On Repentance and Faith

            “Coming to Christ embraces in it repentance, self-abnegation, and faith in the Lord Jesus, and so sums within itself all those things which are the necessary attendants of those great steps of heart, such as the belief of the truth, earnest prayers to God, the submission of the soul to the precepts of His Gospel” (Sermon on John 6:44).

            “To come to Christ signifies to turn from sin and to trust in Him. Coming to Christ is a leaving of all false confidences, a renouncing of all love to sin, and a looking to Jesus as the solitary pillar of our confidence and hope” (Sermon on John 6:37).

 

On the Power of True Conversion

           “Many people think that when we preach salvation, we mean salvation from going to Hell. We do mean that, but we mean a great deal more: we preach salvation from sin; we say that Christ is able to save a man; and by that we mean that He is able to save him from sin and to make him holy; to make him a new man. No person has any right to say, ‘I am saved,’ while he continues in sin as he did before.”

            “How can you be saved from sin while you are living in it? A man that is drowning cannot say he is saved from the water while he is sinking in it; a man that is frost-bitten cannot say, with any truth, that he is saved from the cold while he is stiffened in the wintry blast. No, man, Christ did not come to save thee in thy sins, but to save thee from thy sins; not to make the disease so that it should not kill thee, but to let it remain in itself mortal, and nevertheless, to remove it from be thou clean.” (commenting on Matthew 9:12)

           “The sure result of regeneration, or the bestowal of understanding, is the devout reverence for the law and a reverent keeping of it in the heart. The Spiritof God makes us to know the Lord and to understand somewhat of His love, wisdom, holiness, and majesty; and the result is that we honor the law and yield our hearts to the obedience of the faith.

           “The understanding operates upon the affections; it convinces the heart of the beauty of the law, so that the soul loves it with all its powers; and then it reveals the majesty of the law-Giver, and the whole nature bows before His supreme will. He alone obeys God who can say ‘my Lord, I would serve Thee, and do it with all my heart’; and none can truly say this till they have received as a free grant the inward illumination of the Holy Spirit.”

 

On Assurance vs. Presumption

           “They say they are saved, and they stick to it; they simply are, and they think it wicked to doubt it; but yet they have no reason to warrant their confidence. There is a great difference between presumption and full assurance.  Full assurance is reasonable: it is based on solid ground.  Presumption takes for granted, and with brazen face pronounces that to be its own to which it has no right whatever.”

            “Beware, I pray thee, of presuming that thou art saved. If thy heart be renewed, if thou shalt hate the things that thou didst once love, and love the things that thou didst once hate; if thou hast really repented; if there be a thorough change of mind in thee; if thou be born again, then thou hast reason to rejoice’ but if there be no vital change, no inward godliness; if there be no love to God, no prayer, no work of the Holy Spirit, then thy saying ‘I am saved’ is but thine own assertion, and it may delude, but it will not deliver thee” (commenting on 1 Chronicles 4:10).