Author Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SERMON III- FAITH IN GOD, THE SOURCE OP CHRISTIAN LIFE. The just shall live by faith.? Gal. in. 2. I Am to speak to-day, my friends, of that life which comes through faith. The words which form my text are the very words which brought peace to Luther's soul, and grounded him forever on the great principle of justification by faith. The poor monk of Wittemberg, weary and wasted with a piety which consisted in starvings and penance, and vain works and self-imposed legality, reposed on this verse, and found rest and strength. And since it came to him with so blessed and with such sweet influences, so may it to us. Suffer me, while I may have the privilege of ministering to you, not to be bound and cramped and confined to mere generalities and the ethics of religion; let me speak the message of my heart, for although there may be no harvest in this field, which for some months I have tried to till, let me at least have the poor satisfaction of knowing that in a faithful, consistent, and unconstrained way, I have tried to hold the truths of the gospel before you, and apply them tothe conscience and the heart. As from month to month the saving truths of Christianity are more and more clearly evolved before my sight, the value and privilege of the gospel ministry is ever heightened, and to hold my peace on those things which are a matter of life or death to the soul, becomes a galling, a most oppressive task. I am not obliged to make strictures longer on any name or any system: it is a higher and nobler work that summons me,? it is to deal to you, as I best may, the power and truth of the gospel. Let me then state first a fact, then a problem, and lastly its solution. The fact is, that religiously we are what our Supreme Deity is; i.e., what we conceive God is, moul...