Five things nobody really believes
Posted at Reformation Scotland:
The shape of people’s lives tells you what’s important to them. They must believe that certain things matter, based on where they focus their attention and where they spend their energies. From the little interest they pay to other things, even if they notionally concede their importance, it becomes clear from the absence of any practical impact or consequences in their lives that they don’t really believe in them at all. Over a couple of generations, we have as a society successfully insulated ourselves from meaningful concerns about God and our eternal destiny. In his preaching, the young Covenanting preacher James Renwick points out five things the majority of people simply don’t believe in, as far as anyone can tell from their lives. Yet their failure to reckon with these realities is a terrible mistake. In the following updated extract, Renwick goes on to outline five practical responses that we should be encouraged to make on the basis of really accepting the existence of the one living and true God and the availability of salvation.Five realities we disregard
Beloved, there are five things that are little believed by the most part of this generation.God
The first thing that is little believed by the world is the being of a God. This is apparent by the little fear of God that is in the land. O, if you knew and believed the being of a God, you would certainly fear Him more!
Heaven
The second thing that is little believed by the most part of this generation is that there is a heaven, a place of rest for the souls of the godly. If they did, there would be more labour and diligence to get it for their dwelling place, and there would be more holiness in you, and hungering after it, so that you would enjoy the pleasant inheritance that is above, where the service of God cannot be interrupted and marred by spiritual or temporal enemies, as it is often here below.
Hell
The third thing that is little believed by the most part of the world is that there is a hell, a place of torment, where the souls of the wicked go to after death, even a place of endless torment where there is no mitigation of the pain for evermore.
O friends! If this were believed, people would make much more effort to avoid this place. You would not carry on entertaining idols in your hearts as you do. You would not comply with the sinful courses of the time as you do. There would not be such a compliance with these slaves of the enemy, neither would there be such a running in to them, if you believed that there was such a place as hell, where all impenitent sinners must receive what their sins justly deserve through all eternity.
