Exhortations To Those Already at Peace With God 1/4

          

 A few words by way of improvement to you whose peace with God is concluded with Christ.

           First.  Hast thou peace with God?—look thou makest no peace with sin.  This broke thy peace with God; now let thy peace with God begin a war with that never to have end.  Thou canst not, sure, forget the inestimable wrong and damage thou hast suffered by it.  Every moment’s sweet enjoyment of God —whose bosom-love thou hast now happily recovered—will help to keep the fire of wrath and revenge burning in thy heart against that cursed enemy, that both threw and kept thee so long thence.  God hath now won thy heart, I hope, by his pardoning mercy, dearly to love him for his love to thee.  How then canst thou with patience see any lust come braving forth from its trench—thy heart I mean—defying thy God and his grace in thee?  Paul’s spirit was stirred in him at Athens to see God dishonoured by the superstition of others; and is not thine, to see him re­proached by the pride, unbelief, and other sins, that do it from under thy own soul’s roof?  O Christian, meditate some noble exploit against it.  Now, the more to steel thy heart, and harden it against all re­lenting towards it, carry the blood and wounds of thy Saviour into the field with thee, in the hand of thy faith.  The sight of those will certainly enrage thy heart against thy lusts, that stabbed and killed him, more than the bloody garments of Cæsar, held up by Antony, did the Roman citizens against his mur­derers.  

O see how cruelly they used the Lord of glory, and where they laid him in an ignominious grave —and that fastened with a seal, stronger than that which man set to it—the curse due to us sinners, never possible to have been broke up by any less than his own almighty arm!  And now, Christian, shall these murderers, not of man, but of God—for it was the blood of God that was shed—escape that vengeance which God would have done with thy hand upon them?  Wherefore else doth he leave thee any life in thy soul but that thou shouldst have the opportunity of showing thy love to Christ by running thy dagger of mortification into their heart?  Alexander got no more honour by his great victories in the field than by his piety to his dead father Philip, whose bloody death he avenged as soon as he came into the throne, slaying the murderers upon his father’s tomb. O, show thou, Christian, thy pity to thy dear Saviour by falling upon thy cursed lusts, and that speedily! Never rest till thou hast had their blood that shed his. Till thou dost this thou art consenting to all the cruelty that was executed on him.  This, this is the ‘honour’ which all ‘the saints shall have,’ and therefore the ‘two-edged sword’ of the Spirit is put into their hands that they may execute the vengeance written.