Would You Be Thought To Walk With God?

Would you be thought to walk with God? 

1. What evidence have you that you are in covenant with him? that your covenant with hell and death is broken, and that you are taken into the bond of the covenant of grace? What account can you give to God, others, or your own souls, of this your covenant state and condition? How many are at a loss as to this foundation of all walking with God! 

2. Is your obedience from faith? What evidence have you thereof? Go over all the causes, effects, and adjuncts of a justifying faith, and try whether you have this principle of all acceptable obedience. How hath it been wrought in you? What work of the Spirit have you had upon you? What have been your conviction, humiliation, and conversion? When, how, by what means wrought? Are your hearts purified by it, and are you by it baptized into one Spirit with the people of God? or are you still enemies to them? 

3. Is your walking universal and perfect, according to the tenor of the covenant? Have you no sweet morsel under your tongue, no beloved lust that is indulged to, that you cannot as yet thoroughly part with? no allowed reserve for sin? 

4. Do you delight in God in that obedience you yield? or are his ways a burden unto you, that you are scarce able to bear them, —weary of private prayer, of Sabbaths, of all the worship of God?

I leave these things with your consciences.

~John Owen

from a sermon entitled Of Walking Humbly With God, volume 9 of Works, page 102