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The sermon presents a traditional evangelical doctrine of sanctification: regeneration does not eradicate the sinful nature, so believers experience ongoing conflict between sin and the new spiritual nature. This remaining sin obstructs prayer, worship, obedience, and assurance, making watchfulness and perseverance necessary. Yet the believer’s hope rests not in personal progress but in God’s preserving grace and Christ’s completed work. Sinners are urged to confess their vileness and trust Christ’s blood and righteousness for immediate pardon and justification.
Theological center: Salvation fully pardons and justifies sinners through Christ, while indwelling sin remains in believers and must be resisted by God’s preserving grace.
Applications: Persevere after conversion · Watch your heart continually · Trust God’s preserving grace · Come to Christ in faith
Primary texts: Job 42:1-6 · Romans 7:24 · 1 John 1:8
“Then Job answered the LORD and said, Behold, I am vile.” Job 40:3-4 SURELY if any man had a right to say, I am not vile, it was Job. According to the testimony of God Himself, he was “a perfect and an upright man, one that feared God and eschewed evil.” Yet we find even this eminent saint, when by his nearness to God he had received light enough to discover his own condition, exclaiming, “Behold, I am vile.” We are sure that what Job was forced to say, we may each of us assent unto, whether we are God’s children or not. And if we be partakers of divine grace, it becomes a subject of great consideration for us, since even we, although we be regenerated, must exclaim, each one for himself, “Behold, I am vile.” It is a doctrine, as I believe, taught us in Holy Writ, that when a man is saved by divine grace, he is not wholly cleansed from the corruption of his heart. When we believe in Jesus Christ, all our sins are pardoned. Yet the power of sin, albeit that it is weakened and kept under by the dominion of the newborn nature which God does infuse into our souls, does not cease, but still tarries in us and will do so to our dying day. It is a doctrine held by all the orthodox, that there dwells still in the regenerate, the lusts of the flesh, and that there does still remain in the hearts of those who are converted by God’s mercy, the evil of carnal nature. I have found it very difficult to distinguish, in experiential matters, concerning sin. It is usual with many writers, especially with hymn writers, to confound the two natures of a Christian. Now, I hold that there is in every Christian two natures, as distinct as were the two natures of the God-Man Christ Jesus. There is one nature which cannot sin, because it is born of God—a spiritual nature, coming directly from heaven, as pure and as perfect as God Himself, who is the author of it. And there is also in man that ancient nature which, by the fall of Adam, has become altogether vile, corrupt, sinful, and devilish. There remains in the heart of the Christian a nature which cannot do that which is right, any more than it could before regeneration, and which is as evil as it was before the new birth—as sinful, as altogether hostile to God’s laws, as ever it was—a nature which, as I said before, is curbed and kept under by the new nature in a great measure, but which is not removed and never will be until this tabernacle of our flesh is broken down, and we soar into that land into which there shall never enter anything that defiles. It will be my business this morning to say something of that evil nature…