Exhortation to saints to maintain and promote peace 7/8

           (d) You do not only hazard the decay of grace, but growth of sin.  Indeed, it shows there is more than a little corruption got within doors already; but it opens the door to much more, ‘If ye have bitter envy­ing and strife in your hearts, glory not,’ James 3:14; that is do not think you are such good Christians.  This stains all your other excellencies.  Had ye the knowledge and gifts of the holy angels, yet this would make you look more like devils than them.  He gives the reason, ‘For where envying and strife is, there is con­fusion and every evil work,’ ver. 16.  Contention is the devil’s forge, in which if he can but give a Christian a heat or two, he will not doubt but to soften him for his hammer of temptation.  Moses himself when his spirit was a little hot ‘spake unadvisedly with his lips.’ It must needs be an occasion of much sinning, which renders it impossible for a man while in his distemper to do any one righteous action.  ‘For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God,’ James 1:20. Now what a sad thing is it for Christians to stay long in that temper in which they can do no good to one another, but provoke lust?

           (e) They are prognostics of judgment coming.  A lowering sky speaks of foul weather at hand; and mar­iners look for a storm at sea, when the waves begin to swell and utter a murmuring noise.  Hath there been nothing like these among us?  What can we think but a judgment is breeding, by the lowering countenances of Christians, their swellings of heart, and discontented passions vented from their swollen spirits, like the murmuring of waters, or rumbling of thunder in the air before a tempest?  When children fight and wrangle, now is the time they may expect their father to come and part them with his rod.  ‘He shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse,’ Mal. 4:6.  Strife and contention set a people next door to a curse.  God makes account he brings a heavy judgment upon a people when him­self leaves them.  If the master leaves the ship, it is near sinking indeed.  And truly no readier way to send him going, than by contentions.  These smoke him out of his own house.  ‘Be of one mind,’ saith the apostle, ‘and the God of love and peace shall be with you,’ II Cor. 13:11—implying, if they did not live in peace, they must not look to have his company long with them.  God was coming in Moses with a great salvation to the Israelites, and, as a handsel of the good services he was to do for them, he begins to make peace between two discontented brethren as they strove; but his kindness was not accepted, and this was the occasion of many years’ misery more that they endured in Egypt.  ‘Then fled Moses at this say­ing, and was a stranger in the land of Midian,’ Acts 7:29.  And there was no news of deliverance for the space of ‘forty years’ after, ver. 30.  And have not our dissensions, or rather our rejecting those overtures which God by men of healing spirits have offered for peace, been the cause why mercy hath fled so fast from us, and we left to groan under those sad miseries that are upon us at this day? and who knows how long?  O who can think what a glorious morning shone upon England in that famous Parliament be­gun 1640, and not weep and weep again to see our hopes for a glorious reformation, that opened with them, now shut up in blood and war, contention and confusion!—miseries too like the fire and brimstone that fell from heaven upon those unhappy cities of the plain.