A39669:2505
The Method of Grace
The method of grace, in bringing home the eternal redemption contrived by the Father, and accomplished by the Son through the effectual application of the spirit unto God's elect, being the second part of Gospel redemption : wherein the great mystery of our union and communion with Christ is opened and applied, unbelievers invited, false pretenders convicted, every mans claim to Christ examined, and the misery of Christless persons discovered and bewailed / by John Flavell ...The method of grace, in bringing home the eternal redemption contrived by the Father, and accomplished by the Son through the effectual application of the spirit unto God's elect, being the second part of Gospel redemption : wherein the great mysterie of our union and communion with Christ is opened and applied, unbelievers invited, false pretenders convicted, every mans claim to Christ examined, and the misery of Christless persons discovered and bewailed / by John Flavell ...
London: printed by M. White for Francis Tyton, 1681
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.
Viz. 1. The life of Justification. 2. The life of Sanctification.
Spiritual death in opposition to the life of Justification is nothing else but the guilt of sin, bringing us under the sentence of death. Spiritual death in opposition to the life of sanctification is the pollution or dominion of sin. In both these fen ses unregenerate men are dead men but: it is the last which I am properly concerned to speak to in this place, and therefore
Secondly, Let us briefly consider what this spiritual death is, which as before was hinted is the absence of the quickening 1spirit of Christ from the soul of any man. That soul is a dead soul into which the spirit of Christ is not infused in the work of regeneration, and all its works are dead works, as ⟨p. 531⟩they are called, Heb. 9. 14. For look how it is with the damned, they live, they have sense and motion, and an immortality in all these, yet because they are eternally separated from God, the life which they live, deserves not the name of life, but is every where in scripture styled death: So the unregenerate, they are naturally alive: they eat, and drink, they buy, and sell, they talk, and laugh, they rejoice in the creatures; and many of them spend their days in pleasures, and then go down to the grave. This is the life they live, but yet the scripture rather calls it death than life, because though they live, yet it is without God in the world, Eph. 2. 12. Though they live, yet it is a life alienated from the life of God,