Exhortations To The Sinner To Embrace This Peace With God Offered, In The Gospel 4/5

           (c) Look into the commission God gives his am­bassadors, and still his heart appears in the business, whether you consider the largeness of it, on the one hand, or the strictness of it on the other.  First, the largeness of it—‘Go and preach,’ saith Christ, ‘the gospel to every creature.’  Make no difference—rich or poor, great sinners or little, old sinners or young.  Offer peace to all that will but repent and believe.  Bid as many come as will; here is room for all that come.  Again, the strictness of it on the other hand. O what a solemn charge have they of delivering their message faithfully!  Paul trembles at the thoughts of loitering—‘Woe is me if I preach not.’  What an argument doth Christ use—fetched from his very heart—to persuade Peter to be careful, ‘If thou lovest me, feed my sheep.’  As if he had said, ‘Peter, thou now art in tears for thy cowardice in denying me, but thou hast yet one way left, for all that unkindness, to demonstrate thy love to me, and that is by feeding my sheep; do this, and trouble not thyself for that.’ Christ shows more care of his sheep than of himself.

           (d) The joy God expresseth when poor sinners come into the offer of peace.  Joy is the highest testi­mony that can be given to our complacency in any thing or person.  Love to joy is as fuel to the fire.  If love lay little fuel of desires on the heart, then the flame of joy that comes thence will not be great.  Now God's joy is great in pardoning poor sinners that come in; therefore his affection great in the offer thereof. It is made the very motive that prevails with God to pardon sinners, ‘because he delighteth in mercy,’ Micah 7:18.  ‘Who is a God like unto thee, that pardon­eth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage? he retaineth not his anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy.’  God doth all this, ‘because he delighteth in mercy.’  Ask why the fisher stands all night with his angle in the river.  He will tell you, ‘because he delights in the sport.’  Well, you now know the reason why God stands so long waiting on  sinners, months, years, preaching to them; it is that he may be  gracious in pardoning them, and in that act delight himself.  Princes very oft pardon traitors to please others more than themselves, or else it would never be done, but God doth it chiefly to delight and gladden his own merciful heart. 

 Hence the business Christ came about—which was no other but to reconcile sinners to God—is called ‘the pleasure of the Lord,’ Isa. 53:10.  The Lord takes such joy and pleasure in this, that, whereas other fathers —whose love to their  children sinks infinitely beneath any comparison with the love of God to Christ —mourn at the death of their children, and most of all when violent and bloody, God takes content in his Son's death; yea, had the chief hand in the procuring of it, and that with infinite complacency: ‘It pleased the Lord to bruise him.’  And what joy could God take in his Son’s death, but as it made way for him and his poor creature that were fallen out, and at open war one against another, to fall in again by a happy accord?  And now, speak, O sinner! if God doth so affectionately desire to be reconciled with thee, doth it not much more behove thee to embrace the peace, than it doth him to offer it?  There is but one thing more I would desire thee, sinner, to consider, and then I leave thee to thy own choice.