And how very great is His power at work in us who believe. This power working in us is the same as the mighty strength
Which He used when He raised Christ from death and seated Him at His right side in the heavenly world. Ephe.1:19-20.
Man needs to be roused by a mighty and effectual power out of his sleep and death. It is not a little pull, a gentle snatch at his coat, a slight tug at his sleeve, which will pull him out of his sins. He must be snatched from them as a person would be snatched from bed when the house is on fire, pull out of a river when sinking for the last time. Let us never think that the work of grace upon the heart is a slight or superficial one.
Indeed, there needs a mighty work of grace upon a sinner's heart to deliver him from his destructions. We always, therefore, find the work of grace to begin by a spiritual sight and sense of our ruined condition before God.
But this alone will not suffice to make us true-hearted disciple of Christ Jesus. It is a preparation for a sight of the king in his beauty, but it is not the same thing as to see and believe in the Son of God unto eternal life. We must have sonething far beyond any convictions of sin or any sense of our lost and ruined condition. We must have by faith a view of the blessed Lord more or less manifested to our souls by that Holy Spirit whose office it is to take of the things of Christ and to reveal them to the heart so as to see his suitability, his grace, his glory, his work, his blood, his obedience, and to see these Divine and Blessed realities by the eye of faith, as to know and feel for ourselves that they are exactly adapted to our case and state; that they are the very things we require to save us from the wrath to come; and that so far as we have a saving interest in them we are saved from floods of destruction.
A faith in Him that works by love and purifies the heart, overcomes the world, and delivers from death and hell. Amen.