A92141:344
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.
2. What warrant to complain that all from the womb have not the same influences of grace which the Lord graciously bestowed on John Baptist?
3. What warrant to desire the extraordinary removal of sin original by annihilation? for God hath appointed the Lamb of God to take away sin, and to dissolve the work of the Devil. The Lord's way is by praying, Wash me, and I shall be white as snow: and the Lord will tie us, not to the Socinian absolute taking away of sin, without Christ's satisfaction, but to an ordinance of the Law, Psal. 51. 7. Purge me with hyssop. Hence this deceit or sinful conceits in many; If God would add stronger influences of grace, I should be holy as an Angel. But this he does not; and so comes in a lazy despairing, if ⟨p. 94⟩God will not give stronger influences physical, I cannot help it: I do all that a man can do, I pray night and day, tide and time; therefore if I perish, I must perish: if God will not save me, I cannot be against his will; I can do no more then I do, but must refer my self to his will; So we would consider well, this sinful case of conscience, When 1. the man wishes to be free of the inherency of sin, because something that is penal in lust torments, and hinders sleep; some bodily pain goes along with night drinking, but yet he sticks strongly to the sinful acting thereof. 2. When the man should repent and mourn for his sinful delighting in sin, he murmurs that God would not counter-work the being of it, and that he so permitted it to be, and so disposed of the place, and strength of temptation, since he could have made it never to have been. And 3. The man wishes he might be a patient in the removing of it, and frets that God will not take it away, while he sleeps, but withal he refuses to be an actor; 1. In sorrowing according to God, and in loathing it. 2. In challenging himself, Prov. 5. How have I hated instruction. 3. In a godly improving of Jesus Christ, as the ransom-payer, and believing in him, for the Lord's way of moral removing of sin, by pardoning thereof,