As you desired me to send you in writing some directions as to how to conduct yourself in your Christian course, I would now answer your request…

1. I would advise you to keep up as great a striving and earnestness in religion as if you knew yourself to be in a natural state and were still seeking conversion. We advise persons under conviction to be earnest and violent for the kingdom of heaven; but when they have attained to conversion, they ought not to be any less watchful, laborious, and earnest in the whole work of religion, but the more so; for they are under infinitely greater obligations. For want of this, many persons, in a few months after their conversion, have begun to lose the sweet and lively sense of spiritual things, and to grow cold and dark, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows, whereas, if they had done as the apostle did (Philippians 3:12–14), their path would have been as the shining light, that shines more and more unto the perfect day.

2. Do not leave off seeking, striving, and praying for the very same things that we exhort unconverted persons to strive for, and a degree of which you have already had in conversion. Pray that your eyes may be opened, that you may receive sight, that you may know yourself and be brought to God’s footstool, that you may see the glory of God and Christ and be raised from the dead, and have the love of Christ shed abroad in your heart. Those who have most of these things have need to still pray for them; for there is so much blindness and hardness, pride and death remaining that they still need to have that work of God wrought upon them, further to enlighten and enliven them, that shall bring them out of darkness into God’s marvelous light, and be a kind of new conversion and resurrection from the dead. There are very few requests that are proper for an impenitent man that are not also, in some sense, proper for the godly.

Jonathan Edwards, "A Letter to a Young Convert,"
To the Rising Generation (Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 2005), p. 157–158.

Edwards uses some misleading expressions here, but the general principle is correct — we must continue to earnestly seek God even after we have been converted, just as diligently as before our conversion, and in fact even more.

Recommended:

The Biblical Approach to Evangelism

The "Sincere Offer" of the Gospel, Part 2

http://www.intoutreach.org/seeking.html

http://members.aol.com/jonathanedw/Seeking.html

Vincent Cheung, Presuppositional Confrontations, chapter 2

 

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