Quote of the Day: A. A. Hodge on Supererogation and Hyper Sanctification

A man truly loving holiness and hating sin, himself a redeemed sinner preaching to his fellow-sinners, cannot stultify himself and mock them by telling them to be good as they can with all their might, and God will bless them. He must either preach despair, or an adequate expiation and gracious reconciliation as the basis of all real reform. The opposite method, unhappily becoming less infrequent than hitherto, is an evident symptom of a miserably low moral standard. The age-spirit which doubts about the reality and eternity of future punishment naturally ceases to emphasize justification on the basis of vicarious expiation, and to postpone it as the consequent of regeneration, sanctification, and the life work which follows. The end is evident and inevitable. Without antecedent reconciliation men cannot be truly sanctified. So the same low sense of sin which leads to the ignoring of justification, or to its removal from its position as the beginning and fountain of all practical grace, will necessarily lead to the denial of the soul’s need to any grace, and of its obligation to any law. Legalism makes fair professions; but, beginning with the denial of innate sinfulness and moral impotency, it proceeds logically to ignore the abomination of sin and the excellence of virtue, and ends in an abyss of license which confounds all moral distinctions.

[From:  The Ordo Salutis].

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Reasonable Christian Blog Glory be to the Father, and to the Son : and to the Holy Ghost; Answer. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be : world without end. Amen. 1662 Book of Common Prayer