Today marks the 269th anniversary of Jonathan Edwards preaching his most famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in Enfield, CT. I’m reading through it after pastor Rick Holland’s wife Kim posted a tweet mentioning it. Though I won’t try to summarize it because I just can’t do it justice, the point Edwards was making, as Capitol Hill Baptist Church shows us, was that God’s grace was the only thing keeping his listeners out of hell at that very moment. This message, based on Deuteronomy 32:35, played an important role in the Great Awakening that swept through America in the 1740s.

“The strongest have no power to resist him…”

“God is not altogether such an one as themselves, though they may imagine him to be so.”

“God has laid himself under no obligation by any promise to keep any natural man out of hell one moment.”

“However unconvinced you may now be of the truth of what you hear, by and by you will be fully convinced of it.”

“But the foolish children of men do miserably delude themselves in their own schemes, and in their confidence in their own strength and wisdom; they trust to nothing but a shadow.”

“God hath had it on his heart to show to angels and men, both how excellent his love is, and also how terrible his wrath is.”

“And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has flung the door of mercy wide open, and stands in the door calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners…”

“Men’s hearts harden, and their guilt increases apace at such a day as this, if they neglect their souls: and never was there so great danger of such persons being given up to hardness of heart, and blindness of mind.”