A92141:99
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.
Hence 1. the fear that Christ shall be wanting in bestowing influences,1 (so do many weak ones) is a broken half faith, looking upon Christ as half a Saviour; what? he that died to purchase the spirit, shall he not carry on the work of redemption, by applying it, and carrying on of what he hath begun? Indeed among men, he who made the Ship by art, hath neither art nor power to command wind and tide for sailing, for they are done by diverse powers, the one by a created, the other by an uncreated power; but here the same merit of blood which purchased grace habitual, did also make due and connatural (in its own kind) actual influences of saving grace to carry on the work; hence a case of Christian and supernatural prudence, it is so to fear our own sinful weakness, and to be humbled and cast down for our propension to fall away, as to believe that constant and everlasting love shall work to will and to do to the end: Then 1. tormenting Popish fear, Ah I shall, I may fall away. (2.) And the weak practical doubting of this, it may be, I shall perish, I cannot stand out. And 3. the law, spirit of bondage, I cannot be saved, who am so sinfully weak and wicked, have all three this, in commune; an undervaluing of the power of the free love, and an overvaluing of the strength of corruption; as if wickedness, and he that in the world, were greater then he that is in these who are born of God, 1 John 4. 4. and stronger then grace; for its natural to be of that opinion, that grace worketh not irresistibly, prevailingly, and with all might, according to his glorious power. Collos. 1. 11. and according to that [Greek or Hebrew] exceeding great power, by which he raised Christ from the dead, Ephes. 1: 18, 19. and so while legally we distrust and fear our own weakness, we do unbelievingly doubt of the mighty power of grace, though we see it not; for to see unbelief, (it is so spiritual a sin) is almost to overcome it; among ⟨p. 13⟩all sins it is most invisible, and best seen with the light of the Spirit; faith sees well unbelief, but unbelief can neither see faith nor it self. 2. There is required of believers the exercise of faith, in laying hold on the promises of actual influences from Christ the Mediator.2