Tag Archives: Mortification

New Creatures in an Old Creation

25 Tuesday May 2021

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All human beings are born into the wrong world. As we look more closely and consider the particulars, we see we are born into the wrong time and the wrong place; the wrong city and the wrong century. Sometimes it seems we are born into the wrong family and are born with the wrong skin.

This is the trouble of the Fall: We were created for a Garden, but we were born into a wilderness. We created with dominion over creation, to keep and care; but we are born under domination, in world of dominion run amuck. We were created royalty and live as serfs. We were created to live forever and born with a body programmed to fail. Everywhere, the cosmos may have space for us to live, but at the same moment contains snares which catch and kill. Even the sun and the water present danger as we need them both.

If the trouble were merely external, perhaps we could bear it with equanimity. But we are born subject to irrational, deceitful desires:

This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that the same event happens to all. Also, the hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead. 

Ecclesiastes 9:3 (ESV) 

There is the default to human existence. You need do nothing to achieve madness, or sorrow, or death. As Ms. Dickinson wryly wrote:

Because I could not stop for Death – 
He kindly stopped for me 

It takes no effort to die.

There is no solution to this trouble within the scope of this creation. The brokenness of the creation cannot be mended from the inside. It as if one is an ancient wooden ship in the heart of the sea while the hurricane roars and the planks break and the water charges in. How will you mend the breach? You cannot come to shore and prepare the wood and patch the break.  You will be able to make planks from water as you will be able to remedy the world. 

The One who has cursed the whole is greater than all the creation besides. The certainty of the end will not be moved. 

And us, we cannot look to us to escape this doom. The insanity of my heart will never be repaired by my insane heart. The efforts of your insanity will not cure me. How will the mad ever cure the mad?

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad,” said Alice.

“You must be, said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

And the enemy Death stands as the absolute bar. It will not be avoided. Even if someone managed to drag their corpse 1,000 years into the future, Death would still be waiting. At 1,000 years more, Death would have been there first. 

And what of those 2,000 years? Will the depraved heart be avoided? Will time finally make you good and wise? Will you rise above the common lot of humanity? 

Since no one here gets out alive, the only solution must be to somehow find a door out. The Creation being under a curse; the sentence in stone, irreversible.  As Thomas Brooks wrote centuries ago, “This world at last shall be burnt for a witch.”

No remedy could come from ourselves, we being too weak, too contingent, too mad. The remedy of God is not spare the present evil, but to rescue us from the same:

3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, 4 who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, 

Galatians 1:3–4 (ESV). We receive papers to become citizens of heaven (Phil. 3:20). We are made “new creatures” and are reconciled to God in this new identity:

17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 

2 Corinthians 5:17–21 (ESV). And we, as new creations, reconciled to God, bearing the righteousness of Christ await the New Creation, the New Heavens and the New Earth where sin, sorrow, death have been forever put away. “Behold,” says God “I am making all things new.” (Rev. 21:5)

And yet, despite such good news, a difficulty remains. We are rescued, but not yet. We are bound for the Promised Land, and we are living in the wilderness. We are made new creatures, but at present hold an earnest expectation of our full inheritance. A now which tarries over a “little while” (and O how that “little while” can seem), we are grieved with various trials.

We are going to the New Creation, but we are present in the Old. The scent of death still clings to everything we possess. The Creation is doomed and everywhere shows signs of groaning, as it too awaits its redemption.

That is a trouble indeed, but it is not the worst trouble we face in our new status. We are new creations, and yet seemingly not. It can seem more that we have awakened to a heightened sense of trouble, rather than having been delivered. As Thomas Manton wrote, “We are not yet out of gunshot till we come to the end of our race, and are conquerors over all opposition.” (Thomas Manton, The Complete Works of Thomas Manton, vol. 20 (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1874), 79.)

Think of this more carefully. We are plainly said to be set free from sin:

5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For one who has died has been set free from sin. 8 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. 

Romans 6:5–10 (ESV) Here he says that we have been set free from sin. And in just another few sentences he will write, “For sin will not have dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.” (Rom. 6:14) We look to John’s first letter and read, “By this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments.” (1 John 2:3)

And it seems by logic that being a New Creature, I should look the part. And yet, John also writes, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8). If we have no sin upon salvation, then why the detailed instructions to all the churches? Why are we told that if we confess our sins, we will be cleansed? 

Perhaps we need to stop and consider the utter depth and persistence of sin. Someone may consider themselves to be freed from sin. Have you avoided even the thought of lust or anger? Can you say that you have loved God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? Do you love your neighbor as yourself? And what of enemies? Do you love them. Do you pray for them? Do you bless them?  And have you done this utter humility without the tinge of pride? Has all been for God’s glory, alone?

You see, sin sticks more closely to the new creature than may have at first seemed possible. This is why the Scripture records sin even in the best of saints. Luther in his first Thesis wrote, “The whole life of believers should be repentance.”

How then has this serpent managed to find his way into the life of the New Creature? Where does this monster make its den? Paul says it clings to us as flesh. And what could be nearer than flesh? James shows the danger in our own desire:

14 But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. 15 Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. 

James 1:14–15 (ESV) And so, Paul writes to the Romans whom he said were freed from sin to murder sin:

12 So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. 13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 

Romans 8:12–13 (ESV). This whole thing becomes seemingly more confused. How will this take place? There are myriad of issues and errors which can arise as we contemplate this instruction. But there is one which I particularly wish to consider: We cannot put sin to death without a change of identity.

Let us ignore for a moment the many things which are present in this command and look carefully at this element: The death of sin is not merely the death of this or that desire, this or that behavior. It is not as if a perfect being will be revealed if I merely scrub off the mud. 

Sin is far more dangerous and damaging than that. To be this New Creature means something far more profound that teaching me manners and buying me new clothes. It means becoming someone else — and yet to become whom I was created to be. It means to shed sin and shame in a manner for more fundamental than can easily be understood. 

The Scripture uses words life-death, resurrection and burial, renewal. Look at these seemingly simple words:

9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Colossians 3:9–10 (ESV)

You could read this and see the old self is put off, the new self is put on, I now just need to tidy-up. But look more carefully at verse 10: to be the New Self is to be in the process of transformation. The New Self in possession today is not the end but the beginning. The mortification of sin, the forgetting those things which lie behind and pressing on, is a process of becoming something else. 

If you come to grips with this idea, it is disorienting. Perhaps we think of the person who has led a dramatically chaotic life who comes to Christ, gets a job, and gives to others and marries and raises children. Certainly, there is a radical-change, and we all appreciate it and give God glory for such a thing. 

But what I am saying here is that the depth of the change is far deeper than giving up the most damaging of overt behaviors. We must give up an idol of self which is more fundamental in our thinking than we easily understand.

We give up this self, we crucify this self – not in the self-abnegation of mysticism, but in the utter transformation of new life in light of the Resurrection of Christ. 

I have seen that one reason mortification is so impossible and some much good counsel goes to waste and so many believers struggle dejectedly with sin is that we seek to mortify sin without mortifying self; we seek to remain ourselves and merely shed our sin. But we are called to become something new.

Go back to that language of New Creation. It is not a promise that we will be ourselves with a ticket to the Promised Land. It is a promise that we are and will become something which we were not before. 

And so rather than simply seek to hammer away at persistent sin by resistance, we are called up to become someone for whom such sins are unthinkable. Sin should be as strange to us as cuddling a porcupine or drinking lava.

How then is this new identity – because it is nothing less than a new identity – formed?

Stephen Charnock, A Discourse on Mortification.4

11 Tuesday Aug 2020

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Charnock then considers affirmative evidence of true mortification. 

First, “When upon a temptation that did usually excite the beloved lust, it doth not stir, it is a sign of a mortified state.” He provides Peter as an example. Before the crucifixion, Peter famously boasted that though all desert Jesus, Peter would not. Peter proceeds to deny Christ. As Thomas Manton put it, “Peter, that ventured upon a band of men, was overcome by the weak blast of a damsel’s question.”

(Thomas Manton, The Complete Works of Thomas Manton, vol. 8 (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1872), 496.)

But then after Christ rose and confronted Peter three times with the question, “Do you love me more than these?”, Peter did not rise in his pride as he did before. “His answer goes no further than, ‘Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee,’ without adding ‘more than these.’”

Or the way in which a sick man will not eat the best dinner, it is a sign he has no taste for the meal. “So when a man hath a temptation to sin, decked and garnished with all the allurements the devil can dress it with, and he hath no stomach to close with it, it is a sign of a mortified frame.”

Second, “When we meet with few interruptions in duties of worship.” How easily and often are we turned away from our duty to “lay fast hold on God.” When everything turns us away, it implies that we are taken by everything but God. He compares this to an army: does it stop us at every turn? Then it is a “well-bodied army.” But where the incidents are few, there are few soliders. 

The third point is the key: merely refraining from sin is not mortification – but when the thief no longer steals but now works so that he can give to others, that is evidence of mortification. As Charnock puts it, “When we bring forth the fruits of the contrary graces, it is a sign sin is mortified. It is to this end that sin is killed by the Spirit, that fruit may be brought forth to God; the more sweet and full fruit a tree bears, the more evidence there is of the weakness of those suckers which are about the root to hinder its generous productions.”

Stephen Charnock, A Discourse on Mortification.3

06 Thursday Aug 2020

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“The second thing is, how we may judge of our mortification.”

Those things which are not true mortification. 

Merely reframing from some action: “All cessation from some particular sin is not a mortification. A non-commission of a particular sin is not an evidence of the mortification of the root of it. Indeed, a man cannot commit all kinds of sin at a time, nor in many years; the commands of sin are contrary, and many masters commanding contrary things cannot be served at one and the same time.”

One may give up only the outward display of the sin while maintaining the desire. Jesus explains that adultery and murder begin in the heart as unspoken lust and anger. They are still sin, even if not displayed. 

Or one may cease to commit some particular sin for a number of reasons. Sometimes a sin is not committed because there is simply no opportunity to commit the sin. I would be thief, if only there were something to steal. “The pollutions of the world may be escaped when the pollutions of the heart remain.”

Some sins we cannot commit because our body will not cooperate with the sin. (It was once explained to me that one reason for jail for violent crime is that kept a young man out of service until he became too old to engage in such crimes.) “A present sickness may make an epicure nauseate the dainties which he would before rake even in the sea to procure. There is a cessation from acts of sin, not out of a sense of sin, but a change of the temper of his body.”

Sometimes a flood of guilt or shame keeps one off from a particular sin for some time, but when the guilt subsides and the opportunity returns, so does the sin. 

And finally, one may just trade one sin for other. “A cessation from one sin may be but an exchange.” Certain sins are mutually exclusive: you cannot be profligate and a miser at the same time. 

Being prevented from engaging in a sin: “Restraints from sin are not mortification of it. Men may be curbed when they are not changed; and there is no man in the world but God doth restrain him from more sins, which he hath a nature to commit, than what he doth actually commit.”

Why is a restraint not mortification? Restraints do not get to the heart. 

“Mortification is always from an inward principle in the heart, restraints from an outward.” True mortification will not be merely refraining from some action, but also a desire to refrain. “In a renewed man, there is something beside bare considerations to withhold him, something of antipathy which heightens and improves those considerations, whereby the soul is glad of them, because the edge and dint of them is against sin.”

In true mortification, one does not refrain from the sin because it is too hard to commit; one refrains from the sin because there is a “hatred of sin”.  “[M]ortification proceeds from an anger, a desire of revenge.”

Sin is not the bare action: the law distinguished between an accidental killing a deliberate murder: the intent made the thing a sin. Thus, mortification is not merely the outward restraint but a change in the thought and affection, “Mortification is a voluntary, rational work of the soul; restraints are not so. The devil hath nothing of his nature altered, but hath as strong an inclination to sin as ever, though the act he intends is often hindered by God.”

Stephen Charnock, A Discourse on Mortification.2

02 Sunday Aug 2020

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I. What mortification is.

Charnock begins with a definition of “mortification” (killing). He lists four aspects of mortification, breaking with sin, a declaration of hostility toward sin, resistance to sin, killing sin.

Breaking with sin. Charnock notes the strength which sin is said to hold over the human being. Sin is likened to a king with subjects, “Sin is therefore said to have dominion, to make laws, whence we read of the law of the members.” Sin is as close to the human being as flesh is to bone.  Therefore, there can be no end of sin’s work until one divorces sin. There must be “a stopping the ears against the importunities of it, and refusing all commerce and cohabitation with it.”

Hostility.  We cannot merely say that we are done and then be done with sin. If we break with sin we merely move to a state of war. Sin will either have its way with us, or we will need to be at war with sin:

And here behold that irreconcileable and tedious war, without a possibility of renewing the ancient friendship, and which ends not but with a total conquest of sin. This hostility begins in a bridling corrupt affections, laying a yoke upon anything that would take part with the enemy. It cuts off all the supplies of sin, stops all the avenues to it; which the apostle expresseth by ‘making provision for the flesh,’ Rom. 13:14, &c.; a turning the stream which fed sin another way 

Resistance: “A strong and powerful resistance, by using all the spiritual weapons against sin which the Christian armoury will afford.” Charnock makes an interesting observation by resting sin and movement to sin in disordered affections, “a bringing the affections into order, that they may not contradict and disobey the motions of the Spirit and sanctified reason.”

Killing: This comes from the meaning of the language of Paul. For instance, in Colossians 3:5, Paul uses the verb nekrosate: you put to death, kill, “to reduce to a carcase.”

Every day there is to be a driving a new nail into the body of death, a breaking some limb or other of it, till it doth expire.

Stephen Charnock, A Discourse on Mortification.1

28 Tuesday Jul 2020

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Charnock first introduces his text, Romans 8:13, “For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” He makes the point that, “You must not imagine you shall be justified without being sanctified.” There is a strange belief that (using an image from Dallas Willard) salvation is sort of like an arbitrary barcode slapped onto a product. The scanner reads the code and ignores the item. If a “soap” barcode is put on a box of cereal, the scanner reads “soap.” We believe that if we receive the barcode “saved” that will read by the scanner on judgment day, no matter who we are.

Charnock then defines “flesh” and “body”: “Some, by flesh, understand the state under the law; others, more properly, corrupted nature. Ye shall die, without hopes of a better life. But if you mortify the deeds of the body: the deeds of the body of sin, which is elsewhere called the body of death; the first motions to sin and passionate compliances with sin, which are the springs of corrupt actions. Corrupt nature is called a body here, morally, not physically; it consisting of divers vices, as a body of divers members.”

The verse consists of a threat and a promise; an act and an object. A great deal of Puritan precision is simply a matter of paying attention to the text. Exegesis is a matter of paying attention, asking questions and thinking. When people first hear someone carefully exegete a text is sounds like magic; when in fact it is merely carefully reading.

Charnock then makes a few deductions from the text. “Sin is active in the soul of an unregenerate man.” Second, “Nothing but the death of sin must content a renewed soul. The sentence is irreversible: die it must.” This is a present tense, continual action. 

“The knife must still stick in the throat of sin, till it fall down perfectly dead. Sin must be kept down though it will rage the more, as a beast with the pangs of death is more desperate.”

This rampage against sin must be universal, from all actions and intentions, from the first motion to the last completion.

“The greatest object of our revenge is within us. Our enemies are those of our own house, inbred, domestic adversaries; our anger is then a sanctified anger when set against our own sins. Our enemy has got possession of our souls, which makes the work more difficult.”

How then is this done?  “Man must be an agent in this work. We have brought this rebel into our souls, and God would have us make as it were some recompence by endeavouring to cast it out; as in the law, the father was to fling the first stone against a blasphemous son.”

And how, “Through the Spirit. (1.) Mortification is not the work of nature; it is a spiritual work. Every man ought to be an agent in it, yet not by his own strength.” 

And here a bit of summary, “The difficulty of this work is hereby declared. The difficulty is manifested by the necessity of the Spirit’s efficacy. Not all the powers on earth, nor the strength of ordinances, can do it; omnipotency must have the main share in the work.”

And from this the “doctrine”, the thesis statement: 

The doctrine to be hence insisted on is this: Mortification of sin is an universal duty, and the work of the Spirit in the soul of a believer, without which there can be no well-grounded expectations of eternal life and happiness.

The Only Way to Mortify Sin

16 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in Mortification, Thomas Brooks

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Thomas Brooks, The Unsearchable Riches of Christ

Proposition

the exercise and, improvement of grace in your souls, will be more and more the death and ruin of sin in your souls.

Argument 1

Take it from experience; there is not a choicer way than this for a man to bring under the power of his sin, than to keep up the exercise of his grace.

Two illustrations

Sin and grace are like two buckets at a well, when one is up the other is down; they are like the two laurels at Rome, when one flourishes the other withers.

Restated proposition

Certainly, the readiest and the surest way to bring under the power of sin, is to be much in the exercise of grace:

Argument 2

Rom. 8:10, ‘And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin: but the spirit is life because of righteousness.’ The life and activity of Christ and grace in the soul, is the death and destruction of sin in the soul.

Restated proposition

The more grace acts in the soul, the more sin withers and dies in the soul.

Illustration

The stronger the house of David grew, 2 Sam. 3, the weaker the house of Saul grew. As the house of David grew every day stronger and stronger, so the house of Saul every day grew weaker and weaker.

Restated proposition

So the activity of the new man is the death of the old man.

Illustration and application

When Christ began to bestir himself in the temple, the money-changers quickly fled out, Mat. 21:12–14. So when grace is active and stirring in the soul, corruption quickly flies.

Restated proposition

A man may find out many ways to hide his sin, but he will never find out any way to subdue his sin, but by the exercise of grace.

Argument from experience

Of all Christians, none so mortified as those in whom grace is most exercised.

Concluding illustration and application

Sin is a viper that must be killed, or it will kill you for ever; and there is no way to kill it but by the exercise of grace.

James Denney, Degrees of Reality in Revelation and Religion

26 Tuesday Jun 2018

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(From The Way Everlasting).

This sermon is based upon 1 John 5:6:

6 This is he who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. (ESV)

This sermon concerns the reality of Christ’s coming:

The reality of God’s redeeming love. It is easy to puzzle the mind with questions about reality, especially where God is concerned. Every one has heard of the astronomer who swept the heavens with his telescope and found no trace of God. That is not very disconcerting. We do not ascribe to God the same kind of reality as we do to the stars, and are not disappointed if the astronomer does not detect him as he might a hitherto unnoticed planet. M. Renan somewhere speaks of God as “the category of the ideal”; that is, he ascribes to God that kind of reality which belongs to the high thoughts, aspirations, and hopes of the mind. Certainly we should not disparage the ideal or its power, and still less should we speak lightly of those who devote themselves to ideals and cherish faith in them. But to redeem and elevate such creatures as we are, more is needed; and what the Apostle is so emphatic about is that God has come to save us not with the reality of ideals, but with the reality of all that is most real in the life we live on earth, in the battle we fight in the flesh, in the death that we die He has come with the reality of blood. The Christian religion is robbed of what is most vital in it if the historical Christ and the historical passion cease to be the very heart of it.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 143–144.

He then considers some ways that the reality of Christ’s coming are made bloodless, distance, mere abstractions. First consider the ethical, philosophical arguments which try to reduce Christ and his work to an ethics and example. But,

I had rather preach with a crucifix in my hand and the feeblest power of moral reflection, than have the finest insight into ethical principles and no Son of God who came by blood. It is the pierced side, the thorn-crowned brow, the rent hands and feet, that make us Christians—these, and not our profoundest thoughts about the ethical constitution of the universe.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 145. He also considers those who try to dehistoricize Christ’s coming; but that likewise will not do.

But here comes the bite of the sermon: if Christ came in such a real way, in the way of blood and water, then this lays upon the Christian the call to a life answering that reality:

It follows from this that no deliberate seeking of a sheltered life is truly Christian. The Son of God came in blood. He faced the world as it was, the hour and the power of darkness; He laid down life itself in pursuance of His calling; and there must be something answering to this in a life which is genuinely Christian. Yet we cannot help seeing that in different ways this conclusion is practically evaded. It is evaded by those who aim at cultivating the Christian life solely in coteries, cliques, and conventions of like-minded people; by those whose spiritual concern is all directed inward, and whose ideal is rather the sanctification of the soul than the consecration of life to Christ. There are so few people who make holiness in any sense whatever the chief end of life that one shrinks from saying anything which might reflect on those who do pursue it, even in a mistaken sense; but who has not known promising characters fade away and become characterless, through making this mistake? Who does not know how easy it is to miss the Gospel type, the type of Jesus, and actually to present to the world, as though with his stamp upon it, a character insipid, ineffective, bloodless? Nothing has a right to bear His name that is not proved amid the actualities of life to have a passion in it like His own.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 148–149.

This then leads to a final question: I am willing to concede and even believe this fact of Christ coming so, but it still seems distant and abstract. Christ did come in blood and water, but my life and my experience does not seem truly touched by this fact. What of that? To which Denney answers:

The answer to such questions, I believe, is suggested by the next words of the Apostle: “It is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth”. There is a point of mystery in all religion—not the point at which we know nothing, but the point at which we know everything and yet nothing happens—the point at which we are cast absolutely on God. But the mention of the Spirit reminds us that though the Christian experience depends absolutely upon God, it is not for that reason blankly mysterious. The Spirit is a witness; he takes the things of Christ and shows them to us, and under his showing they become present, real, and powerful. This is his work—to make the past present, the historical eternal, the inert vital.

When the Spirit comes, Christ is with us in all the reality of His life and Passion, and our hearts answer to His testimony. We read the Gospel, and we do not say, He spoke these words of grace and truth, but He speaks them. We do not say, He received sinners and ate with them; but, He receives sinners and spreads a table for them. We do not say, He prayed for His own; but, He ever liveth to make intercession for us. We do not even say, He came in blood; but, He is here, clothed in His crimson robe, in the power of His Passion, mighty to save. Have we not had this witness of the Spirit on days we can recall? Have we not had it in listening to the word of God this very day? We know what it is to grieve the Spirit; we know also what it is to open our hearts to Him.

Let us be ready always to open our hearts to His testimony to the Son of God—to Jesus Christ who came with the water and with the blood; and as the awful reality of the love of God in Christ is sealed upon them, let us make answer to it in a love which has all the reality of our own nature in it.

James Denney, The Way Everlasting: Sermons (London; New York; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 150–151.

Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, Direction II.A

29 Saturday Jul 2017

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(The prior post in this series may be found here.

In this section Marshall deals with the question of motivation, “we must have an inclination and propensity in our hearts” to do what God requires. There are two reasons for this. First, we will not act without the inclination. Second, the law of God itself requires love — and actual desire. It is not bare conduct which satisfies the will of God.

He begins by noting that this work of sanctification is too difficult to attain to without a satisfactory motivation:

And shall we dare to rush into the battle against all the powers of darkness, all worldly terrors and allurements, and our own inbred domineering corruptions, without considering whether we have sufficient spiritual furniture to stand in the evil day?

There are four “endowments” which Marshall lists as necessary. The first is “an inclination and propensity of the heart to the duties of the law”.  This first element is the primary category. The remaining three elements matter as these support the desire to act:

[The duty required is not bare instinctual conduct” but such a one as it meet for intelligent creatures, whereby they are, by the conduct of reason, prone and bent to approve and choose their duty, and averse to the practice of sin. And therefore, I have intimated that the three other endowments [a new natures, confidence in the eternal state, and confidence they we will persevere] are subservient to this as the chief of all, which is are sufficient to make a rationale propensity.

Marshall here sets out a theory of human motivation: A human being will not fulfill the law of God (love of God and love of neighbor) unless he has a new nature, a “hope of heaven” and certainty that the hope is real for him.

Hope functions like magnetic north for a compass needle: Hope draws the attention and orders the conduct. We must have some hope and reasonable assurance to undertake any task. One will promise to come to see another because he has hope that it will be possible to make the trek and has sufficient reason to undertake the work. But no one (who is sane) would promise to be around the world in 30 seconds, or to travel back in time. Therefore, we need hope and we need those supernatural helps (a new nature and faith to lay hold upon what is promised to the new nature) to increase in holiness.

Next we will look at Marshall’s discussion of “inclination and propensity”.

Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, Direction I

25 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by in Mortification, Sanctification, Sanctifictation, Uncategorized

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Marshall’s book, published in 1692 (12 years after his death), sets out 14 directions on the doctrine of sanctification and its relationship to justification. It is publication with an introduction by Joel Beeke, published by Reformation Heritage Books.

Direction I: That we may acceptably perform the duties of holiness and righteousness required by the law, our first work is to learn the powerful and effectual means whereby we may attain to so great an end.

Marshall begins with the proposition that Christians are required to holiness: we are saved to holiness The question is how, what is the means by which we attain to such holiness?

He notes that if we take seriously the doctrine of original sin, we must recognize that we in ourselves lack the ability to attain to such holiness. And he rebukes those who merely insist upon holiness as if it merely required effort and self-will:

Yea, many that are accounted powerful preachers, spend all their zeal in the earnest pressing the immediate practice of the law, without any discovery [disclosure] of the effectual means of performance: as if the works of righteousness were like those servile employments that need no skill and artifice at all, but industry and activity.

The means for sanctification is a grace communicated by God to us — it cannot be known without God’s disclosure. The means appointed by God are the Scriptures received by faith: “God hath given, in the holy scriptures by his inspiration, plentiful instruction in righteousness, that we may be thoroughly furnished for every good work….[W]e cannot apply ourselves ourselves to the practice of holiness, with hope of success, except we have some faith concerning divine assistance, which we have no ground to expect, if we use not such means as God has appointed to work by.”

Pull out their own eyes

17 Tuesday May 2016

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The Puritans, who held to the sovereignty of God as much as any, held mortification (the putting to death of sin, Col. 3:5) to take disciplined human effort:

That we ourselves must engage in the mortifying of our lusts.—Sinners, with their own hands, must pull out their own eyes. It is not enough to cry unto God for help, and, in the mean time, to be careless and idle, as if nothing were to be done on our part. Mortification is a work incumbent upon us, although we are empowered thereunto by the Spirit: “If ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” (Rom. 8:13.) We must mortify, although by the Spirit. The duty is ours, though the strength be God’s. So here: “If thy right eye offend thee, thou thyself pluck it out, and cast it from thee.”
Bejamin Needler

How May Beloved Lusts be Discovered and Mortified