A30243:467
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 2 › Sermon 18
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.
In the next place, Consider the effects by which this love to the godly discovers it self.1
- 1III. The Effect, of this love. 1. Not to be ashamed to own them as Brethren in persecution.
And 1. By not being ashamed to own them as Brethren, and join with them in the times of persecution. The Church of God hath had many Swallow-friends that will stay with her no longer then Summer; our Saviour foreseeing this proneness to Apostasy, antidoteth against it, He that is ashamed of me in the midst of a crooked generation, of him my Father also will be ashamed before the Angels. The world that is full of scorns and reproaches, The holy Brethren, The holy Sisters, now men are through their pride and corruption ashamed of such ways. This argueth thou hast no love to them. It was observed by the Heathens how the Primitive Christians loved one another, Ecce quam se mutuò diligunt & fratres see vocant! Now then as it is noted of God, Heb. 11. that he was not ashamed to be the God of believers; thus also may we observe of thee, thou art not ashamed to be called one of the believers; Thy speech, conversation, whole deportment shall betray thee to be one that followeth Christ. It's observed by some, That there were but few hypocrites comparatively in the first Plantation of the Churches by Christ and his Apostles, because there was such certain and present danger to all those that embraced their way, and no advantage at all to carnal considerations, yet for all that some hypocrites there were. It was a weakness in Nicodemus, who came to Jesus by night, he dared not publicly own him, because of the Jews. Examine therefore thy self, if thou lovest the godly, then this will appear when godliness is the only scorned, reproached and persecuted way that is. It is strange to observe how godliness in the power of it doth diminish respect in the world, Bonus vir Caius & prudens, nisi quod Christianus, A learned man, a wise man, a good man, but only too precise, too puritanical, inclining too much to strictness. If it were an Heathen that derideth all Christianity that saith thus, it would be no wonder; but for a Christian, who by his profession is engaged to all this practice of holiness, it is unsufferable; if we may have too much godliness, then too much of heaven and happiness.