289 DIRECTIONS FOR GETTING AND KEEPING godly men should perform all these with perfect Willingness; the flesh will play its part, in pleading its own cause, and will strive hard to maintain its own interests. O, the shifts, the subtile arguments, or at least the clamorous and importunate contradic- tions that all these duties will meet with in the best, so far as they are renewed, and their graces weak ! So that you may well hence conclude that you are a sinner, but you may not conclude that you are graceless, because of a backwardness and some unwillingness to duty. Yet your willingness must be greater than your unwillingness, and so Christ must have the prevailing part of your will ; and from that the denomination is usually taken. So that Scripture useth to affirm God's people to be willing even when they fail in the execution. So. Paul (Rom. vii. 18.) saith, "To will is present with me, when how to do or perform he found not ; " that is, not to obey so perfectly as he would do; not to love God so intensely and fervently; not to subdue passions and lusts so 'thoroughly ; not to watch our thoughts, and words, and ways, so narrowly, and order them soexactly, as the bent of his will did consent to. And lest any ,Arminian should pretend (as they do) that Paul speaks here in the person of an unregenerate man, as under the convic- tions of the law, and not as a man regenerate ; it is plain in the text that he speaks of himself in the state which he was then in, and that the state was a regenerate state. He expressly saith, it is thus, and thus with me; " So then I myself with my mind do serve the law of God, but with my flesh do serve the law of sin;" ver. 25. And to put it out of doubt, the apostle speaks the like of all Christians; Gal. v. 17. "For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would." This is the plain exposition of Rom. vii. Here Scripturemaketh the godly willing to do more than they do or can do, but yet it is not a perfect willingness, but it is the prevailing inclination and choice of the will, and that gives the name. iv. Observe further, that Ì add your actual performance of duty ; because true hearty willingness will show itself ill actions and en- deavors. It is but dissembling, if I should say I am willing to perform the strictest, holiest duties, and yet do not perform them ; to say I am willing to pray, and pray not ; dr to give to the poor, and yet give not; or to perform the most self-denying, costly duties, and yet when it should come to the practice, I will not be per- suaded or drawn to them ; I will not confessa disgraceful sin, nor further a good cause to my danger, cost or trouble ; nor reprove, nor submit to reproof,nor turn from the way of temptations or the like. Action must discover true willingness. The son that said to
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