Are you a true believer? If so, have you found any improvement in your old nature? Is it a single whit better now than it was when you first started on your Christian course? You may, through grace, be able to subdue it more thoroughly; but it is nothing better. If it be not mortified, it is just as ready to spring up and show itself in all its vileness as ever. “The flesh” in a believer is in no wise better than “the flesh” in an unbeliever. If this be forgotten, it would be hard to calculate the result. If the Christian does not bear in mind that self must be judged, he will soon learn, by bitter experience, that his old nature is as bad as ever; and, moreover, that it will be the very same to the end.

It is difficult to conceive how anyone who is led to expect a gradual improvement of his nature can enjoy an hour’s peace, inasmuch as he cannot but see—if he only looks at himself in the light of God’s holy Word—that there is not the smallest change in the true character of his own heart, that his heart is so deceitful and desperately wicked as when he walked in the moral darkness of his unconverted state. His own condition and character are, indeed, greatly changed by the possession of a new, yea, a “divine nature,” and by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but the moment the old nature is at work, he finds it as opposed to God as ever.

We doubt not but that very much of the gloom and despondency, of which so many complain, may be justly traced to their misapprehension of this important point of sanctification. They are looking for what they can never find. They are seeking for a ground of peace in a sanctified nature instead of in a perfect sacrifice; in a progressive work of holiness, instead of in a finished work of atonement.