When a man is absorbed by a new master-passion, what a different man he becomes. The passion for wealth will work marvels! We have known idle people become very diligent, and profuse voluptuaries become even self-denying to their flesh in their ambition to acquire riches.
In the same way, whenever God really saves a person, He gives that person a new master-passion the passion of gratitude to Christ, along with love to the God who saved him.
These always become a new master-principle which rules the entire man.
From the moment that a man sincerely believes in Jesus, his nature becomes different from what it was before. He receives a new heart. Another influence takes possession of him, and another love engrosses him.
He who once loved sin now loves God and lives for Him.
By the saving grace of God, this supernatural change is possible even to the most vile and degraded people.
If a man has committed every crime in the whole catalog of villainy, and his heart has become as hard as the nether millstone, and his disposition altogether vile and detestable, and groveling, and sensual, and devilish the Spirit can turn that man in a single moment, into a lover of that which is true, and right, and just!
Yes, the Spirit can passionately inflame him with the desire to be perfectly holy!
We do not teach that Christ forgives men and then lets them continue to live in the hog pens as before! We assert that the moment He gives the pardon of sin, He gives the new nature as well. The gospel hospital is not merely a place where lepers are harbored, but where lepers are healed!
[Charles H. Spurgeon]
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Ezekiel 36:26–27 ... A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.
2 Corinthians 5:17 ... Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. ❤
