Natural Mirrors

Karl Briullov/Source

For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. James 1:23

To walk with God implies that the Spirit of God removes the power of the natural heart. Perhaps it may seem hard to some, but our own experience daily proves what the Scriptures in many places assert, that the carnal mind, the mind of the unconverted man, and even the mind of the regenerate, so far as any part of him remains unrenewed, is [at] enmity against God himself. Indeed, one may well wonder that any creature, especially that lovely creature man, made after his Maker's own image, should ever have any enmity, much less a prevailing enmity, against that very God in whom he lives, moves, and has his being. But so it is. Our first parents contracted it when they fell from God by eating the forbidden fruit… and this same enmity rules and prevails in every man that is naturally engendered of the offspring of Adam… He that cannot set his seal to this knows nothing yet, in a saving manner, of the Holy Scriptures, or of the power of God. And all that do know this, will readily acknowledge, that before a person can be said to walk with God, the prevailing power of this heart-enmity must be destroyed: for persons do not walk and keep company together, who entertain an irreconcilable enmity and hatred against one another… It is destroyed in every soul that is truly born of God, and gradually more and more weakened as the believer grows in grace, and the Spirit of God gains a greater and greater ascendancy in the heart.

George Whitefield Daily Readings, Randall J. Pederson, ed., Christian Focus Publications, 2010, August 24 reading.