A92141:1209
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.
3. The unrenewed man is under the debt of Gospel-obedience to Christ: a deep habitual sleepiness on the sluggard frees him neither from an obligation to the duty of ploughing, nor from that justice of God which clothes the sleeper with rags. Now the shift that the natural man hath,1 is, No man can come to the Son except the Father of Christ draw him: it's true, and Scripture-truth of it self; But it's told, 1. By the proud and the lawless bankrupt as a shift. 2. It is told also by the humble and broken diver. In the former mans sense the meaning is, I cannot believe; I can do no more, he denies me grace, blame himself; hence he must keep his lusts.
3. The unrenewed man is under the debt of Gospel-obedience to Christ: a deep habitual sleepiness on the sluggard frees him neither from an obligation to the duty of plowing, nor from that justice of God which cloathes the sleeper with rags. Now the shift that the natural man hath,1 is, No man can come to the Son except the Father of Christ draw him: it's true, and Scripture-truth of it self; But it's told, 1. By the proud and the lawless bankrupt as a shift. 2. It is told also by the humble and broken diver. In the former mans sense the meaning is, I cannot believe; I can do no more, he denies me grace, blame himself; hence he must keep his lusts.
- 13. Case. Inability to do without grace is pretended by the lawless bankrupt and by the humble convert, but for divers ends.
But 1. Nature and acting of nature must be before the acting of grace; he hath not denied to you the grace of using external means, to come to the assembly of the Saints, to lend the ear, and not to turn the ear away from the law, and this you refuse.