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A thin slice of godliness
over a mass of carnality!
Spurgeon, "Constancy and Inconstancy: a Contrast."
"...what should I do with you?" asks the Lord.
"For your goodness vanishes like the morning
mist and disappears like dew in the sunlight."
Hosea 6:4
Oh, beware of pious veneering!
Beware of the religion which consists
in putting on a thin slice of godliness
over a mass of carnality!
We must have thorough going work
within; the grace which reaches the
core, and affects the innermost spirit
is the only grace worth having.
The absence of the Holy Spirit is the
great cause of religious instability.
Beware of mistaking 'religious excitement'
for the Holy Spirit, or your own resolutions
for the deep workings of the Spirit of God
in the soul.
All that human nature ever paints, God
will burn off with hot irons. All that human
nature ever spins he will unravel and cast
away with the rags.
You must be born from above, you must
have a new nature wrought in you by the
finger of God himself, for of all his saints
it is written, "You are his workmanship,
created anew in Christ Jesus."
Oh, but, everywhere I fear there is an
absence of the Holy Spirit! There is much
getting up of a tawdry morality, barely
skin deep, much crying "Peace, peace,"
where there is no true peace. There is
very little deep heart searching anxiety
to be thoroughly purged from sin.
The hopes of many hypocrites are flimsily
formed, and their confidences ill founded.
It is this which makes deceivers so plentiful,
and fair religious shows so common.
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