"Now, are you willing, my dear Hearer—are 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 sin—not 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-hypocritical—there 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 pardoned—it 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"