"Now, are you willing, my dear Hearerare you sure that you are willing to be saved by Grace, alone, and to owe your deliverance from sin and its punishment entirely to the free favor of God? Will you yield to that? I trust you will...
What do you say, dear Hearers? Does the Holy Spirit incline you to trust in the blood of Jesus? And then there must be a full submission to God in the matter of giving up every sin. Numbers of persons pray for mercy, but they continue in their sins. Such men cannot be saved because salvation is salvation from sinnot in sin. How can we be saved from sin if we are its slaves? If you come to God and cry, Lord, deliver me and have mercy upon me, and yet you practice private drinking and tipple yourselves into semi-drunkenness, how can you be saved? If you keep on cheating in business, or telling lies, or indulge a malicious or angry temper in the family, or are proud and unkind, selfish and miserly, how can you be saved?
I warn you, Friends, that faith itself cannot save you while these things are so, for if your faith were a saving faith it would rescue you from these evils! This, indeed, is salvation, namely, deliverance from the power and habit of sin! Many prayers are semi-hypocriticalthere is a kind of sincerity about them, but there is no whole-hearted desire after holiness and, therefore, they will never gain a comfortable answer from God. O Seeker, are you willing to give up every sin? Come, drunkard, you pray to be forgiven, but are you willing to leave the intoxicating cup once and for all? You, my Friend, ask to be pardonedit is well, but are you, at the same time, desirous to cease from your transgressions?
Yes or no? Are you anxious to search out every false way and abandon it as soon as it is discovered? Do you wish to have a holy, truthful, godly tongue? Do you long to be saved from every lust and secret vice? If so, believing in the Lord Jesus Christ, you are already saved! Your sigh to be delivered from evil is the commencement of the work of sanctification! But if you say, I would be saved from every wrong way except my one indulgence, my one secret iniquity, then you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bonds of iniquity"
_________________ SI Moderator - Greg Gordon
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