{"id":4471,"date":"2018-01-29T03:19:21","date_gmt":"2018-01-29T03:19:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/?p=4471"},"modified":"2018-01-29T03:19:21","modified_gmt":"2018-01-29T03:19:21","slug":"a-spirit-of-hardness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/?p=4471","title":{"rendered":"A spirit of hardness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One mark of the spirit which is not of God, is a spirit of hardness. I use the word \u201cspirit,\u201d because the Scriptures speak in the same way of \u201cthe spirit of error,\u201d (1 John iv. 6), \u201cof antichrist,\u201d (1 John iv. 3), \u201cof whoredoms,\u201d (Hos. iv. 12), and so on. We read that \u201cthe Lord hardened Pharoah\u2019s heart, so that he would not let the children of Israel go.\u201d (Ex. x. 20.) And we read, \u201cGod hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear.\u201d (Rom. xi. 8.) A spirit of hardness, then, is an\u00a0<strong>infallible mark<\/strong> of the spirit not being of God. By hardness, I mean the opposite of tenderness. Opposition to God\u2019s truth, an unwillingness, an inability to fall under the power of it; setting up our prejudice, our pride, our preconceived opinions\u00a0<strong>against<\/strong> the solemn authority of God, and maintaining a rugged, unbending, unyielding temper.<br \/>\nNow this is a very different thing from firmness. Gospel firmness and judicial hardness are two very different things. A man cannot be too firm when God the Spirit has meekened his heart, and made the truth precious to him; but he will not have hardness of spirit; he will fall in a moment before truth. Let God only bring one of His people upon His heart; let Him only touch his conscience with His finger, and he is broken to pieces. But it is not so with the heart that is hard; neither law nor gospel has an effect there, but even a profession of religion is carried out in an unyielding spirit, a hard, self-opinionated perverseness.<\/p>\n<p>J. C. Philpot<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One mark of the spirit which is not of God, is a spirit of hardness. I use the word \u201cspirit,\u201d because the Scriptures speak in the same way of \u201cthe spirit of error,\u201d (1 John iv. 6), \u201cof antichrist,\u201d (1 John iv. 3), \u201cof whoredoms,\u201d (Hos. iv. 12), and so on. We read that \u201cthe [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-author-j-c-philpot","category-total-depravity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4471"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4473,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4471\/revisions\/4473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shoalhavengospelchurch.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}