Welcome to the Man of God Network. The Man of God Network is a ministry of Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary in Owensboro, Kentucky. For more recordings, go to sermonaudio.com and do a search at The Narrated Puritan. In 2018, in Sunday School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I was teaching on Pilgrim's Progress, and that's where I became really familiar with Alexander White's characters. But this comes from characters from the Holy War. It's Emmanuel's last charge to Mansoul concerning the remainders of sin and the regenerate. Hold fast till I come. There are many fine things in Emmanuel's last charge to Mansoul, but by far the best thing is the answer to he himself there supplies to this deep and difficult question. Namely, why indwelling sin is still left to rage in the truly regenerate? Why does our Lord not wholly extirpate sin in our regeneration? What can His reason be for leaving their indwelling sin to dwell in His best saints until the day of their death? For, to use His own sad words about sin and its last charge, nothing hurts us but sin. Nothing defiles and debases us but sin. Why then does he not take our sin clean out of us at once? He could speak the word of complete deliverance if he only would. Why then did he not speak that word? That has been a mystery and a grief to all God saints ever since sanctification began to be. And a great interest and a great value of Emmanuel's last charge to Mansoul in the Holy War, stands in this, that he here tells us, if not all, then at least some of his reasons for the policy he pursues with us, intersanctification. Do you know, he asks, as he stands on his chariot steps, surrounded with his captains on the right hand and the left, Do you know why I at first did, and do still, allow sin to live and dwell and harbor in your heart? And then, after an, O yes, for silence, the prince began, and thus proceeded. Do you ask me why I and my father have seen it good to allow the dregs of your sinfulness still to corrupt and to rot in your heart? Do you ask why amid so much in you that is regenerate, there is still so much more in you that is not regenerate? Why while you are without controversy under grace and dwelling sin still so festers and so breaks out in you? Do you ask that? Then attend. And before I go away to come again, I will try to tell you if indeed you are able and willing to bear it. Well then, be silent while I tell you that I have left all of that remaining sin in you to tempt you, to try you, to humble you, and to thrust day and night upon you what is still in your heart, to humble you, take knowledge, take warning, take forethought, to make you humble and to keep you humble, to hide pride from you, and to lay you all your days on the earth in the dust of death. I tell you this day that in all your past life I have ordered and administered all my providences towards you, to humble you, and to prove you, and to make you dust and ashes in your own eyes. And I go away to carry on from heaven the same intention of my father's and mine towards you, We shall try you as silver is tried. We shall sift you as wheat is sifted. We shall search you as Jerusalem is searched with lighted candles. I tell you the truth. I shall bend from heaven all my power which my Father has given me, and all my wisdom, and all my love, and all my grace. What to do, do you think? What to do but to make you to know and to acknowledge the plague of your own heart? the deceitfulness that is the depth of wickedness and the abominableness past all words of your own heart. I do not ascend to my Father with all things in my hand to make your seat soft and your cup sweet and your name great and your seed multiplied. I have far other plans before me for you I have loved you with an everlasting love, and it is to everlasting life that I am leading you. And you must let me lead you through fire and through water, if I am to lead you to heaven at last. I shall have to utterly kill all self-love out of your heart, and to plant all humility in its place. Many a dreadful discovery shall I have to make to you of your profane and inhuman self-love and selfishness. Words will fail you to confess all your selfishness in your most penitent prayer, your towering pride of heart also, and your so contemptible vanity. As for your vanity, I shall so overrule it, the double-minded men about you shall make you and your vanity their sport, their jest, and their prey. And I shall not leave you, nor discharge myself of my work within you, until I see you loathing yourself, and hating yourself, and gnashing your teeth at yourself for your envy of your brother, your envy concerning his house, his wife, and his manservant, and his maidservant, and his ox, and his ass, and everything that is his. You shall find something in you that shall allow you to see your enemy prosper, but not your friend. Something that shall keep you from your sleep because of his talents, his name. his income, and his place which I have given him above you, beside you, and always in your sight. It will be something also that shall make his sickness, his decay, his defamation, and his death sweet to you, and his prosperity and return to life bitter to you. You shall have to confess something in yourself, whatever its nature and whatever its name, something that shall make you miserable at good news and glad and enlarged and full of life at evil tidings. It will be something also that shall give a long life in your evil heart to anger and to resentment and to retaliation and to revenge. For after years and years you shall still have it in your heart to hate and to hurt that man and his house. Because long ago he left your side, your booth in the market, your party in the state, and your church. As I live, swore Emmanuel, standing up on the step of his ascending chariot, I shall show you yourself. I shall show you what an unclean heart is and a wicked heart. I shall teach to you what all true saints shudder at when they are let see the plague of their own hearts. I shall show you as I live how full of pride hate, envy, and ill will a regenerate heart can still have, and how a true-born man of God may still love evil and hate good, may still rejoice in iniquity and pine under the truth. I shall show you also what you will not as yet believe, how your breast friend cannot trust his good name with you. Such a sweet morsel to you shall be the mote in his eye, and a spot on his praise. Yes, I shall show you that I did not die on the cross for nothing when I died for you, when I went out to Calvary, a shame and a spitting and outcast and a curse for you. You shall yet arise up and fall down in your sin and shall justify all my thorns and nails and spears and the last drop of my blood for you. Yea, you shall remember all the way which the Lord your God led you these 40 years in the wilderness to humble you and approve you and to know what was in your heart and whether you would keep his commandments or not. It is also, the still tarrying prince proceeded, it is also to keep you wakeful and to keep you watchful. Now what conceivable estate could any man be put into, even by his Maker and Redeemer, more calculated to call forth wakefulness and watchfulness, than to have one half of his heart new? and the other half old. To have one half of his heart garrisoned by the captains of Emmanuel and the other half still full of the spies and the scouts and the emissaries of hell. You need to have the great bulk of his heart still full of sin and but a small part of his heart here and there under grace and truth. Here is material for fightings without and fears within with a vengeance. If it somehow suits and answers God's deep purposes with His people, to teach them watchfulness in this life, then here is a field for watchfulness, a field of divine depth and scope and opportunity. There used to be a divinity question set in the schools in these terms. Where in the regenerate has sin its lodging place? For that sin does still lodge in the regenerate is too abundantly evident, both from scripture and from experience. But where it so lodges is a question. The dominion monks and some others were of opinion that original sin is to be found only in the inferior part of the soul, but not in the mind or the will, which I suppose we shall soon find contrary both to scripture and reason and experience. Old Andrew Gray speaks fillingly and no less truly concerning the heart when he says, I think that if all the saints since Adam's day, and who shall be to the end of the world? Had but one deceitful heart to guide, they would misguide it. What a plot of God, then! It is to seek grace, a little saving grace, in the midst of such a sea of corruption as a human heart is, and then to set a sinful man to watch over that spark, and to keep the boiling pollutions of his own heart from extinguishing that spark. Well may Paul exclaim, yea, what carefulness that calls forth in us, yea, what indignation, yea, what fear, yea, what vehement desire, yea, what zeal, yea, what revenge. And know unto what he has left our hearts. Well may Emmanuel say to us from his ascending steps, watch you therefore. And what I say unto you, I say unto all, watch. And dwelling sin is left in you to keep you watchful, and to teach you war also, the prince went on. Bishop Butler is about the last author that we would think of going to for light on any deep and intricate question in the evangelical and experimental life. But Butler is so deeply seen into much of the heart of man, as also into many of the ways of God, that even here he has something to say to the point. It is vain to object, he says, in a sober and sobering way, that all this trouble and danger might have been saved us by our being made at once the creatures and the characters which we were to be. For we experience that what we are to be is to be the effect of what we shall do, and that the conduct of nature is not to save us trouble and danger, but to make us capable of going through trouble and danger and to put it upon us to do it. The Apostle Peter has the same teaching in a passage, Tutalittle attended to, in which he tells us that we are set here to work out our own salvation, and that our salvation will just be what? With fear and trembling, or as Butler says, with trouble and danger, we work it out. No man, let all men understand, is to have his salvation thrust upon him. No man need expect to awaken up at the end of an idle, indifferent, inattentive life and find his salvation super-induced upon all that. No man shall wear the crown of everlasting life, who is not for himself wanted. As every man sows to the Spirit, so also shall he reap. As a soldier wars, so shall he hear it said of him, well done. And as a sinner keeps his heart with all diligence and holds it fast until his king comes, so shall he hear it said to him, You have been faithful over a few things. I will make you ruler over many things. If your sin center left in you to teach you war, O poor saint of God, then take to you the whole armor of God. You know the pieces of it, and where the armory is, and having done all, stand. And do you know, O man so, that it is all to try your love also? Now, how, just how, do the remainders of sin and the returner try their love? Why, surely in this way, if we really loved sin at the deepest bottom of our hearts, and only loved holiness on the surface, would we not in our deepest hearts close with sin? give ourselves up to it, and make no stand at all against it? Would we not in our deepest and most secret hearts welcome it, and embrace it, look out for it with desire and delight, and part with it with regret? But if, As a matter of fact, we at our deepest and most hidden heart turn from sin, flee from it, fight against it, rejoice when we are rid of it, and have horror at the return of it. What better proof than that could Christ and his angels have that at bottom we are his and not the devil's, and that grace at bottom has our hearts and not sin? Heaven. and not hell. The apostles' protesting cry is our cry also. We also delight in the law of God after our most inward man. For after our saddest surprises and dissent, after its worst outbreaks and overthrows, such all the time were our reluctances, recalcitrancies, and resistances that swept away as we were. Yet all the time, and after it was again over, it was with some good conscience that we said to Christ that He knew all things and that He knew that we loved Him. O benefit of ill, now I find true, That better is by evil still made better, And ruined love, when it is built anew, Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater. So I return rebuke to my content, And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent. Yes, it is a sure and certain proof how truly we love our dearest friend, that after all our envy and ill will, yet it is as true as that God is in heaven, that all the time, mauger the devil of self that remains in our heart. After he has done his worst, we would still pluck out our eyes for our friend and shed our blood. I have no better proof to myself of the depth and the divineness of my love to my friend than just this. that I still love him, and love him more tenderly and loyally, after having so treacherously hurt him. And my heavenly friends and my earthly friends, if they will still have me, must both be content to go into the same bundle, both of my remaining enmity and my increasing love, my remainders of sin, and my slow growth and regeneration. So when they had dying, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, do you love me more than these? He said unto him, yea, Lord, you know that I love you. He says unto him again the second time, Simon, son of Jonas, do you love me? He says to him, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. He says unto him the third time, Simon, son of Jonas, do you love me? Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, do you love me? And he said unto him, Lord, you know all things, you know that I love you. 5. And to sum up all more than your humility, more than your watchfulness, more than your prayerfulness, more than to teach you war, and more than to try your love, the dregs and remainders of sin have been left in your regenerate heart to exalt and to extol the grace of God. In Emmanuel's very words, it has all been to make you a monument of God's mercy. I put it to yourselves then, you people of God, does this not satisfy you for a reason and for an explanation and for a justification of all your shame and pain and of all your bondage and misery and wretchedness since you knew the Lord? Is there not a heart in you that says, yes, it was worth all my corruption and pollution and misery to help to manifest forth and magnify the glory of the grace of God? you seize on Emmanuel's word that you are a monument of mercy. Somehow that word pleases and reposes you. Yes, that is what out of all these post-regeneration years you are. You would have been a monument to God's mercy had you, like the thief on the cross, been glorified on the same day on which you were first justified. But it will neither be the day of your justification, nor the day of your glorification that will make you the greatest of all in the monuments that shall ever be raised to the praise of God's grace. It will be the day of your sanctification that will do that. Paul was a blasphemer and a persecutor and injurious at his conversion, but he had to be a lifetime in grace and an apostle above all the twelve before he became the chiefest of sinners and the most wretched of saints. And though your first forgiveness was no doubt a great proof of the grace of God, yet it was nothing, nothing at all to your forgiveness today. You had no words for the wonder and the praise of your forgiveness today. You just took to your lips a cup of salvation and let that silent action speak aloud your monumental praise. You were a sinner at your regeneration. else you would not have been regenerated, but you were not then the chief of sinners. But now, ah, now, those words, the chief of sinners, were but idle words in Paul's mouth. He did not know what he was saying, or what has horrified and offended other men when it has been spoken with bated breath to them about envy and hate and malice and revenge and such like remainders of hell. All that has been a breath of life and hope to you. It has been to you is when a Christian in a valley of the shadow of death heard a voice in the darkness, which proved to him that there was another sinner at the mouth of hell besides himself. There is no text that comes oftener to your mind than this, that whoso hates his brother is a murderer. And, communicant as you are, you feel and you know and you are sure that there are many men lying and lying, waiting the day of judgment, to whom it would have been more tolerable for you, were it not that you were to be at that day the highest monument in heaven or earth to the redeeming. pardoning and saving grace of God. Yes, this is the name that shall be written on you. This is the name that shall be read on you of all who shall see you in heaven. This name that Emmanuel pronounced over Mansoul that day from his ascending chariot steps, a very spectacle of wonder and a very monument of the mercy and the grace of God, Alexander White. Thank you for tuning in to the Man of God podcast. For more narrations, go to the Narrated Puritan at sermonaudio.com.