ties; "with him is plenteous redemption," Psal.
cxxx. 7, 8. This is the plenty, this is the sufficiency of it,--that he
redeems not only from misery, but from iniquity, and that all iniquities.
I would not desire a believer's soul to be in a better posture here
away,(170) than this,--to be looking upon sin indwelling as his bondage,
and redemption from it as freedom; to account himself in so far free, as
the free Spirit of Christ enters and writes that free law of love and
obedience in his heart, and blots out these base characters of the law of
sin. It were a good temper to be groaning for the redemption of the soul,
and why doth a believer groan for the redemption of the body, but because
he shall then be freed wholly from the law of sin, and from the presence
of sin? I know not a greater argument to a gracious heart, to subdue his
corruption, and strive for freedom from the law of sin, than the freedom
obtained from the law of death. Nor is there any clearer argument and
evidence of a soul delivered from death than to strive for the freedom of
the spirit from the law of sin. These jointly help one another. Freedom
from death will raise up a Christian's heart to aspire to a freedom and
liberty from sin, and again, freedom from sin will witness and evidence
that such an one is delivered from death. When freedom from death is an
inducement to seek after freedom from sin, and freedom from sin a
declaration of freedom from death, then all is well, and indeed thus it
will be in some measure with every soul that is quickened by this new law
of the Spirit of life, for it is the entry of this that expels its
contrary, the law of sin. And indeed the law must enter, the command and
the promise must enter into the soul, and the affections of the soul be
enlivened thereby, or rather the soul changed into the similitude of that
mould or else the having of it in a book, or in one's memory and
understanding, will never make him the richer or freer. A Christian looks
to the pattern of the law, and the word of the gospel without, but he must
be changed into the image of it, by beholding it, and so he becomes a
living law to himself. The Spirit writes these precepts and practices of
Christ's, in which he commands imitation, upon the fleshly tables of the
heart. And now the law is not a rod above his head, as above a slave, but
it is turned into a law of love within his heart and hath something like a
natural instinct in it. All that men c