On vacation, I kept a copy of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons on my bedside
table as a way of going to sleep with a God-centered mind. One of those
sermons was called “Keeping the Presence of God.” It was preached on a
colony-wide fast day in April 1742. The second wave of the First Great
Awakening had crested in the vicinity, and Edwards was seeing both the
good and bad fallout of revival. He saw spiritual dangers lurking
everywhere. In the next year, as he preached his famous series on the
religious affections, he would become the most careful analyst and
student of human hearts that had been wakened in the revival. What he
saw in those hearts was mixed.
So in this sermon, “Keeping the Presence of God,” his aim was to stir
up awakened Christians to be vigilant that their exuberance not become
pride. He exhorted them to give themselves to watchfulness and prayer so
as to remain broken, humble, and happy in the good work of God in
their lives.
Oh, how different is the path of Christian maturity pointed out by
Edwards f rom the path most Christians walk today. There is a kind of
cavalier attitude toward our security today. There is little trembling,
little vigilance, earnestness, caution, and watchfulness over our souls.
There is a kind of casual, slack, careless attitude toward the
possibilit y that we might make shipwreck of our faith and fail to lay
hold on eternal life. We have the notion that security is a kind of
mechanical, automatic thing. We prayed once to receive Jesus. We are
safe and there is no place for “working out [our] own salvation with
fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). That is not what Edwards saw in the Bible. Keep Reading >>>
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