기도의 방법 - 매튜 헨리(1710년)

BY nature our understandings are darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in us, because of the blindness of our hearts.

The things of the Spirit of God are foolishness, to the natural man, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

We are wise to do evil, but to do good we have no knowledge. We know not, neither do we understand, we walk on in darkness.

God speaketh once, yea twice, but we perceive it not; but hearing we hear, and do not understand, and we see men as trees walking.

We have within us a carnal mind, which is enmity against God, and is not in subjection to the law of God, neither indeed can be.

Thou hast written to us the great things of thy law, but they have been accounted by us as a strange thing, and our corrupt hearts have been sometimes ready to say, What is the Almighty that we should serve him? And that we would certainly do whatsoever thing goes forth out of our own mouth. For we have walked in the way of our own heart, and in the sight of our eyes, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind.

Our neck hath been an iron sinew, and we have made our heart as an adamant; we have refused to hearken, have pulled away the shoulder, and stopped our ears, like the deaf adder, that will not hearken to the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely.

How have we hated instruction, and our heart despised reproof, and have not obeyed the voice of our teachers, nor inclined our ear to them that instructed us?

Every imagination of the thought of our heart is evil, only evil, and that continually, and it has been so from our youth.

O how long have those vain thoughts lodged within us! those thoughts of foolishness which are sin. From within out of the heart proceed evil thoughts; which devise mischief upon the bed, and carry the heart with the fool’s eyes into the ends of the earth.

But God is not in all our thoughts, it is well if he be in any: Of the Rock that begat us we have been unmindful, and have forgotten the God that formed us: We have forgotten him days without number, and our hearts have walked after vanity, and become vain. Their inward thought having been that our houses should continue for ever; this our way is our folly.

We have set those affections on things beneath, which should have been set on things above, where our treasure is, and where Christ sits on the right hand of God, the things which we should seek.

We have followed after lying vanities, and forsaken our own mercies; have forsaken the fountain of living waters, for cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.

We have panted after the dust of the earth, and have been full of care what we shall eat, and what we shall drink, and wherewithal we shall be clothed, the things after which the Gentiles seek, but have neglected the kingdom of God and the righteousness thereof.

We have lifted up our souls unto vanity, and set our eyes upon that which is not, have looked at the things that are seen which are temporal, but the things that are not seen that are eternal, have been forgotten and postponed.

We are born of the flesh, and we are flesh: Dust we are: We have borne the image of the earthly; and in us, that is, in our flesh, there dwells no good thing: For if to will is present to us, yet how to perform that which is good we find not; for the good that we would do we do it not, and the evil which we would not do that we do.

We have a law in our members warring against the law of our mind, and bringing us into captivity to the law of sin that is in our members: So that when we would do good, evil is present with us, and most easily besets us.

The whole head is sick, the whole heart faint, from the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in us, but wounds and bruises, and putrifying sores.

There is in us a bent to backslide from the living God: Our hearts are deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know them? They start aside like a broken bow.