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My Chains Fell Off
One day as I was passing into the field . . . this sentence fell upon my soul. Thy righteousness is in heaven. And methought, withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God’s right hand; there, I say, was my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, he wants [=lacks] my righteousness, for that was just [in front of] him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, “The same yesterday, today, and forever.” . . . Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from that time those dreadful scriptures of God [e.g., Hebrews 12:16-17] left off to trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing for the grace and love of God.
- John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Hertfordshire: Evangelical Press, 1978, orig. 1666), pp. 90-91.
I am building a digital library of Reformed (regardless of whether or not one think Baptist are) Baptist documents and have simply been astounded at the works of John Gill and John Bunyan, among many. And, as one of my elders has mentioned to me, one need not worry about a dead man writing something next year that will embarrass his current readers. Dead authors are safe!
Beautifully articulated!
What could one possibly add to this, it was all by Christ and all for Christ . These are comforting words.
Manfred,
If you truly understand Reformed thought, you can’t be Baptist and Reformed at the same time. The best you can do is to be a Baptist who agrees with the historic doctrines of grace relative to soteriology. If you have not read “The Reformers and Their Stepchildren by Leonard Verduin, I would strongly recommend it.
Randy – we disagree, apparently on what it means to be reformed. Not worth arguing about, IMO. I’ve read a bit about Verduin’s book, which is described by Phil Johnson as a book which “bends over backward to paint the anabaptists in the best possible light.”
I know of the Radical Reformers vs. the Majesterial Reformers. I have no trouble distinguishing between Baptist theology and doctrine and Presbyterian and I do not allow Presbyterians that I know to be at ease thinking they are the only Reformed folk on the planet. They have by and large forgotten “Semper Reformanda!”