Doctrine 4: In the Most Fruitful Branches There Remain Corruptions Unpurged

The 4th doctrine is, that in the most fruitful branches there remain corruptions that still need purging out.

This is taken but as supposed in the text, and not so directly laid down, and I shall handle it but so far as it makes way for what does follow. What shall I need to quote much scripture for the proof of it? Turn but to your own hearts, the best will find proofs enough of it.

Reasons.

That God might thereby the more set forth and clear to us his justifying grace by Christ's righteousness, and clear the truth of it to all our hearts. When the Apostle, long after his first conversion, was in the midst of that great and famous battle, chronicled in Romans 7, in which he was led captive to a law, and an army of sin within him, warring against the law of his mind, presently upon that woeful exclamation and outcry there mentioned, 'Oh miserable man that I am,' etc., he falls admiring the grace of justification through Christ, they are his first words after the battle ended: [Now] (says he) 'there is no condemnation to them that are in Christ.' Mark that word [Now] — that now after such bloody wounds and gashes there should yet be no condemnation; this exceedingly exalts this grace, for if ever (thought he) I was in danger of condemnation, it was upon the rising and rebelling of these my corruptions, which when they had carried me captive, I might well have expected the sentence of condemnation to have followed, but I find, says he, that God still pardons me, and accepts me as much as ever, upon my returning to him; and therefore I do proclaim with wonder, to all the world, that God's justifying grace in Christ is exceedingly large and rich. And though there be many corruptions in those that are in Christ, yet there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ, that walk after the Spirit, though flesh be in them: and this at once both clears our justification by Christ's righteousness alone, and also magnifies and extols it.

It clears it, therefore how does this remaining of corruptions afford to our divines that great demonstration against the papists, that we are not justified by works, nor are those works perfect, (which they so impudently affirm against their own experience) even because corruption stains the best, and our best righteousness is but as a filthy cloth.

And as it clears it, so likewise it extols it: for how is grace magnified, when as not only all the sins and debts a man brought to Christ to pardon at first conversion are pardoned, but after many relapses of us, and provings bankrupt, we are yet still set up again by free grace with a new stock; and though we still run upon new scores every day, yet that these should still be paid, and there should be riches of love enough, and stock enough, that is, merit enough to hold out to pardon us, though we remained in this mixed condition of sinning, to eternity, this exceedingly advances the abounding of this grace.

2. It serves exceedingly to illustrate the grace of perseverance, and the power of God therein; for to the power of God is our perseverance wholly attributed. 1 Peter 1:5: 'You are kept (as with a garrison, as the word signifies) through the power of God to salvation.' And were there not a great and an apparent danger of miscarrying, such a mighty guard were not needed; there is nothing which puts us into any danger, but our corruptions that still remain in us, which fight against the soul, and endeavor to overcome and destroy us. Now then to be kept despite all these; to have grace maintained; a spark of grace in the midst of a sea of corruption; how does this honor the power of God in keeping us? As much in regard of this our dependency on him in such a condition, as he would otherwise be by our service, if it were perfect, and we wholly free from those corruptions. How will the grace of God under the Gospel, triumph over the grace given Adam in his innocence? When Adam having his heart full of inherent grace, and nothing inwardly, in his nature, to seduce him, and the temptation that he had, being but a matter of curiosity, and the pleasing his wife, and yet he fell: when as many poor souls under the state of grace, that have but mites of grace in comparison, and worlds of corruption, are yet kept, not only from the unnecessary pleasures of sin in time of prosperity, but hold out against all the threats, all the cruelties of wicked persecutors in times of persecution, which threaten to debar them of all the present good they enjoy? And though God's people are foiled often, yet that there should still remain a seed within them (1 John 3:9), this illustrates the grace of Christ under the Gospel. For one act in Adam expelled all grace out of him, when yet his heart was full of nothing else. Were our hearts filled with grace perfectly at first conversion, this power would not be seen. The angels are kept with much less care, and charge, and power than we, because they have no bias, no weights of sin, (as the Apostle speaks) hung upon them to draw them aside, and press them down, as we have.

Neither 3. would the confusion of the devil in the end be so great, and the victory so glorious, if all sin at first conversion were expelled. For by this means the devil has in his assaults against us, the more advantages, fair play (as I may so speak), fair hopes of overcoming; having a great faction in us, as ready to sin as he is greedy to tempt. And yet God strongly carries on his own work begun, though slowly, and by degrees, backs and maintains a small party of grace within us, to his confusion. That as in God's outward government towards his church here on earth, he suffers a great party, and the greater still by far, to be against his church, and yet upholds it, and rules among the midst of his enemies (Psalm 110), so does he also in every particular believer's heart. When grace shall be in us but as a spark, and corruptions as much smoke and moisture damping it; grace but as a candle and that in the socket, among huge and many winds, then to bring judgment forth to victory, that is a victory indeed.

Lastly, as God does it to advance his own grace, and confound the devil, so for holy ends that concern the saints themselves: as,

1. To keep them from spiritual pride. He trusted the angels that fell, with a full and complete stock of grace at first, and they, though raised up from nothing a few days before, fell into such an admiration of themselves, that heaven could not hold them, it was not a place good enough for them; [They left] (the text says) their own habitation and first estate (Jude verse 6). Pride was the condemnation of the devil (1 Timothy 3:6). But how much more would this have been an occasion of pride to a soul that was full of nothing but sin the other day, to be made perfect presently? To perfectly justify us the first day by the righteousness of another, there is no danger in that, for it is a righteousness without us, and which we cannot so easily boast of vainly; for that faith that apprehends it, empties us first of ourselves, and goes out to another for it. But sanctification being a work worked in us, we are apt to dote on that, as too much upon excellence in ourselves; how much ado have poor believers to keep their hearts off from doting upon their own righteousness, and from poring on it, when it is (God knows) a very little? They must therefore have something within them to pull down their spirits, that when they look on their feathers, they may look on their feet, which Christ says are still defiled (John 13:10).

2. However, if there were no such danger of spiritual pride upon so sudden a rise, (as indeed it befalls not infants, nor such souls as die as soon as regenerated, as that good thief) yet however God thinks it meet to use it as a means to humble his people this way: even as God left the Canaanites in the land, to vex the Israelites, and to humble them. And to have been thoroughly humbled for sin here, will do the saints no harm before they come to heaven, it will keep them nothing forever, in their own eyes, even when they are filled brim full of grace and glory.

For 1. nothing humbles so as sin. This made him cry out, 'Oh miserable man that I am!' He that never flinched for outward crosses, never thought himself miserable for any of them, but gloried in them (2 Corinthians 12), when he came to be led captive by sin remaining in him, cries out, 'Oh miserable man!'

And 2. it is not the sins of a fore-past unregenerate estate, that will be enough to do this thoroughly: for they might be looked upon, as past, and gone; and some ways be an occasion of making the grace after conversion the more glorious. But present sense humbles most kindly, most deeply, because it is fresh, and therefore says Paul, 'Oh miserable man that [I am].' And again, we are not able to know the depth, and height of corruptions at once; therefore we are to know it by degrees. And therefore it is still left in us, that after we have a spiritual eye given us, we might experimentally gauge it to the bottom, and be experimentally still humbled for sin. And experimental humbling is the most kindly, as pity out of experience is.

And 3. God would have us humbled by seeing our dependence upon him for inherent grace; and how soon are we apt to forget we have received it; and that in our natures no good dwells? We would not remember, that our nature were a stepmother to grace, and a natural mother to lusts, but that we see weeds still grow naturally of themselves.

And 4. God would have us not only humbled by such our dependence on him, but by a sense of our continual liability to him, and of being in his debt; and therefore leaves corruption still, that we might ever acknowledge that our necks do even lie on the block, and that he may chop them off, and to see that in him, we should not only live, and move as creatures; but further, that by him we might justly be destroyed every moment, this humbles the creature indeed (Ezekiel 36:31-32).

3. As thus to humble them, so that they might have occasion to deny themselves: which to do is more acceptable to God, than much more service without it; and therefore the great promise of having a hundredfold, is made to that grace. It was the great grace, which of all other Christ exercised. Now if we had no corruption to entice and seduce us, what opportunities were there for us, thus of denying ourselves? Christ indeed had an infinite deal of glory to lay down, not so we: unless there be a self in us, to solicit us, and another self to deny those solicitations, we should have no occasions of self-denial, or the exercise of any such grace. Therefore Adam was not capable of any such grace, because he had no corruption to seduce him. And therefore a little grace in us, denying a great deal of corruption, is in that respect, (for so much as is of it) more acceptable than his obedience. Though we have less grace, yet in this respect of a higher kind in the exercises of it.

To be meek and charitable to those who fall into sin, as knowing corruption is not fully yet purged out of yourself. This is the Apostle's admonition upon this ground (Galatians 6:1): 'If a man be overtaken in a fault,' (he speaks indefinitely, that any man may) 'if it be but an overtaking, not a sinning willfully, and obstinately, but a falling by occasion, through rashness, suddenness, and violence of temptation, etc., you which are spiritual, restore such a man with the spirit of meekness, considering yourself, lest you also be tempted.' He would have every man be meek in his censure, and in his reproof of such a one, and restore him, and put him in joint again, as the word signifies; for still he may be united to Christ, as a bone out of joint is to the body, though for the time rendered thereby useless. And do this, says he, with tenderness and pity, with the spirit of meekness, which a man will not do, unless he be sensible of his own frailty, and subjection to corruption; unless he reflect on himself, and that seriously too: [considering] says the Apostle there, as implying more than a slight thought, (I may chance to fall also) but the seeing and weighing what matter of falling there is in your own heart, if God but leave you to yourself a little then; this works a spirit of meekness towards such a one. For meekness and pity is most kindly, when we are sensible of the like in ourselves, and make it our own case. And this he speaks to the most spiritual Christians, not to those who are as yet but as carnal, (as he speaks of the Corinthians) Christians newly converted, who (finding their corruptions at the first stunned with that first blow of mortification given them, and though but in part killed, yet wholly in a manner for a while laid asleep, and having not as yet, after their late conversion, had a fresh experience of the dangers and temptations a man after conversion in his progress is subject to) are therefore apt to imagine they shall continue free from assaults, and think not that their lusts will get up again, and so are prone to be more censorious of the falls of others. But you, who are more spiritual, to you I speak, says the Apostle, for you are most meekened with a sense of your own weakness; and even you, (says he) if you consider yourselves, and what you are in yourselves, have cause to think that you also may be tempted.

Never set yourself any limit or measure of mortification, for still you have matter to purge out: you must never be out of medicine all your life. Say not, 'Now I have grace enough, and health enough,' but as that great Apostle, ('Not as if I had as yet attained, for indeed you have not') still press forward to have more virtue from Christ. If you have prevailed against the outward act, rest not, but get the rising of the lust mortified, and that rolling of it in your fancy; get your heart deadened towards it also. And rest not there, but get to hate it, and the thought of it. The body of death must not only be crucified with Christ, but buried also, and so rot (Romans 6:4-6) — it is crucified to be destroyed, says the Apostle there: that is, to moulder away more and more, after its first death's wound.

The fourth doctrine is that in the most fruitful branches there remain corruptions that still need to be purged out.

This is only assumed in the text rather than directly stated, and I will only treat it as far as it prepares the way for what follows. What need is there to quote much Scripture to prove it? Turn to your own hearts — the best among you will find enough proof there.

Reasons.

First, so that God might more clearly display and confirm His justifying grace through Christ's righteousness, and make the truth of it plain to all our hearts. When the Apostle, long after his first conversion, was in the midst of that great and famous spiritual battle described in Romans 7 — being taken captive by a law and an army of sin within him, warring against the law of his mind — immediately after that agonized cry of 'Oh, wretched man that I am!' he breaks out in wonder at the grace of justification through Christ. His first words after the battle: 'Now there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ.' Notice that word now — that even after such deep wounds and struggles, there should still be no condemnation. This greatly exalts this grace. He reasoned: if there was ever a moment I was in danger of condemnation, it was when these corruptions rose up and took me captive. And yet I find that God still forgives me and accepts me as fully as ever when I return to Him. Therefore I declare with wonder to all the world: God's justifying grace in Christ is exceedingly rich and abundant. Though there are many corruptions in those who are in Christ, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ and walk after the Spirit — even though the flesh remains in them. This at once both confirms and magnifies our justification by Christ's righteousness alone.

It confirms our justification: how powerfully does the remaining of corruptions provide our theologians that great proof against the Catholics that we are not justified by works, and that our works are not perfect — which they so boldly claim, against their own experience — precisely because corruption taints even our best efforts, and our finest righteousness is but as a filthy cloth.

And as it confirms our justification, so it also magnifies it. How grace is magnified when not only all the sins and debts a person brought to Christ at first conversion are forgiven, but after many relapses and fresh bankruptcies, we are still set up again by free grace with a new supply. Though we run up new accounts every day, they are still paid. There is enough love, enough merit, to hold out and pardon us, even if we remained in this mixed condition of sinning to eternity. This greatly displays the overflowing abundance of this grace.

2. It greatly illustrates the grace of perseverance and the power of God in it, for perseverance is wholly attributed to the power of God. 1 Peter 1:5: 'You are kept — as with a garrison, as the word means — through the power of God to salvation.' If there were no serious danger of failing, such a mighty guard would not be needed. Nothing puts us in danger except the corruptions that remain in us, which fight against the soul and strive to overcome and destroy it. To be kept in spite of all these; to have grace sustained — a spark of grace in the middle of a sea of corruption — this honors the power of God in keeping us. It honors Him as much, in view of our dependency on Him in that condition, as He would be honored by our perfect service if we were completely free from those corruptions. How will the grace of God under the Gospel triumph over the grace given to Adam in his innocence? Adam had his heart full of inherent grace, with nothing inwardly in his nature to seduce him, and the temptation he faced was a small matter — satisfying curiosity and pleasing his wife — yet he fell. Meanwhile, many poor souls under grace, who have only small measures of grace compared to worlds of corruption, are kept not only from needless pleasures of sin in prosperity, but hold out against all the threats and cruelties of wicked persecutors in times of persecution — threats to strip them of all the earthly good they possess. Though God's people are often defeated, yet the fact that there remains a seed within them (1 John 3:9) illustrates the grace of Christ under the Gospel. One act in Adam expelled all grace from him, when his heart was full of nothing else. If our hearts were perfectly filled with grace at first conversion, this power would not be seen. The angels are kept with far less care, effort, and power than we are, because they have no bias, no weights of sin hung upon them to pull them down and drag them sideways, as we have.

3. Nor would the devil's confusion in the end be so great, and the victory so glorious, if all sin were expelled at first conversion. As it stands, the devil has in his assaults against us a greater advantage — genuine competition, one might say — because there is already a large faction within us as ready to sin as he is eager to tempt. Yet God powerfully carries on His own work begun, though slowly and by degrees, sustaining and maintaining a small party of grace within us — to the devil's great confusion. In God's outward government of His church on earth, He allows a great party — and by far the greater one — to stand against His church, and yet He upholds it and rules in the midst of His enemies (Psalm 110). He does the same in every individual believer's heart. When grace is in us only as a spark, and corruptions as much smoke and moisture damping it; grace but as a candle nearly burned down in its socket, in the midst of many great winds — then to bring judgment forth to victory, that is a victory indeed.

Lastly, just as God does this to advance His own grace and confound the devil, He also does it for holy ends that concern the saints themselves, such as:

1. To keep them from spiritual pride. God entrusted the fallen angels with a full and complete supply of grace from the beginning. They, though raised from nothing only a short time before, fell into such self-admiration that heaven was not a good enough place for them. As the text says, 'They left their own habitation and first estate' (Jude 6). Pride was the condemnation of the devil (1 Timothy 3:6). But how much more would this have been an occasion of pride to a soul who was nothing but sin the day before, to suddenly be made perfect? To be fully justified on the first day by the righteousness of another carries no such danger, for it is a righteousness outside of us, and not so easily boasted of vainly. The faith that grasps it first empties us of ourselves and reaches out to another for it. But sanctification is a work worked within us, and we are prone to become too attached to it — to dwell on our own inner excellence. How much trouble do poor believers already have keeping their hearts from fixating on their own righteousness and dwelling on it, when it is, as God knows, very little? They must therefore have something within them to humble their spirits, so that when they look at their feathers, they may also look at their feet, which Christ says are still defiled (John 13:10).

2. Even if there were no such danger of spiritual pride from so sudden a rise — as indeed it does not threaten infants or souls who die immediately after regeneration, as the thief on the cross — God still sees fit to use remaining corruption as a means of humbling His people. He left the Canaanites in the land to trouble and humble the Israelites. To have been thoroughly humbled for sin here on earth will do the saints no harm before they reach heaven. It will keep them lowly in their own eyes forever, even when they are filled to the brim with grace and glory.

For 1. nothing humbles like sin. It made Paul cry out, 'Oh, wretched man that I am!' He who never flinched at outward hardships, and never considered himself wretched because of any of them — indeed who gloried in them (2 Corinthians 12) — when he came to be taken captive by the sin remaining in him, cried out, 'Oh, wretched man!'

And 2. the sins of a past unregenerate life are not sufficient to accomplish this thoroughly on their own. Those sins might be looked back on as past and gone, and in some ways might even make the grace that followed conversion all the more glorious by contrast. But present experience humbles most naturally and most deeply, because it is fresh. This is why Paul says, 'Oh, wretched man that I am' — present tense. Moreover, we are not able to know the full depth and extent of our corruptions all at once. We must come to know them gradually. Corruption is therefore left in us so that after we have been given a spiritual eye, we might measure its depth by experience and continue to be humbled for sin by firsthand knowledge. Humbling from experience is the most genuine kind, just as compassion born of experience is.

And 3. God would have us humbled by seeing our dependence on Him for the grace within us. How quickly we are prone to forget that we have received it, and that no good dwells in our own nature. We would not remember that our nature is a hostile environment for grace and a natural home for sinful desires — were it not for the fact that we see weeds still grow on their own without any planting.

And 4. God would have us not only humbled by our dependence on Him, but by a continual sense of our liability to judgment and of being in His debt. He therefore leaves corruption still in us, so that we might always acknowledge that our necks lie on the chopping block — that He could justly cut us off — and so that we might see that in Him we should not only live and move as creatures, but that He would be fully just in destroying us at any moment. This humbles the creature deeply (Ezekiel 36:31-32).

3. As God uses this to humble them, so also to give them occasion to deny themselves. Self-denial is more acceptable to God than far greater service without it, and therefore the great promise of receiving a hundredfold is attached to that grace. It was the greatest grace that Christ above all others exercised. Now if we had no corruption to entice and solicit us, what opportunity would we have for this kind of self-denial? Christ had an infinite store of glory to lay down — we do not have that. Unless there is a self in us to solicit us, and another self to refuse those solicitations, we would have no occasions for self-denial or the exercise of such grace. Adam was not capable of any such grace because he had no corruption to seduce him. Therefore a small measure of grace in us that denies a great deal of corruption is, in that respect, more acceptable than his obedience. Though we have less grace, yet in this respect it is of a higher kind in its exercises.

Be gentle and charitable toward those who fall into sin, knowing that corruption is not yet fully purged from yourself. This is the Apostle's counsel on this very ground (Galatians 6:1): 'If a man be overtaken in a fault' — he speaks generally, that it could happen to anyone — 'if it is only an overtaking, not a willful and stubborn sin, but a falling by occasion, through rashness, suddenness, and the force of temptation, you who are spiritual, restore such a man with the spirit of meekness, considering yourself, lest you also be tempted.' He would have every person be gentle in judging and reproving such a one, and restore him and set him right again — as the word means — for he may still be united to Christ, as a bone out of joint is still part of the body, though for the time made useless. Do this with tenderness and compassion, with the spirit of meekness, which a person will not have unless he is aware of his own frailty and liability to corruption. He must reflect on himself — and seriously, too, as the word 'considering' implies. It is not a passing thought of 'I might also fall someday,' but a genuine weighing of what material for falling exists in your own heart, if God were to leave you to yourself for even a little while. This is what produces a spirit of meekness toward the one who has fallen. Meekness and compassion are most genuine when we feel our own likeness to the one who fell and make their situation our own. He addresses this to the most spiritually mature Christians — not to those who are still in some ways carnal, as the Corinthians were — those newly converted who, finding their corruptions temporarily stunned by the first blow of mortification (though only partly killed, and for a time mostly put to sleep), have not yet experienced the fresh temptations and dangers a person faces in the ongoing progress of the Christian life. Such new converts are therefore prone to imagine they will remain free from assaults and do not expect their sinful desires to rise again. So they are inclined to be more critical of the failures of others. But you who are more spiritually mature — I speak to you, says the Apostle — for you have been most softened by a sense of your own weakness. Even you, he says, if you reflect on what you are in yourselves, have reason to think that you too may be tempted.

Never set yourself any fixed limit or measure of mortification, for there is always more to purge out. You must never stop taking medicine all your life. Do not say, 'Now I have enough grace and enough spiritual health' — but rather, as that great Apostle said, 'Not as though I had already attained' — for indeed you have not. Press on continually for more virtue from Christ. If you have conquered the outward act, do not rest — but work to have the rising impulse of the lust also mortified, and that turning of it over in your imagination. Get your heart deadened toward it as well. And do not stop there — work to hate it, and the very thought of it. The body of death must not only be crucified with Christ but buried as well, and left to decay (Romans 6:4-6). It is crucified in order to be destroyed, says the Apostle there — meaning to continue gradually breaking down after that first death blow.