A92145:117
A sermon preached before the Right Honourable House of Lords, in the Abbey Church…A sermon preached before the Right Honorable House of Lords, in the Abbey Church…
A sermon preached before the Right Honourable House of Lords, in the Abbey Church at Westminster, Wednesday the 25. day of June, 1645. Being the day appointed for a solemn and public humiliation. / By Samuel Rutherfurd Professor of Divinity at St. Andrews.A sermon preached before the Right Honorable House of Lords, in the Abbey Church at Westminster, Wednesday the 25. day of Iune, 1645. Being the day appointed for a solemne and publique humiliation. / By Samuel Rutherfurd Professor of Divinitie at St. Andrews.
London: printed by R.C. for Andrew Crook, 1645
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 Conclus. Those who have a great faith in habit, many have a little faith in act, and the Disciples who had forsaken all and followed Christ, must have a great measure of faith of fiducial adherence; it is a great faith to renounce all our bosom-lovers for Christ: Though 2. their faith of light, or in regard of knowledge was weak; they not knowing Christs death and resurrection, which are principal Articles of faith, Matth. 16. 21, 22, 23. Joh. 20 9. Yet in this present act their faith was weak. The grounds of a weak faith in regard of the act, and some special exigents of a prevailing temptation: are first, because faith is one thing,1 and the use of faith another thing: The habit of faith is not the complete and only cause of believing. 1. Because then the regenerate from the first moment of their regeneration to their dying day, should always believe, which is repugnant to Scripture and all experience; for the habit of faith, and the seed of God always remaineth in them, even when they sin, they lose not that, Joh. 3. 9. 1 Joh. 2. 27, 28, 29. Joh. 4. 14. Jer. 32. 40, 41. Isaiah 59. 21. 2. We are not Lords, having by free-will a dominion over the habit of faith, to stir it up into acts when we please; for then, these that have the habit need not to pray for the actual influence of the grace of God, to work in them to will and to do, against many Scriptures, as Cant. 1. 4. Psal. 25. 5. Psal. 86. 11. Psal. 119. 18, 36, 37. 66. 68. 80. 3. Our free-will, at its best, is but Graces armour-bearer, and servant. Grace whether habitual or actual, is Gods Prerogative Royal, and one of the supreme and absolute flowers of his Crown. And therefore we are Masters of our own sins; we can be willingly wicked, and fall when we will, we are not masters of our own rising again; we can faint when we will, but we believe when Christ will, and when his saving grace breathes on us, and neither sooner nor later, neither more strongly, nor more remissly, then the free-grace of God, enableth us: for if we could believe ere grace blow on us; First, we could prevene grace, and then should we carry it all before us; and it