lessly despise. Can you stand in judgement before the Almighty? Can you perfectly answer the just demands of his spiritual and extensive law? Consider what that law requires of you. The law requires you to love God supremely above all things. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart. It forbids you to set up your idols in your heart; to bestow on any creature that place in your affections, which belongs to your Creator only. My son, give me thine heart*. The law requires you to be pure in heart. It pronounces the inward indulgence of sin to be equally criminal with the outward practice. Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. He that hateth his brother is a murderer†. The law requires you to maintain truth in the inward parts. It examines the motives of your conduct. It determines the relative value of any action, not by its outward appearance, not by its seeming agreement with the letter of the precept, but by the secret principle from which it springs. It commands you in all things to have a single eye towards God; to be influenced by a prevailing regard to his favour, his * Deut. vi. 5. Prov. xxiii. 26. will, and his glory. Whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God*. Such is the extensive and spiritual nature of that law, which never, for the shortest interval, abates of its strictest demands. Bring, then, your hearts and lives to this test. Compare your actions, words, and thoughts, your desires, affections, tempers, and intentions, from the first dawn of reason to the present moment, with the heart-searching and comprehensive demands of the moral law. Survey, reflected in this faithful mirror, the number and the magnitude of your sins. How repeatedly have you violated the letter of this most holy law, by doing what it prohibits, by leaving undone what it enjoins? How incessantly have you violated the spirit of it? Nay, when did you ever fully comply with its spiritual injunctions? In numberless instances you have evidently broken its precepts. Even in those things in which you have appeared to obey them, has your obedience been such as is required? In all your best actions, in all your seeming compliances with the divine commands, have you been actuated supremely by love to God, and by regard to his glory? Have not many selfish, inferior, unworthy motives continually interfered? Recollect, if you are able, that one single day, throughout * Psalm, li. 6, 1 Cor. x. 31. which you have preserved, in the outward and in the inward man, a perfect conformity to the letter and the spirit of the divine law. Recollect, if you are able, that one single transaction of your life, which could call upon the holy God to witness as being free, both in the motive and in the execution, from any mixture of selfishness and impurity. you Weighed in these balances (and they are the balances of the sanctuary), you must be found wanting. Measured by this standard, far from having a righteousness of your own, commensurate to the demands of the law, you cannot but feel that you are miserably defective. (You are all as an unclean thing: and all your righteousnesses are as filthy rags*.) Thus circumstanced, will you refuse the gift of righteousness? Will you reject the offer of that weddinggarment, in which alone you can be worthy to partake of the marriage-supper of the Lamb? Deal not so unwisely. Look forward to the time, when, if you shall have persisted in this refusal, you will be speechless before God, and the assembled universe. Have mercy on your own souls. We pray you in Christ's stead, Be ye reconciled to God. As workers together -- you, with him, we beseech grace of God in vain. wrath against the day that ye receive not the No longer treasure up of wrath. Cast away the *Isaiah, Ixiv. 6. weapons of your fruitless warfare. Submit yourselves unto God.-Tuke hold of his strength, that you may make peace with him, and you shall make peace with him. cry, 66 But there may be some who deeply feel their need of the gift of righteousness; who earnestly long for the possession of it, but who, from a sense of their exceeding sinfulness, distrust their title to it. "Reconciliation," they “with our offended God is the blessing " which we most fervently desire. But it is a blessing, of which at present we are utterly "unworthy: a blessing, to which under our "load of guilt we cannot venture to aspire: a blessing, for which we must be content to "wait, till we are more fitted for receiving it. Such is their language. But whence do these sentiments arise? They have a show of humility; but at the bottom they spring from the suggestions of natural pride, which still lurks within. My brethren, if you maintain these sentiments, the cause is manifest. You have not yet entirely dismissed the idea of merit in the sinner. You have not eradicated the notion so firmly implanted in the natural heart, that the Almighty, in dispensing his favours, is influenced by a regard to some antecedent worthiness in his creatures. But what say the Scriptures? My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord; As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts*. Where is this antecedent worthiness to be obtained? If your guilt is now so great as to incapacitate you for receiving the gift of righteousness, when will it be sufficiently diminished? If you are now unfit for participating the grace of God, how will you be rendered fit? Admit, that from this moment you so entirely reform your heart and life, as never in a single instance to add to your present numberless transgressions; yet such a reformation cannot make the number of those transgressions less. Futuré obedience, even if perfect, cannot atone for the guilt, cannot purchase the remission of the sins that are past. An unfailing compliance with the most rigorous demands of the law for the time to come, cannot cancel the debt of ten thousand talents, already contracted, Dismiss such vain pretensions. Your debt, your unworthiness, your guilt, will never become less by any method of your own devising. Every attempt will but augment and aggravate them. Accept then the blessing, which is freely offered to you: offered, not because you are worthy to receive it; but because you are utterly unworthy; because where sin Isaiah, lv. 8, 9. |