Fire and water may as well agree in the same vessel, as grace and sin in the same heart.
Interpretation
Goodness and wrongdoing cannot coexist in the same individual.
This quote by Thomas Brooks suggests that grace, representing goodness and virtue, cannot coexist with sin, which represents wrongdoing, within the same heart. It highlights the internal struggle between moral values and immoral actions, emphasizing that one must ultimately choose between the two sides of human nature.
In practice
During a sermon discussing moral integrity.
Remember this-all the sighing, mourning, sobbing, and complaining in the world, does not so undeniably evidence a man to be humble, as his overlooking his own righteousness, and living really and purely upon the righteousness of Christ.
Grace and glory differ very little; the one is the seed, the other is the flower; grace is glory militant, glory is grace triumphant.
He is the best preacher, not that tickles the ear, but that breaks the heart.
Ah! sinner, remember this, there is no way on earth effectually to be rid of the guilt, filth, and power of sin, but by believing in a Saviour. It is not resolving, it is not complaining, it is not mourning, but believing, that will make thee divinely victorious over that body of sin that to this day is too strong for thee, and that will certainly be thy ruin, if it be not ruined by a hand of faith.
Self is the only oil that makes the chariot-wheels of the hypocrite move in all religious concerns.
Humility can weep over other men's weaknesses, and joy and rejoice over their graces.
History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.
The heart is the secret inside the secret.
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
Only God is able to humble us without humiliating us and to exalt us without flattering us.
When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.
Freedom is the very essence of our economy and society. Without freedom the human mind is prevented from unleashing its creative force. But what is also clear is that this freedom does not stand alone. It is freedom in responsibility and freedom to exercise responsibility.
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