responsible for native depravity? However much we may deplore both our depravity and our being overcome by it, we can feel guilt of and ask pardon only for our own personal misdeeds. The exercise of saving faith by the pleading penitent is for pardon, for forgiveness, and for release from personal guilt, not for the removal of depravity. As penitent men and women cry out, like the despairing publican, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner!” they do not stop to consider theories, formulas, deep spiritual truths, metaphysical conditions, and profound questions of theology. The feeling of their personal guilt overshadows for the moment every other consideration. It is only in later experience in the light of innocence and truth and hungering for more righteousness that they begin to discover that there is an element of depravity within. Therefore, since all the conditions leading up to the experience of justification relate not to the removal of native depravity but to the removal of the effect of actual transgressions, justification does not remove native depravity. That there should be native depravity in the believer is as consistent as that there should remain in fallen man a moral instinct that calls for God and right. To be continued in the next issue.
Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee; Let the water and the blood, From Thy riven side which flowed, Be of sin the double cure, Save me from its guilt and power. — AUGUSTUS TOPLaDY (1776)
As good Christians should consider every place as holy because God is there, so they should look upon every part of their lives as a matter of holiness because they are to be offered unto God.
— WILLIaM LaW. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.
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O ctober –D ecember 2023 • T H E FL A M E
