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through Christ. The sinner now forsakes his sins and endeavours by God's grace to keep
God's commandments. He therefore, through communion with God, enjoys unspeakable happiness
here on earth, even amid persecutions, sorrows, and trials. He knows from his own
experience that all which the Bible declares concerning the fruits of salvation is
certainly true.
The change, then, which the influence of the Holy Spirit produces in the heart of the
believer in Christ is such that it not only turns the heart from sin to righteousness,
from darkness to light, from Satan to God, but is really a new spiritual birth (John iii.
3, 5), by virtue of which the true believer in Christ becomes spiritually a new creation
(2 Cor. v. 17; compare Gal. vi. 15).
It is the will of God that every man should repent of his sins and should obtain
salvation through faith in Christ (Ezek. xxxiii. 11; I Tim. ii. 3-6; 2 Pet. iii. 9). Hence
no one is shut out from the hope of salvation. Everyone who sincerely seeks for redemption
through Christ will assuredly obtain it (John vi. 37). But those who, trusting in what
they consider to be their own good deeds and the store of fancied merits which Satan tells
them they have laid up for themselves, refuse to come to Christ for salvation, are
resisting the Holy Spirit and are pronouncing their own condemnation (John iii. 16-21; v.
40). Though here they may resist Christ's love and mercy, yet finally they will be
compelled to bow down before Him, as the Scriptures say (Isa. xlv. 23; Rom. xiv. 11; Phil.
ii. 9-11).
From what has been said it will be evident that the change of heart produced by faith
in Christ does not allow men to remain in carelessness or to continue in sin. It is a
living and life-giving faith, urging men to do all that is good and to refrain from evil.
Thus the believer in Christ, if his faith is real, by the grace of God's Holy Spirit
overcomes sin in his own heart, resists the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the
devil, treads down his own evil desires, and devotes
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