Idling life away like an idiot or a madman!
(J.C. Philpot, “The Soul’s Growth in Grace” 1837)
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“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation!
Old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new!” 2 Corinthians 5:17
When one is spiritually reborn, he sees at one and the same moment . . .
God, and self,
justice, and guilt,
power, and helplessness,
a holy law, and a broken commandment,
eternity, and time,
the purity of the Creator, and the filthiness of the creature.
And these things he sees, not merely as declared in the Bible, but as revealed in himself as personal realities, involving all his happiness or all his misery, in time and in eternity. Thus it is with him as though a new existence had been communicated, and as if for the first time he had found there was a God!
It is as though all his days he had been asleep, and were now awakened; asleep upon the top of a mast, with the raging waves beneath;as if all his past life were a dream, and the dream were now at an end. He has been . . .
hunting butterflies,
blowing soap bubbles,
angling for minnows,
picking daisies,
building houses of cards, and
idling life away like an idiot or a madman!
He had been perhaps wrapped up in a religious profession, advanced even to the office of a deacon, or mounted in a pulpit. He had learned to talk about Christ, and election, and grace, and fill his mouth with the language of Zion.
But what did he experimentally know of these things? Nothing, absolutely nothing!
Ignorant of his own ignorance (of all kinds of ignorance the worst), he thought himself rich, and increased with goods, and to have need of nothing; and knew not that he was wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.
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