Holy Club<\/b><\/p>\n
During his years at Oxford John became associated with the \u201cHoly Club,\u201d a group of serious churchmen committed to a methodically rigorous regimen of religious observance with the brothers John and Charles Wesley as the leading spirits. Their remarkable earnestness manifested itself in ascetic living, regular devotions, charitable works, and solemn discussion, but it was unenlightened by the Gospel. \u201cI began to fast twice a week for thirty-six hours together,\u201d Whitefield wrote in later years, \u201cprayed many times a day and received the sacrament every Lord\u2019s Day. I fasted myself almost to death all the forty days of Lent, during which I made it a point of duty never to go less than three times a day to public worship, besides seven times a day to my private prayers. Yet I knew no more that I was to be born a new creature in Christ Jesus than if I had never been born at all.\u201d Deeply dissatisfied at heart, the reading of a book with the title The Life of God in the Soul of Man by Henry Scougal made plain to him the necessity of personal commitment to and union with Christ as Saviour and Lord. Desperately seeking this relationship, he increased his self-affliction to such an extent that his weakness brought him near to death. At last, however, the grace of God enabled him to trust solely in Christ instead of in his own religious exercises: \u201cGod was pleased to remove the heavy load,\u201d he testified, \u201cto enable me to lay hold of His dear Son by a living faith, and by giving me the Spirit of adoption, to seal me even to the day of everlasting redemption.\u201d His life continued to be one of zeal and self-discipline and was carefully planned from day to day; but from now on his overruling desire was to proclaim Christ and his grace to the world.<\/p>\n
Source unknown<\/p>\n
Poll<\/b><\/p>\n
[According to a recent poll] 88% of Catholics and a majority of Presbyterian and Methodist evangelizers [those who actively try to share their \u201cfaith\u201d] believe that \u201cif people are generally good, or do enough good things for others during their lives, they will earn a place in heaven.\u201d<\/p>\n
National & International Religion Report, 8\u201323-93<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Holy Club During his years at Oxford John became associated with the \u201cHoly Club,\u201d a group of serious churchmen committed to a methodically rigorous regimen of religious observance with the brothers John and Charles Wesley as the leading spirits. Their remarkable earnestness manifested itself in ascetic living, regular devotions, charitable works, and solemn discussion, but … Continue reading “Good Works”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}