A92141:647
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.
6.1 Divis. Some are influences for the habit, others for the act of grace. Influences for the habit, as Isa. 44. 3. I will pour water on him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground. I will pour my spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thy off-spring. A land that rains showers of rain and milk, and rains down showers of glory and grace, must be the glory of all lands, and it must needs be an excellent and a glorious Sun that shines upon that land. 2. There are influences for heavenly dispositions. Christ speaks and opens the Scriptures to them, and their hearts burn within them, Luke 24. 32. Every word of Christ casts in a fiery coal of love: Every fitting down under the Apple-tree brings sweetness; he hath influences by which he brings on love-sickness, Cant. 5. 7, 8. Christ casteth in a praying disposition on Saul, Behold he prays, Acts 8. and casts in a mourning disposition on the woman that washed his feet with tears; and a disposition of love, she loved much, so she wept over Christs feet, and kissed them, and wiped them with the hair of her head. He cast in a hearing disposition in Mary, Luke 10. A love-sickness after Christ in the Spouse, Cant. 2. a mourning disposition on Peter, he weeps bitterly. 3. There are influences by which Christ acts in us, and the spirit acts in us to will and to do, Phil. 2. 13. and the spirit groans and prays in the Saints, Rom. 8. 26. Christ by his influences makes some one new work or other what he hath done in you. Are ye a dry Eunuch, and the heath in the wilderness? and are ye the dried up fig-tree, and withered up by the root, neither leaves nor fruit? God will blast brambles, and cast them over the hedge, and deny Sun and rain to them. Some there be on whom Christ never acted as Christ; they are in the shadow all their life, and never saw nor felt the Sun.