I am continuing slowly through Richard Baxter’s monumental Directory and am sharing various ideas and quotations I have found particularly encouraging. Immediately preceding this quotation, he has been challenging the person who wants to please God to rid himself of any thought of self-merit or deserved acceptance before God in anything but Jesus Christ. Conversion and the beginnings of new life are only in and by Christ, but so it the way of sanctification and ultimate victory:
Alas! without Christ,
we know not how to live an hour;
nor can have hope or peace in any thing we have or do;
nor look with comfort either upward or downward, to God, or the creature;
nor think without terrors of our sins, of God, or of the life to come.
Resolve, therefore, that as true converts,
you are wholly to live upon Jesus Christ,
and to do all that you do by his Spirit and strength;
and to expect all your acceptance with God upon his account.