The Works of Thomas Goodwin, Volume 04 of 12

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BOOK III. Tin corruption of man'i whole nature, and of all the faculties of his soul by sin; and first of tlie depravation of the understanding, which is full of darkness and blinded, so that it cannot apprehend spirituat things in a due spiritual manner. And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly: and I pray God your whole spirit and said and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesui Christ.?1 Thes. V. 28. CHAPTER I. wards of the text explained.?That all the faculties of tlie soul, even the mind, are wliolly corrupted, proved from the expressions concerning it in Scripture, and from the equal extent both of sin and grace. These words have no coherence or dependence with the foregoing, for the conclusion of the epistle doth begin with them. They are a prayer for the working and perfecting that sanctification in them unto which he had exhorted, and which God had begun to work. Concerning which you have these things. 1. The author of this sanctification, God, to whom Paul prays to work and perfect it. And in prayer believers use to suit their invocation to God, according to the nature of the blessing they seek for. James i. 5, ' If auy of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, ' ver. 17, ' the Father of lights.' So if we pray for mercy and comfort, then we are to call upon God, as the Father of mercies and God of all consolation, as Paul doth, 2 Cor. i. 8, ' Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort.' Yet still we are to use such expressions, both as motives to move God out of his fulness to bestow what we ask, and as a strengthening to our own faith. And accordingly here in the text, when Panl asks sanctification at God's hands, he looks up to him as ' the God of peace.' Sin...