Directions for Young Christians, Part 2

Concerning Balance in Christianity
by Richard Baxter

 To change your opinions is an easier matter than to change the heart and life. A holding of the truth will save no man, without a love and practice of the truth. This is the meaning of James 2, where he speaketh so much of the unprofitableness of a dead, unaffected belief, that worketh not by love, and commandeth not the soul to practice and obedience.
 

•  To believe that there is a God, while you neglect Him and disobey Him, is unlikely to please Him.
• To believe that there is a heaven, while you neglect it, and prefer the world before it, will never bring you
  [there]. 
• To believe your duty, and not to perform it, and to believe that sin is evil, and yet to live in it, is to sin with aggravation, and have no excuse, and not the way to be accepted or justified with God. 
• To be of the same belief with holy men, without the same hearts and conversations, will never bring you to the same felicity. “He that knoweth His master’s will and doth it not” shall be so far from being accepted for it that he “shall be beaten with many stripes” (see Luke 12:47). 
• To believe that holiness and obedience is the best way, will never save the disobedient and unholy.

(Click here to read the whole message.)

 Taken with gratitude from Scripture Studies.com

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