A92141:1113
Influences of the life of grace
Influences of the life of grace. Or, A practical treatise concerning the way, manner, and means of having and improving of spiritual dispositions, and quickening influences from Christ the resurrection and the life. By Samuel Rutherfurd, Professor of Divinity in the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.Influences of the life of grace. Or, A practical treatise concerning the way, manner, and means of having and improving of spiritual dispositions, and quickning influences from Christ the resurrection and the life. By Samuel Rutherfurd, Professor of Divinity in the Vniversity of St. Andrews in Scotland.
London: printed by T.C. for Andrew Crook, 1659
Title page typeset from the transcription.
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.
1. His own grace is his own grace, and he is free of all debt and obligation to give gracious influences to Angels or men; as also grace to use the measure of grace given, is rather to be sought then a large measure.
2. There is in love-sickness for Christ a weakness of the soul,1 and a fainting for the want of Christ; and this may come from the apprehended curse and anger of God for sin, which is a disease after conversion that the child of God may be sick of. So David, Psal. 6. 1. Lord rebuke me not in thine anger. Psal. 38. 2. Thine arrows stick fast in me, thine hand presseth me sore. 3. There is no soundness in my flesh because of thine anger, neither is there any rest in my bones because of my sin. 4. For mine iniquities are gone over mine head: as a heavy burden they are too heavy for me. ⟨p. 319⟩Psalm 90. 7. We are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath we are troubled; thou hast set our iniquities before thee; our secret sins in the light of thy countenance. Therefore that Rom. 8. 14. For ye have not received the Spirit of bondage again to fear, is all one with this, we ought not to receive it, or we have not received the habit, but are and may be under the temptation and actual assaults of that spirit of law-bondage. Now in this sickness in the renewed soul, this is wrong, that the conscience goes back to its old prison,2 and comes again under the spirit of bondage: for Christ having made our peace by the blood of atonement on the Cross, there is ground of peace with God, as touching the Law-debt of sin; otherwise we fail against the sufficiency of the paid ransom: but as touching the blot of sin, we are never to have peace that way, and so it is good that the soul is troubled that way; and that the world is whole and needs not the Physician Christ, is the death of the world and a worse disease.