A92141:1203
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.
CHAP. XIII.
Q. 13. What the unrenewed and the renewed can do in the respective dead condition at the use of means? 2. Influences work as God sets them on. 3. A gracious heart reflects upon it self. 4. We may do more by the habit of grace then we do. 5. Divers cases of renewed and unrenewed. 7. No promise is made to using of external means only, yet a sad threatening is made to the not using of them. 8. The opposition by unbelief that reprobates make to the Gospel.
Q. 13. What the unrenewed and the renewed can do in the respective dead condition at the use of means? 2. Influences work as God sets them on. 3. A gracious heart reflects upon it self. 4. We may do more by the habit of grace then we do. 5. Divers cases of renewed and unrenewed. 7. No promise is made to using of external means only, yet a sad threatning is made to the not using of them. 8. The opposition by unbelief that reprobates make to the Gospel.
IT is a matter of difficulty to determine, because of the various cases, what we may here do in the using of means. 1. Unrenewed men and renewed both can do less in using of means, when two mountains and two rivers are in the way, then when one only is before them; an unrenewed having both his natural corruption and a strong temptation against him can do no less. So Naaman by his office being obliged to go to the house of the Idol-God Rimmon, and not yet converted, could more hardly abstain from that outward Idolatry, then now when to natural corruption fear of offending his master the King of Assyria is added. No doubt Pilate naturally loathed and hated Christ, as Herod Acts 12. did the Apostles and the Gospel, but when Pilate is afraid to offend the people, and to seem an enemy to Caesar, and Herod willing to pleasure the Jews, it's no wonder then both be not only weakened in using the means to believe in Christ, but also positively oppose Christ and the Gospel, and if both had been engaged in a profession of Christ, as many now are, they might have used means more largely to believe,