Exhortation to saints to maintain and promote peace 4/8

           (3.) The price that Christ gave for the obtaining of this peace and unity.  As Christ went from preaching up peace to pulling down peace from heaven by prayer, so he went from praying to paying for it.  In­deed Christ’s prayers are not beggar’s prayers, as ours are; he prays his Father that he may only have what he pays for.  He was now on the way to the place of payment, Calvary, where his blood was the coin he laid down for this peace.  I confess peace with God was the chief pearl that this wise merchant, Christ, bought up for his people.  But he had this in his eye also, viz. love to the brethren; and therefore the sacra­ment of the Lord’s supper, which is the commemoration feast of Christ’s death, as it seals our peace with God, so it signifies our love one to another, I Cor. 10. And need I now give you any account why our dear Lord pursued his design so close of knitting his peo­ple in peace and unity together?  Truly the church is intended by Christ to be his house, in which he means to take up his rest.  And what rest could he take in a house all on fire about him?  It is his kingdom; and how can his laws be obeyed, if all his sub­jects be in a hubbub one against another?  Inter arma silent leges—laws are silent amid arms.  In a word, his church are a people that are called out of the world to be a praise to him in the sight of the nations, as Peter saith, ‘God did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name,’ Acts 15:14—that is, a people for his honour.  But a wrangling divided peo­ple would be little credit to the name of Christ.  Yea such, where they are foun d—and where alas are they not to be found?—are to the name of Christ as smoke and dirt to a fair face.  They crock and disfigure Christ, so that the world will not acknowledge him to be who he saith he is; they lead them even into temptation to think basely of Christ and his gospel. Christ prays his people may be made perfect in one, and mark his argument—‘That the world may know that thou hast sent me,’ John 17:23.  Whose heart bleeds not to hear Christ blasphemed at this day by so many black mouths? and what hath opened them more than the saints’ divisions?

2. Argument. The second argument shall be ta­ken from yourselves; for your own sakes live in peace and unity.

           (1.) Consider your obligations to love and unity; your relations call for it.  If believers, Paul tells you your kindred, ‘Ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus,’ Gal. 3:26; not only children of God, so are all by creation, but by faith in Jesus Christ also.  Christ is the foundation of a new brotherhood to be­lievers.  O Christians! consider how near you are set one to another.  You are conceived in the same womb of the church, begotten by the same seed of the word to this new creation, whereby, as one saith, you be­come brethren of the whole blood, and therefore there should be more unity and dear affection among you than among any others.  Joseph’s heart went out more to Benjamin, than any of the rest of his brethren, because he was his brother both by father and mother.  If you fall out, who shall agree? what is it that can rationally break your peace?  Those things which use to be bones of contention, and occasion squabbling among other brethren, Christ hath taken care to remove them all, so that of all others, your quarrellings are most childish, yea sinful.  Sometimes one child finds himself grieved  at the partiality of his parents’ affection, more set on some others than him­self, and this makes him envy them, and they despise him.  But there is no such foundling in his God’s family—all dear alike to Christ: ‘Walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us,’ Eph. 5:2, that is, for one as well as another.  Christ in the church is like the soul in the body, he is totus in toto, et totus in qualibet parte—every member in Christ hath whole Christ, his whole heart and love, as if there were none besides himself to enjoy it.