Christian Theology - Media Sabda Org

and to obey; so does he give us power to believe; and to us the use or
exercise of the power belongs. He does not discern, repent, hope, love, or
obey for us, no more than he believes for us. By using the grace he gives,
we discern, repent, hope, believe, love, and obey. Without the grace we
can do nothing; without the careful use of the grace, the grace profits us
nothing. To every prescribed duty, God furnishes the requisite grace. The
help is ever at hand, but we are not workers together with him; hence we
are, in general, receiving the grace of God in vain; and, to excuse our
negligence, indolence, and infidelity, we cry out, "We can do nothing!"
"We have no strength!" "We can no more believe than we can make a
world!" Our adversary knows well how to take advantage of such sayings,
and, indeed, they are issues of his own temptations; therefore it is his
business to persuade us that these are all incontrovertible truths! How
strange, how disgraceful is it, that the words of the devil, and the wicked
words of a lying world, and the antinomian maxims of fallen churches or
fallen Christians should be implicitly believed, while the words of the
living God are not credited! He commands us to believe; reproaches us
for our unbelief; tells us that if we believe not, we shall not be
established; asserts that he who believes not, has made God a liar;
proclaims salvation by faith; and finishes the confutation of our infidel
speeches with, "He that believeth not shall be damned." Now, all this
supposes, that he gives us the strength, and that we do not use it. Whose
word so credible as the word of God? and whose word has less credence?
Many are volunteers in faith, where there is no promise,—for they can
believe that we cannot be saved from all sin in this life,—that we shall be
saved in the article of death, and that there is a purgatorial middle state,
where we may be cleansed, by penal fire, from vices that the blood of
Jesus either could not or did not purge, and that the almighty Spirit of
judgment and burning did not, or could not consume: and where there are
exceeding great and precious promises, which in God are yea, and in
Christ amen, they can scarcely credit any thing! How abominable is this
conduct! How insulting to God! How destructive to the soul! No wonder
that many of our old and best writers have declaimed so much against
this, calling unbelief "the damning sin," by way of eminence; and that
which binds all other sins upon the soul. Men may treat the word of God