Understand the Word of God in Matters of Salvation

Spiritual Direction # 1. If you truly want to become a child of God and be sanctified, do not remain in a state of ignorance, but do your best to come into the light by understanding the Word of God in matters of salvation. 

Knowledge is to be valued according to its usefulness. If it be a matter of great concern to know how to do your worldly business, and to trade and gather worldly wealth, and to understand the laws, and to maintain your honor, than to know how to be reconciled unto God, to be pardoned and justified, to please your Creator, to prepare in time for death and judgment, and an endless life, then let worldly wisdom have the pre-eminence. But if all earthly things be dreams and shadows, and valuable only as they serve us in the way to heaven, then surely the heavenly wisdom is the best. 

It is a fact that a man can be well-acquainted with the details of the law, excellent in the knowledge of all the languages, sciences, and arts, and yet does not know how to live for God, to mortify the flesh, to conquer sin, to deny himself, nor to prepare for judgment. Such learned man is far from being wise, as he is from being happy.

Generally, there are two kinds of people who do not know the life under grace:

First, people who are not book-learned; and because their parents neglected to teach them when they were young, therefore they may neglect themselves ever after, and need not learn the things they were made for.

Second, sensual gentlemen and scholars that have so much breeding as to understand the words, and speak better than the ordinary men, but they never knew the nature, truth, and goodness of the things they speak of. They are many of them as ignorant of the nature of faith, and sanctification, and the working of the Holy Ghost in planting the image of God upon the soul, and of the saint's communion with God, and the nature of a holy life. Nicodemus is a lively instance in this case: a ruler in Israel, and a Pharisee, and yet he knew not what it was to be born again.

Source: Baxter, R. (1830). The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter Volume 2: Christian Directory Part 1 - Christian Ethics. London: Printed by Mills, Jowett, and Mills.