Faith & Spirit Quote by William Ames

Ames draws a clean, almost accountant-like line through the messier terrain of “religion”: it begins with reception, then moves to return. The phrasing is instructive and slightly corrective, as if aimed at a common mistake in his own moment - treating religion as either pure belief (God talks, we listen) or pure performance (we give, we do, we prove). By naming “the first act” as what is communicated from God, Ames asserts that religion isn’t fundamentally a human project. It’s initiated elsewhere. That’s classic Reformed Protestant posture: revelation and grace come first, not spiritual self-improvement.

The second clause tightens the screw. “Those things which we yield to God” doesn’t romanticize devotion; “yield” implies surrender, relinquishment, even loss of control. It’s a verb with friction in it, and that’s the point. Ames is sketching a transactional rhythm without turning God into a negotiator: God gives; the human response is not payment but submission.

The subtext is polemical. In early 17th-century English Puritan theology, Ames was writing against both empty formalism and the anxiety-inducing logic of earning salvation. His order of operations matters: you don’t start with what you can offer. You start with what you’ve been given. The quote works because it reduces a sprawling religious argument to a two-beat structure - receive, then yield - and smuggles an entire theology of dependence into a sentence that sounds like common sense.