A92141:448
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.
yea and the entry to this house is feasible and accessible, by natural strength, to fools and idiots, to learned and unlearned; so that they need not say, Who shall ascend up to heaven? That is, to bring Christ again from above: Or, who shall descend into the deep? That is, to bring up Christ again from the dead. But the word is now near even in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that is, the word of faith which we preach, Rom. 10. 7, 8, 9, 10. Deut. 13. 14. The preached Law leading pedagogically to Christ in Moses time, and the plainly preached Gospel offered to all in Paul's time, is an open door to all, who love to come near to Christ and to be warmed by him; in which consideration there is a key put in every mans hand. 1. The unrenewed man turns away his ear from the Law, and will not let the news of the Gospel lodge in his ear, or the outer room of his soul; ye set not a work the literal actings and cogitations of the heart, to think whether Christ, and Heaven and Hell concerns you, or no. So 2. The believer under deadness and saddest desertion, when he is at this, All is but counterfeit work I had before, Psal. 31. 22. Jer. 2. 4. Job 13. 24. God reputes me as an enemy; He may read the word, hear the Gospel preached, and cast himself in Christ's way, and come in under the cast of his saving influences, and so the fire may be kindled of new: the sin is that the natural man useth wit, judgment, memory, for a worldly bargain of gain, but not for salvation. 3. Christ is in his own ordinance: never man before he be converted, can savingly intend his own conversion; Peter and John, and Matthew, when Christ spoke to them, minded no saving work on their spirits; ⟨p. 133⟩nor did the three thousand, Acts 2. nor the Jailer, Acts 16. mind so much as they met with. Many came to Christ for bodily health, and to be freed of Satan in a bodily possession; yet when they see and hear Christ lying at wait, in ambush, in the preached Gospel, they are beyond their intentions taken captives. There is a great difference betwixt the doing of the bulk and body of an action, and the action commanded by the highest authority of God; even though the man perform not the action upon the account of a divine command.