From a sermon George Whitefield preached entitled “The
Holy Spirit Convincing the World of Sin, Righteousness, and Judgment”:
“We have
seen how the Holy Ghost convinces the sinner of the sin of his nature, life,
duties, and of the sin of unbelief; and what then must the poor creature do? He
must, he must inevitably despair, if there be no hope but in himself. When
therefore the Spirit has hunted the sinner out of all his false rests and hiding-places,
taken off the pitiful fig-leaves of his own works, and driven him out of the
trees of the garden (his outward reformations) and place him naked before the
bar of a sovereign, holy, just, and sin-avenging God; then, then it is, when
the soul, having the sentence of death within itself because of unbelief, has a
sweet display of Christ's righteousness made to it by the Holy Spirit of God.
Here it is, that he begins more immediately to act in the quality of a
Comforter, and convinces the soul so powerfully of the reality and
all-sufficiency of Christ's righteousness, that the soul is immediately set a
hungering and thirsting after it. Now the sinner begins to see, that though he
has destroyed himself, yet in Christ is his help; that, though he has no
righteousness of his own to recommend him, there is a fullness of grace, a
fullness of truth, a fullness of righteousness in the dear Lord Jesus, which,
if once imputed to him, will make him happy forever and ever.”
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