What is Your Expectation?

 The following is from Arthur T. Pierson's excellent book Shall We Continue in Sin:

". . . if you knew that to-night, at midnight, death would certainly end your mortal career, you would at once stop making provision for living. A shroud, a coffin, a grave, would be all the clothing, house, possession, you would need. 

"God would have you count yourself dead to sin and hence living no longer therein, and reckon yourself alive unto God and unto holiness.

"Your expectation has everything to do with your actual life. If you expect to sin you will sin, and if you expect not to sin, because you reckon yourself no longer under sin's mastery, but under God's, you will find that expectation itself a security.

"Paul says we are saved by hope, and, in the armor of God, the very helmet is the hope of salvation. To count on sinning is itself a form of sinning; it is reckoning the flesh, the world, the Devil, mightier than the Spirit of God and the Son of God, whose very office it is to overcome the flesh, deliver us from this present evil age, and destroy the works of the Devil."