A30243:1348
Spiritual refining
Spiritual refining: or A treatise of grace and assurance Wherein are handled, the doctrine of assurance. The use of signs in self-examination. How true graces may be distinguished from counterfeit. Several true signs of grace, and many false ones. The nature of grace under divers Scripture notions or titles, as regeneration, the new-creature, the heart of flesh, vocation, sanctification, &c. Many chief questions (occasionally) controverted between the orthodox and the Arminians. As also many cases of conscience. Tending to comfort and confirm saints. Undeceive and convert sinners. Being CXX sermons preached and now published by Anthony Burgess sometime fellow of Emanuel College in Cambridge, and now pastor of the church of Sutton-Coldfield in Warwickshire.Spiritual refining: or A treatise of grace and assurance Wherein are handled, the doctrine of assurance. The use of signs in self-examination. How true graces may be distinguished from counterfeit. Several true signs of grace, and many false ones. The nature of grace under divers Scripture notions or titles, as regeneration, the new-creature, the heart of flesh, vocation, sanctification, &c. Many chief questions (occasionally) controverted between the orthodox and the Arminians. As also many cases of conscience. Tending to comfort and confirm saints. Undeceive and convert sinners. Being CXX sermons preached and now published by Anthony Burgess sometime fellow of Emanuel Colledge in Cambridge, and now pastor of the church of Sutton-Coldfield in Warwickshire.
London: printed by A. Miller for Thomas Underhill, 1652
Title page typeset from the transcription.
A TREATISE OF GRACE and ASSURANCE; Being CXX. SERMONS. › Section 7 › Sermon 50
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
SERMON L.
Of the Hearts being established with Grace, and in what sense it is so.
HEB. 13. 9. For it is a good thing that the heart be established with Grace, not with meats, that have not profited them that have been occupied therein.
IN the former part of this Epistle, Paul (for we take him to be the Author of it) doth like a kind father crack the shell of those Jewish Ceremonies, and give the kernel to believers; he opens the spiritual sense and meaning of all those typical prefigurations, making them shadows only of Christ to come; so that as the blossom falls when the fruit cometh, thus they vanished, when Christ arose: and because they were only shadows, he thereupon argueth their insufficiency for any spiritual effect, making Moses in all his administrations, no more then the Prophets servant with his Masters staff, that could not raise the dead man. But in the later part of the Epistle, he enjoineth many practical and plain Duties; as in this Chapter vers. 7. he exhorteth them to follow the faith of their spiritual Governors and Teachers, which is to be supposed, as Paul in the like case, while they follow Christ. This duty he enforceth from a two-fold Argument.