A30243:1356
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.
2. That Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever. Christ that helped his servants in former times, will still help them. Christ is still the same, ⟨p. 310⟩though we be not those worthies that went before us: an excellent point of comfort.
In the next place he dehorts from the contrary sin. Be not carried about with divers and strange Doctrines; carried about, as light, empty chaff is with every wind; divers, that is, different Doctrines one with another, for all errors disagree among themselves, as well as with the truth; strange Doctrines, because brought in against the sense and meaning of the Scripture: now to make this Dehortation prevalent, he declareth that grace in the heart is far better then any learning in the head, by the Proposition in the Text, it is good, the positive is for the comparative, it is better to establish, or have the heart established (the word is in the middle voice) by grace, that is, the inward works and gifts of Gods sanctifying Spirit, then with meats, that is, dispute and controversies about the difference of meats: you know how that Question troubled the Church of God in her infancy. Some indeed expound meats of the Legal Sacrifices, for the Jews thought themselves made more holy by eating thereof. Insomuch that some are brought in pleading this at the day of Judgement, Have we not eat in thy presence? Others relate it to those banquets, and dainty feastings, the Nicolaitans entertained their Disciples with: but the first exposition is to be preferred. By grace also some understand the Doctrine of faith; others the grace of the Gospel, and the sense of it in our hearts. But the phrase, Establish the heart with grace, doth carry it for some gift of God wrought in the soul, confirming and settling it in the truths and commandments of God, by saith and obedience, which we call sanctifying grace; so that as I have handled the work of godliness, under the notions of regeneration and a New Creature; so I shall out of this Text speak of it, under that usual and frequent name of grace, the work of grace in a mans heart; but there is one profitable and necessary Doctrine lieth in the way, before we enter into the bowels of that Point.