sin nature

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Quotes (749)

Man has become so fallen that he cannot keep the law. Sooner might the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots, than he that is accustomed to do evil learn to do well (Jeremiah 13:23); but what man cannot do, by reason of the perversity of the flesh, God performs within him, working in him to will and to do of his good pleasure. Oh, what amazing grace is this, which while it forgives our want of will, also removes our want of power!

And, dear friends, is it not a wonderful proof of grace that God does this without destroying man in any degree whatever? Man is a creature with a will,—a “free will” as they sometimes call it,—a creature who is responsible for his actions; so God does not come and change our hearts by a physical process, as some seem to dream, but by a spiritual process in which he never mars our nature, but sets our nature right.

If a man becomes a child of God, he still has a will. God does not destroy the delicate machinery of our nature, but he puts it into proper gear. We become Christians with our own full assent and consent; and we keep the law of God not by any compulsion except the sweet compulsion of love. We do not keep it because we cannot do otherwise, but we keep it because we would not do otherwise, because we have come to delight therein, and this seems to me the greatest wonder of divine grace.

See, dear friends, how different is the Lord’s way of working and ours. If you knock down a man who is living an evil life, and put him in chains, you can make him honest by force; or if you set him free, and hem him round with Acts of Parliament, you may make him sober if he cannot get anything to drink, you may make him wonderfully quiet if you put a gag in his mouth; but that is not God’s way of acting.

He who put man in the Garden of Eden, and never put any palisades around the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but left man a free agent, does just the same in the operations of his grace. He leaves his people to the influences that are within them, and yet they go right, because they are so changed and renewed by his grace that they delight to do that which once they loathed to do.

I admire the grace of God in acting thus. We should have taken the watch to pieces, and broken half the wheels, and made new ones, or something of the kind. But God knows how to leave the man just as much a man as he was before his conversion, and yet to make him so entirely a new man that old things have passed away, and all things have become new.

And this is very beautiful, too, that when God writes his law in his people’s hearts, He makes this the way of their preservation. When God’s law is written in a man’s heart, that heart becomes divinely royal property, for the King’s name is there, and the heart in which God has written his name can never perish.

– Charles Spurgeon

1834 – 1892

HT: Pyro

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Scam Into Blessing – Part 11

Too many want to start halfway through a book hoping to understand the plot and then think that they understand who the author is and what he is trying to express to the reader. Many readers come to the Scripture with a similar mindset. They start at the points that are of interest them and ignore the basics of Who the Author is and what He expresses to the reader through each page. When a person has little or no knowledge of the Scriptures, it is often best to start right at the very beginning. People need to understand Who God is by what is given in Scripture.

One huge issue to overcome though when starting at the beginning is some who consider themselves to be smart want to ignore or erase the first eleven chapters of Genesis. The reason is because if we can erase the truth and validity of the accounts found in Genesis 1-11, we can then make God into our own image. We no longer have to worry about those troubling doctrines such as: original sin, the fall of man, the total depravity of man, hereditary aspects of the sin nature, the judgment of God, and even the need for a promised Messiah.

I was convinced that the pastors, elders and deacons sitting in that hot concrete building had never heard a complete gospel message. They may have known that a person named Jesus Christ died on a cross, but they did not know why. Several attendees expressed their own thoughts on sin and how they believed that they would be judged by God and allowed into heaven because of their good works.

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