# “We are equally delighted to preach good high practice and to insist upon it” by Charles Spurgeon

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2019/03/26/we-are-equally-delighted-to-preach-good-high-practice-and-to-insist-upon-it-by-charles-spurgeon/
- Published: 2019-03-26T12:00:02-05:00
- Author: tollelege

“The word ‘conversation’ does not merely mean our talk and converse one with another,
but the whole course of our life and behaviour in the world. The Greek word signifies
the actions and the privileges of citizenship, and we are to let our whole citizenship,
our actions as citizens of the new Jerusalem, be such as becometh the gospel of 
Christ.

Observe, dear friends, the difference between the exhortations of the legalists 
and those of the gospel. He who would have you perfect in the flesh, exhorts you
to work that you may be saved, that you may accomplish a meritorious righteousness
of your own, and so may be accepted before God.

But he who is taught in the doctrines of grace, urges you to holiness for quite 
another reason. He believes that you are saved, since you believe in the Lord Jesus
Christ, and he speaks to as many as are saved in Jesus, and then he asks them to
make their actions conformable to their position; he only seeks what he may reasonably
expect to receive.

_‘Let your conversation be such as becometh the gospel of Christ. You have been 
saved by it, you profess to glory in it, you desire to extend it; let then your 
conversation be such as becometh it.’_

The one, you perceive, bids you to work that you may enter heaven by your working;
the other exhorts you to labour because heaven is yours as the gift of divine grace,
and he would have you act as one who is made meet to be a partaker of the inheritance
of the saints in light.

Some persons cannot hear an exhortation without at once crying out that we are legal.
Such persons will always find this Tabernacle the wrong place for them to feed in.

We are delighted to preach good high doctrine, and to insist upon it that salvation
is of grace alone; but we are equally delighted to preach good high practice and
to insist upon it, that that grace which does not make a man better than his neighbours,
is a grace which will never take him to heaven, nor render him acceptable before
God.”

–Charles H. Spurgeon, “[The Gospel’s Power in a Christian’s Life](https://amzn.to/2utR9MB),”
in [_The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, Vol. 11_](https://amzn.to/2utR9MB)(
London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1865), 11: 399. Spurgeon was preaching on Philippians
1:27.

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