If any of you ridicule inward religion, or think there is no such thing as our feeling or receiving the Holy Ghost, I fear my preaching will be quite foolishness to you, and that you will understand me no more than if I spoke to you in an unknown tongue. But as the promise in the text, is made to the world, and as I know it will be fulfilling till time shall be no more, I shall proceed to explain the general way whereby the Holy Ghost works upon every converted sinner’s heart; and I hope that the LORD, even whilst I am speaking, will be pleased to fulfil it in many of your hearts. “And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment.”
The word, which we translate _reprove_, ought to be rendred _convince_; and in the original it implies a conviction by way of argumentation, and coming with a power upon the mind equal to a demonstration. A great many scoffers of these last days, will ask such as they term pretenders to the Spirit, how they feel the Spirit, and how they know the Spirit? They might as well ask, how they know, and how they feel the sun when it shines upon the body? For with equal power and demonstration does the Spirit of GOD work upon and convince the soul. And,
_First_, It convinces of sin; and generally of some enormous sin, the worst perhaps the convicted person ever was guilty of. Thus, when our LORD was conversing with the woman of _Samaria_, he convinced her first of her adultery: “Woman, go call thy husband. The woman answered, and said, I have no husband. JESUS said unto her, Thou hast well said, I have no husband: for thou hast had five husbands, and he whom thou now hast, is not thy husband: in this saidst thou truly.” With this there went such a powerful conviction of all her other actual sins, that soon after, “she left her waterpot, and went her way into the city, and saith to the men, Come, and see a man that told me all things that ever I did: is not this the CHRIST?” Thus our LORD also dealt with the persecutor _Saul_: he convinced him first of the horrid sin of persecution; “_Saul_, _Saul_, why persecutest thou me?” Such a sense of all his other sins, probably at the same time revived in his mind, that immediately he died; that is, died to all his false confidences, and was thrown into such an agony of soul, that he continued three days, and neither did eat nor drink. This is the method the Spirit of GOD generally takes in dealing with sinners; he first convinces them of some heinous actual sin, and at the same time brings all their other sins into ♦remembrance, and as it were sets them in battle-array before them: “When he is come, he will reprove the world of sin.”
♦ “remembrace” replaced with “remembrance”
And was it ever thus with you, my dear hearers? (For I must question you as I go along, because I intend, by the Divine help, to preach not only to your heads, but your hearts). Did the Spirit of GOD ever bring all your sins thus to remembrance, and make you cry out to GOD, “Thou writest bitter things against me?” Did your actual sins ever appear before you, as though drawn in a map? If not, you have great reason (unless you were sanctified from the womb) to suspect that you are not convicted, much more not converted, and that the promise of the text was never yet fulfilled in your hearts.
Farther: When the Comforter comes into a sinner’s heart, though it generally convinces the sinner of his actual sin first, yet it leads him to see and bewail his original sin, the fountain from which all these polluted streams do flow.
Though every thing in the earth, air, and water; every thing both without and within, concur to prove the truth of that assertion in the scripture, “in _Adam_ we all have died;” yet most are so hardened through the deceitfulness of sin, that notwithstanding they may give an assent to the truth of the proposition in their heads, yet they never felt it really in their hearts. Nay, some in words professedly deny it, though their works too, too plainly prove them to be degenerate sons of a degenerate father. But when the Comforter, the Spirit of GOD, arrests a sinner, and convinces him of sin, all carnal reasoning against original corruption, every proud and high imagination, which exalteth itself against that doctrine, is immediately thrown down; and he is made to cry out, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” He now finds that concupiscence is sin; and does not so much bewail his actual sins, as the inward perverseness of his heart, which he now finds not only to be an enemy to, but also direct enmity against GOD.