# Idling life away like an idiot



## Blueridge Believer (May 21, 2009)

(Joseph Philpot, "The Soul's Growth in Grace" 1837)

When one is spiritually reborn, he sees 
at one and the same moment . . .
God and self,
justice and guilt,
power and helplessness,
a holy law and a broken commandment,
eternity and time,
the purity of the Creator, and 
the filthiness of the creature. 

And these things he sees, not merely as 
declared in the Bible, but as revealed in 
himself as personal realities, involving all 
his happiness or all his misery in time and 
in eternity. Thus it is with him as though 
a new existence had been communicated, 
and as if for the first time he had found 
there was a God!

It is as though all his days he had been asleep, 
and were now awakened; asleep upon the top of 
a mast, with the raging waves beneath; as if all 
his past life were a dream, and the dream were 
now at an end. He has been . . .
hunting butterflies,
blowing soap bubbles,
angling for minnows,
picking daisies,
building houses of cards, and
idling life away like an idiot or a madman. 

He had been perhaps wrapped up in a religious
profession, advanced even to the office of a deacon, 
or mounted in a pulpit. He had learned to talk about 
Christ, and election, and grace, and fill his mouth 
with the language of Zion. 

But what did he experimentally know of these 
things? Nothing, absolutely nothing!

Ignorant of his own ignorance (of all kinds of 
ignorance the worst), he thought himself rich,
and increased with goods, and to have need of 
nothing; and knew not that he was wretched, 
and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.


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## ewenlin (May 21, 2009)

Blueridge Believer said:


> (Joseph Philpot, "The Soul's Growth in Grace" 1837)
> idling life away like an idiot



How poignant and true.

Thanks for sharing


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