Chapter 18: Legal Experience II. I am to show the importance of a right understanding of this passage.
A right understanding of this passage must be fundamental. If this passage in fact describes a sinner under conviction, or a purely legal experience, and if a person supposing that it is a Christian experience, finds his own experience to correspond with it, his mistake is a fatal one. It must be a fatal error, to rest in his experience as that of a real Christian, because it corresponds with the seventh of Romans, if Paul in fact is giving only the experience of a sinner under legal motives and considerations.
III. I will lay down some principles and facts that have a bearing on the elucidation of this subject.
1. It is true that mankind act, in all cases, and frost the nature of mind, must always act, as on the whole they feel to be preferable
Or, in other words, the will governs the conduct. Men never act against their will. The will governs the motion of the limbs. Voluntary beings cannot act contrary to their will.
2. Men often desire what, on the whole they do not choose.
The desires and the will are often opposed to each other. The conduct is governed by the choice, not by the desires. The desires may be inconsistent with the choice. You may desire to go to some other place tonight, and yet on the whole choose to remain here. Perhaps you desire very strongly to be somewhere else, and yet choose to remain in meeting. A man wishes to go a journey to some place. Perhaps he desires it strongly. It may be very important to his business or his ambition. But his family are sick, or some other object requires him to be at home, and on the whole he chooses to remain. In all cases, the conduct follows the actual choice.
3. Regeneration, or conversion, is a change in the choice.
It is a change in the supreme controlling choice of the mind. The regenerated or converted person prefers God's glory to everything else. He chooses it as the supreme object of affection. This is a change of heart. Before, he chose his own interest or happiness, as his supreme end. Now, he chooses God's service in preference to his own interest. When a person is truly born again, his choice is habitually right, and of course his conduct is in the main right.
The force of temptation may produce an occasional strong choice, or even a succession of wrong choices, but his habitual course of action is right. The will, or choice, of a converted person is habitually right, and of course his conduct is so. If this is not true, I ask, in what does the converted differ from the unconverted person? If it is not, the character of the converted person, that he habitually does the commandments of God, what is his character?
But I presume this position will not be disputed by any one who believes in the doctrine of regeneration.
4. Moral agents are so constituted, that they naturally and necessarily approve of what is right.