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11 July, 2018

How We May Know Whether We Be Under Satan As Our Prince, or Not 3/4



How We May Know Whether We Be Under Satan As Our Prince, or Not

Second.  Bless God, O ye saints, who upon the former trial, can say you are translated into the kingdom of Christ, and so delivered from the tyranny of this usurper.  There are few but have some one gaudy day in a year, which they solemnize; some keep their birthday, others their marriage; some their man­umission from a cruel service, others their deliverance from some imminent danger.  Here is a mercy where all these meet.  You may call it, as Adam did his wife, Evah, the mother of all the living; every mercy riseth up and calls this blessed.  This is thy birth-day; thou wert before, but beganst to live when Christ began to live in thee.  The father of the prodigal dated his son’s life from his return: ‘This my son was dead, and is alive.’  Is it thy marriage day: ‘I have married you to one husband, even Christ Jesus,’ saith Paul to the Corinthians.  Perhaps thou hast enjoyed this thy hus­band’s sweet company many a day, and had a nu­merous offspring of joys and comforts by thy fellow­ship with him, the thought of which cannot but en­dear him to thee, and make the day of thy espousals delightful to thy memory.  It is thy manumission; then were thy indentures cancelled, wherein thou wert bound to sin and Satan.  When the Son made thee free, thou becamest free indeed.  Thou canst not say thou wast born free, for thy father was a slave; not that thou boughtest thy freedom with a sum.  By grace ye are saved.  Heaven is settled on thee in the promise, and thou not at charge so much as for the writing’s drawing.  All is done at Christ’s cost, with whom God indented, and to whom he gave the prom­ise of eternal life before the world began, as a free estate to settle upon every believing soul in the day they should come to Christ, and receive him for their Prince and Saviour; so that from the hour thou didst come under Christ's shadow, all the sweet fruit that grows on this tree of life is thine.  With Christ, all that both worlds have, fall to thee; all is yours, because you are Christ’s.    
 O Christian, look upon thyself now, and bless thy God to see what a change there is made to thy state, since that black and dismal time, when thou wert slave to the prince of darkness.  How couldst thou like thy old scullion’s work again, or think of returning to thy house of bondage, now thou knowest the privileges of Christ’s kingdom?  Great princes, who from baseness and beggary have ascended to kingdoms and empires—to add to the joy of their present honour—have delighted to speak often of their base birth, to go and see the mean cottages where they were first entertained, and had their birth and breeding and the like.  And it is not unuseful for the Christian to look in at the grate, to see the smoky hole where once he lay, to view the chains wherewith he was laden, and so to compare Christ's court and the devil’s prison—the felicity of the one and the horror of the other—together.  But when we do our best to affect our hearts with this mercy, by all the enhancing aggravations we can find out, alas, how little a portion of it shall we know here?  This is a nimium excellens—a surpassing excellence, which cannot be fully seen, unless it be by a glorified eye. How can it be fully known by us, where it cannot be fully enjoyed?  Thou art translated into the kingdom of Christ, but thou art a great way from his court. That is kept in heaven, and that the Christian knows, but as we [know] far countries which we never saw only by map, or some rarities that are sent us as a taste of what grows there in abundance.
           Third.  This, Christian, calls for thy loyalty and faithful service to Christ, who hath saved thee from Satan’s bondage.  Say, O ye saints, to Christ, as they say to Gideon, ‘Come thou and rule over us, for thou hast delivered us from the hand, not of Midian, but of Satan.’  Who so able to defend thee from his wrath, as he who broke his power? who like to rule thee so tenderly, as he that could not brook another’s tyranny over thee?  In a word, who hath right to thee besides him, who ventured his life to redeem thee? —that being delivered from all thine enemies, thou mayest serve him without fear in holiness all the days of thy life.  And were it not pity that Christ should take all this pains to lift up thy head from Satan’s house of bondage, and give thee a place among those in his own house, who are admitted to minister unto him—which is the highest honour the nature of men or angels is capable of—and that thou shouldst after all this be found to have a hand in any treasonable practice against thy dear Saviour?  Surely Christ may think he hath deserved better at your hands, if at none besides. Where shall a prince safely dwell, if not in the midst of his own courtiers? and those such were all taken from chains and prisons to be thus pre­ferred, the more to oblige them in his service.  Let devils and devilish men do their own work, but let not thy hand, O Christian, be upon thy dear Saviour. But this is too little, to bid thee not play the traitor. If thou hast any loyal blood running in thy veins, thy own heart will smite thee when thou rendest the least skirt of his holy law; thou canst as well carry burning coals in thy bosom, as hide any treason there against thy dear Sovereign.  No, it is some noble enterprise I would have thee think upon, how thou mayest ad­vance the name of Christ higher in thy heart, and [in the] world too, as much as in thee lies.  O how kindly did God take it, that David, when peaceably set in his throne, was casting about, not how he might entertain himself with those pleasures which usually corrupt and debauch the courts of princes in times of peace, but how he might show his zeal for God, in building a house for his worship that had reared a throne for him, II Sam.

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