The Eternal Good News ~ the Gratuitous Bounty of God

SALVATION ALL OF GRACE

 

     "It pleased God to deliver me from the Arminian snare before I was quite eighteen years of age.  Before that, I confess with the lowest self-abasement, there was not a more haughty and violent free-willer to be found within the compass of the four seas.  But, blessed be God, I have since been enabled to acknowledge the freeness and omnipotence of His grace, times without number; and to sing (what I trust will be my everlasting song when time shall be no more), “Not unto me, O LORD, not unto me, but unto Thy Name, give all the glory” (Psalm 115:1).

 

We never know so much of heaven in our own souls, nor stand so high upon the mount of communion with God, as when His Spirit, breathing on our hearts, makes us lie low at the footstool of sovereign grace, and inspires us with this cry, “O God, be mine the comfort of salvation, but Thine be the entire praise of it!”

 

Let us briefly apply the rule and compass of God’s word to the several parts of which salvation is composed and we shall soon perceive that the whole building is made up of grace, and of grace alone.  Do you ask in what sense I here take the word grace?  I mean by that important term, the voluntary, sovereign, and gratuitous bounty of God; quite unconditioned by, and irrespective of, all and every shadow of human worthiness.  This is precisely the scripture idea of grace: to wit, that it [i.e. salvation in all its branches] “is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God Who sheweth mercy” (Romans 9:16).  And thus it is that grace reigneth unto the eternal life of sinners, through the righteousness of Jesus Christ our Lord (see Romans 5:21). 

 

 

 -preacher Augustus Toplady (1740-1778 A.D.)

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