Watching Sanctification: The Honorable Obsession learned that Wilberforce's main concern in life was Christian Living. Real Christianity Wilberforce is about practical living. Professing Christians can be speaking of upbringing, nationality, religion, or morality but do they know the religion of Jesus? Wilberforce says, "Their standard of right and wrong is not the standard of the gospel: they approve and condemn by a different rule; they advance principles and maintain opinions altogether opposite to the genius and character of Christianity."
What did Jesus say? What does the Bible teach? So many have self-induced ignorance and suffer as a result, yet this is not a new way of life. I often go back to the Commandments of Jesus, one of my favorite studies.
Everywhere in life, we see excellence is only attained through diligence, study, commitment, and practice, "Yet we expect to be Christians without labor, study, or inquiry. This is more preposterous, because Christianity, being a revelation from God, and not the invention of man, discovering to us new relations, with their correspondent duties; containing also doctrines, and motives, and practical principles, and rules, peculiar to itself, and almost as new in their nature as supreme in their excellence, we cannot reasonably expect to become proficient in it by the accidental intercourses of life, as one might learn insensibly the maxims of worldly policy or a scheme of mere morals."
He recommends the pursuit of Holy Scripture and seeing the promise to the first people in Genesis, the prophets, and the Christmas miracle to the desire of the nations in Revelation.
The big message: you have the Bible, don't be ignorant of it's contents.
People wish they were generally good, only failing a little, once in a while. "Far different is the humiliating language of Christianity. From it we learn that man is an apostate creature, fallen from his high original, degraded in his nature, and depraved in his faculties; indisposed to good, and disposed to evil; prone to vice, it is natural and easy to him; disinclined to virtue, it is difficult and laborious; that he is tainted with sin, not slightly and superficially, but radically and to the very core. These are truths which, however mortifying to our pride, one would think (if this very corruption itself did not warp the judgment) none would be hardy enough to attempt to controvert."
Arm yourselves also with the same attitude as Christ (1 Peter 4:1-4)
Diagnostics of a depraved psychology and consequences (Romans 1:18-32)
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