weakest people.  

He puts an instinct into the weakest things to rely for support on something stronger than themselves.  So the vine clings to the elm.  The church’s awareness of her weakness makes her willing to lean on her Beloved.”

Richard Sibbes, “The Bruised Reed,” in Works (Edinburgh, 1979), I:46.  Style updated.

Riches

"We are only poor for this reason, that we do not know our riches in Christ.”

“What is the gospel itself but a merciful moderation, in which Christ’s obedience is esteemed ours, and our sins laid upon him, wherein God, from being a judge, becomes our Father, pardoning our sins and accepting our obedience, though feeble and blemished? We are now brought to heaven under the covenant of grace by a way of love and mercy.”

- Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed

They Never Cry for the Mercy of the Judge.

Isaiah 42:1-3 ESV

Behold my servant, whom I uphold,

my chosen, in whom my soul delights;

I have put my Spirit upon him;

he will bring forth justice to the nations.

He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice,

or make it heard in the street;

a bruised reed he will not break,

and a faintly burning wick he will not quench;

he will faithfully bring forth justice.

Richard Sibbes - The Bruised Reed

THE GOOD EFFECTS OF BRUISING

This bruising is required before conversion that so the Spirit may make way for himself into the heart by levelling all proud, high thoughts, and that we may understand ourselves to be what indeed we are by nature. We love to wander from ourselves and to be strangers at home, till God bruises us by one cross or other, and then we `begin to think', and come home to ourselves with the prodigal (Luke 15:17).

It is a very hard thing to bring a dull and an evasive heart to cry with feeling for mercy. Our hearts, like criminals, until they be beaten from all evasions, never cry for the mercy of the judge.

Again, this bruising makes us set a high price upon Christ. Then the gospel becomes the gospel indeed; then the fig leaves of morality will do us no good. And it makes us more thankful, and, from thankfulness, more fruitful in our lives; for what makes many so cold and barren, but that bruising for sin never endeared God's grace to them?