Consider, is it not better to remember your sins on earth, than in Hell? Before your Physician, than before your Judge? . . . O wretch, that I am! Where was my understanding, when played so boldly with the flames of hell, the wrath of God, the poison of sin! When God stood by, and yet I sinned! When conscience rebuked me, and yet I sinned! When heaven or hell were close at hand, and yet I sinned! When, to please my God and save my soul, I would not hold back a filthy lust, or forbidden vanity of no worth! When I would not be persuaded to a holy, Heavenly, watchful life though all my hopes of Heaven depended on it! I am ashamed of myself; I am confounded in the remembrance of my willful, self-destroying folly! I loathe myself for all my abominations! O that I had lived in poverty and rags when I lived in sin! And O that I had lived with God in a prison, or in a wilderness, when I refused a holy, heavenly life, for the love of a deceitful world!
– Richard Baxter
1615 – 1691
Christ Alone Wyoming 
The Puritans tend to have a much better grasp on sin and the human condition than modern seeker and emergent folk. Let God’s people – this knucklehead included – heed this warning and be grieved over sin that we take lightly.
Better to confess before the Great Physician than stand guilty before the Great Judge!
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Wow, what an excellent citation!
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“For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. Oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Rom. 7:22-24)
This is exactly why it is imperative that we put our flesh (old human nature) to death daily, indeed eagerly taking up the cross on which our flesh is crucified upon. Paul understood this, Richard Baxter understood this, everyone who has the Holy Spirit within them should understand this. How utterly wicked is the doctrine today which teaches that dying to ourselves is “detrimental to our psyche”, “works religion”, “Pharisaic”. The flesh and spirit cannot coexist.
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Great quote! “Consider, is it not better to remember your sins on earth, than in Hell? Before your Physician, than before your Judge?” Oh my, yes!!!
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