I. What are we to understand by the love of the world.
Have you not tonight been listening to find something in this sermon that you can stumble over? Take care; if you wish to canvil, you can always find occasions enough. Sinners have stumbled over every other doctrine of the Bible into hell, and you may stumble over this.
What would you say of any man that should go home tonight and cut his throat, and say he did it because God foreknew that he would do it, and by creating him with this foreknowledge, designed that he should do it. Would saying that excuse him? No. Yet he is under just as much necessity of doing it as he is of going away from this house in his sins.
You only show that you are determined to harden your hearts, and resist God, and thus compel the holy Lord God to reject you. There is no doctrine of the Bible that can save you, if you persevere in sin, and none that can damn you, if you repent and embrace the Gospel. The blood of Christ flows freely. The fountain is open Sinner, what say you? Will you have eternal life? will you have it now, or will you reject it? Will you trample the law under foot, and stumble over the Gospel to the depths of hell?
SERMON XII.
LOVE OF THE WORLD.
-- 1 John ii. 15.-- "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the
love of the Father is not in him."
This lecture was typed in Eugene Detweiler.
In discussing this subject I shall pursue the following order: --
1. What we are to understand by the love of the world.
2. Who love the wold in this sense.
3. That they do not love God.
I. What are we to understand by the love of the world.
Negatively. The love of the world here spoken of, is not every kind or degree of desire for worldly objects. God has so constituted us, that a certain amount, and certain kinds of worldly objects, are indispensible to our existence. We need food and raiment, implements of husbandry and trade, and various worldly things. The proper desire of which is not sinful, nor inconsistent with the love of God.
But to love the world, is to make worldly things the principal objects of desire and pursuit.