Wednesday March 2, 2016
Cheerful Piety – Letter I
John Berridge
To Mr. B.
Dear Friend,
With a melancholy pleasure, and at the same time self-abasement, I heard your lectures on man’s heart, as fallen by original apostasy, and the dreadful epidemical disease of sin, which has spread itself over the whole soul. When you dissected and anatomised the heart of man as before and after conversion, you went into the private closet of my heart, and the underground vaults, where you have dug up some of the bones of the old man that have long lain rotting there.
Here is the general exchange for corruption, Mark 7:21; here the world and the devil often meet together; here they correspond, trade, and traffic, and Satan well knows this is the best place for vending his contraband goods, having so many friends that court the heart, and recommend his wares; namely, vain thoughts, worldly imaginations, evil and impure sensations, earthly affections, inordinate desires, ambitious views, high-mindedness, riches, and sinful pleasures, or pharisaical righteousness, moral confidence, unscriptural hopes, formal sanctity, uncovenanted mercy, &c.
Satan takes a turn round these walks, and pays his compliments, if I may say so, to the inmates of my soul, who are his good friends, every day, aye, every hour; he tries all ways to find out the constitutional sin, or what the apostle calls, my besetting sin. Heb. 12:1. He has baits for all sorts of corruptions, and he endeavours to time his assaults. Sometimes he bids good-morrow to one lust or corruption, sometimes to another, and so makes his cruel visits from one place of the soul to another all day long, and never bids good-night; for even when I go to bed he lies down with me, and sometimes in my sleep he haunts and awakes me.
If I go into my closet, in order to lock myself up from the busy world, this impertinent intruder, the devil, will break in there, without asking my leave: and so in the family, and even in the sanctuary, the house of God, I am dogged by this roaring lion. 1 Peter 5:8; Romans 7:21. Sometimes he snatches the preached word from me, in a way of forgetfulness; sometimes presents other objects to my view; and sometimes would have me make an ill use of it, by misapplying it. Sometimes I pray as if I were praying to a wooden god, without a proper sense of his divinity and omniscience, and so only word it with God. By the way, I would not charge the devil with more than his just due; for I know my own corrupt heart sometimes invites Satan to come in, and has often entertained, and bidden him welcome.
Oh, how ought I to be humbled, that I have so often fetched a chair for Satan, the tempter, to sit down in, while he has entertained himself upon the lusts and affections of my soul; and has he not had the insolence sometimes to tempt me to sin from the aboundings of grace? Oh, horrid injection! And sometimes such cogitations have worked upon the imagination and the heart in and under ordinances. What power Satan’s temptations have had, and how often the seeds of sin have sprung up, and blossomed, and budded, and brought forth to my sorrow, as well as shame, I cannot express; but I would open the matter with soul-abasement to the eye of him who looks down into my heart, and sees all the workings of iniquity within me.
Respecting what you are now upon, it is pleasing to find experience answers experience, as face to face in a glass. Prov. 27:19.
There is a prodigious alliance formed by the empire of hell, the god of this world, and by unbelief, with all its train of sins in the heart of every natural man, and the unrenewed part in every true believer: this is the threefold cord that is not easily broken; this is the grand alliance. Sir, thus the case stands; and on these accounts my soul has often bled; afraid of myself, afraid of the devil, afraid of every one, and sometimes afraid even of my God. Job 23:15,16. I have sometimes had hopes that grace had enthroned itself in my heart, and I have had, as it were, a cessation from corruption; at least, in some branches, the war has seemed to be at an end, almost, and I have often sung a funeral song of victory over, as I thought, a dead corruption; but Satan has called up all his forces, and fired again, and with his fireballs has set the whole City of my soul into a flame, and there has been a resurrection of the monster sin, again.
Oh, pity me, all you combatants in the field of battle, that know the force of temptation, and are haunted as I am, with these ghosts continually. The devil sometimes gets me down and buffets me with the sin that most easily besets me, and then turns accuser, and brings railing accusations against me; and if he cannot keep me from a throne of grace he makes me go limping and halting there, afraid to open my mouth; and sometimes I can only hold up my hand at the bar, and cry, Guilty! guilty guilty!
And now, sir, let me ask you, is this balm in Gilead for an old stinking sore, as well as for a constant running one? a sore that I thought had been healed long ago, but breaks out again and again with its blood issue. Is there a physician? What, for such a nauseous, defiled, stinking, as well as weak and sin-sick soul as mine? I truly need a physician within, as well as without: Christ, and his blood and righteousness, to justify and acquit, and the blessed Spirit to sanctify and cure the inward diseases of my soul; for what would it avail a condemned malefactor to be pardoned and acquitted of his crimes, if he had the jail distemper upon him, and were to die by it?
Indeed, God never justifies but he sanctifies. Election is God’s mark to know his own children by. Calling and sanctification are our marks, by which we come to know that we ourselves are his elected children. Oh then, set forth the work of the Spirit in a rebellious will, a blind understanding, a hard heart, a stupid conscience and vile affections, renewing and sanctifying all these powers, and so proving it to be truly the work of God, and not of man. This gospel sanctification I need and earnestly desire; and if you can help me in the present prospect of the eye of Christ scanning the hidden parts of man, it would be doing a good piece of service not only to me, but perhaps to many others who may be in the same case.
Dear sir, may you be helped to lay open the inward powers of the soul, and the deceitful arts of the body, for the alarming and rousing the stupid and careless, and for the search and enquiry of every real Christian, both with regard to the principle, growth, and activity of grace, or the decay and witherings of it; what interest God has in the heart, and how much sin and Satan have; what advances heavenward, or what loitering, back-slidings, or falls there are found too often in the way to glory.
I am, dear friend, yours,
John Berridge.