Penitence and love

Many people in England have been baptised.  How is it, then, that although they have been given grace, so many of them are anything but godly and many lead very sinful lives?  The answer is that grace makes only those people like Jesus who really want to be like him.  It will not make any difference to those who like dong wrong, who are not sorry about it afterwards and who do not love God.  You know as well as I do that nothing much will grow if the ground is hard and solid as a stone, however much you water it.  You have to break it up first.  In the same way, grace will not make people grow like Jesus if their hearts are hard towards God and they do not care.

If then, grace is to make any difference to us, our hearts when they get hard must be broken by sorrow for the wrong we have done, and we must show our love for God by making up our minds to do better with the help of God’s grace.  And if we keep on like that all through our life, we shall find that our characters will, little by little, become more like the character of God.