Christ: The Way, the Truth, and the Life eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 426 pages of information about Christ.

Christ: The Way, the Truth, and the Life eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 426 pages of information about Christ.
and make the glorified’s heaven, in some respects, another thing, or at least, in some respect, a more excellent heaven than Adam’s heaven would have been; for Adam could not have sung the song of the redeemed; Adam’s heaven would not have been the purchase of the blood of God; nor would Adam have sitten with Christ Redeemer on his throne; nor would there have been in his heaven such rich hangings of free grace, nor such mansions prepared by that gracious and loving husband, Christ, who will come and bring his bought bride home with him.  Seeing, I say, heaven, even upon the account of free grace, will have such a special, lovely, desirable, and glorious lustre, O bow should grace be prized by us now!  How should the gospel of the grace of God be prized by us!  What an antipathy to glory, as now prepared and dressed up for sinful man, must they shew, whose whole wits and parts are busied to darken the glory of that grace, which God would have shining in the gospel; and who are at so much pains and labour to dress up another gospel, (though the apostle hath told us, Gal. i. 7, that there is not another,) wherein gospel-grace must stand by, and law-grace take the throne, that so man may sacrifice to his own net, and burn incense to his own drag, and may, at most, be grace’s debtor in part; and yet no way may the saved man account himself more grace’s debtor, than the man was who wilfully destroyed himself in not performing of the conditions; for grace, as the new gospellers, or rather gospel-spillers mean and say, did equally to both frame the conditions, make known to the contrivance, and tender the conditional peace and salvation.  But as to the difference betwixt Paul and Judas, it was Paul that made himself to differ, and not the free grace of God determining the heart of Paul by grace to a closing with and accepting of the bargain.  It was not grace that wrought in him both to will and to do.  It was he, and not the grace of God in him; what is more contradictory to the gospel of the grace of God?  And yet vain man will not condescend to the free grace of God.  Pelagianism and Arminianism needeth not put a man to much study, and to the reading of many books, to the end it may be learned, (though the patrons hereof labour hot in the very fires, to make their notions hang together, and to give them such a lustre of unsanctified and corrupt reason, as may be taking with such as know no other conduct in the matters of God,) for naturally we all are born Pelagians and Arminians.  These tenets are deeply engraven in the heart of every son of fallen Adam.  What serious servant of God findeth not this, in his dealing with souls, whom he is labouring to bring into the way of the gospel?  Yea, what Christian is there, who hath acquaintance with his own heart, and is observing its biasses, and corrupt inclinations, that is not made to cry out, O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from these dregs of Pelagianism, Arminianism, and Jesuitism, which I find yet within my soul?  Hence, it may
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Christ: The Way, the Truth, and the Life from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.