The testimony of God is the divine means of communicating life to the soul when applied by the Holy Spirit-that is, by faith. And if we want still further to know what specially in the truth of God is used to quicken those who are dead in sins, it is always, more or less, the revelation of Christ.
My believing that the creature was made by God will not quicken my soul. I might believe any facts in the Old Testament and be assured of all the miracles, discourses and ways of Jesus in the New Testament, and yet my soul might still be unquickened.
But believing in Christ Himself is a very different thing from not doubting things about Him. It supposes that I have, more or less, come to an end of myself, that I have bowed to the humiliating sentence of Scripture upon my nature, and that I own myself to be only a poor, lost, dead creature in the sight of God. [12]