All prayer’ viewed as to DIVERSITY IN MATTER —Second kind of petitionary prayer —the deprecatory.

 

           Second. Deprecatory prayer.  The second branch in the petitionary part of prayer is deprecation, wherein we desire of God, in the name of Christ, the removal of some evil felt or feared, inflicted or threatened.  So that evil is the object of deprecation.  Here I shall briefly point at the evils to be dep­recated, and how we are to frame our requests to God in dep­recating of them.  All evil is comprehended in these two:—1. Sin.  2. Suffering.

First object of deprecatory prayer.

1. Object. Sin.  This indeed is the evil of evils, against which chiefly we are to let fly the arrows of our prayers.  This is the only thing that is intrinsically evil in its own nature.  Suffering is rather evil to us than in itself, and our sufferings have both their being and malignity from the evil of our sins.  Had there been no sin, there had been no suffering.  Where that ceaseth, this is not to be found.  No sorrow in heaven, because no sin.  These, like twins, live and die together.  ‘If thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door;’ that is, if thou doest the evil of sin, prepare to meet with the evil of suffering.  Now in sin two things [are] to be deprecated: (1.) Guilt, and (2.) Filth—the defiling power of sin.

           (1.) Guilt.  This is the proper effect and conse­quent of every sin.  Whenever any sin is committed there is guilt contracted, whereby the creature be­comes obnoxious to the wrath of God; and this guilt wears not off by length of time, but continues bound upon the sinner till God by an act of pardoning mercy absolves him.  So that, though the act of sin be tran­sient, and passeth away as soon as the fact is commit­ted, yet the creature is in the bond of his iniquity, held with this chain of guilt as a prisoner to divine justice, till he by faith and repentance sues out his pardon; even as a felon who, may be, is not presently after the fact taken and brought into judgment, yet abides a debtor to the law, wherever he is, till he can obtain his pardon.  Now need I speak anything to set out the dismal and deplored condition  of a soul un­der guilt, thereby to provoke you to pray for the re­moval of it?  There is no mountain so heavy as the guilt of the least sin is to an awakened conscience. Better thy house were haunted with devils than thy soul with guilt.  If thy conscience tells thee thou art ‘in the bond of iniquity,’ thou canst not be ‘in the gall of bitterness,’ they are joined together, Acts 8:23.  Guilt is a burden which the sinner can neither stand under nor throw off.  One compares him to a beast stung with a gadfly—fain would he run from his pain, but still he finds it in him.  This lies throbbing in his soul like a thorn in the flesh, and will not let him rest by day or sleep by night; he turns himself on his bed as Regulius in his barrel stuck with nails—not an easy plat that he can find in it.  This makes him afraid of every disease that comes to town, pox or plague, lest it should arrest him and bring him by death to judg­ment.  His guilt makes him think that every bush a man, and every man a messenger of divine vengeance to slay him.  The ‘mark’ that God set upon guilty Cain, Gen. 4:15,  is by many interpreters conceived to be a trembling heart, made visible by a ghastly coun­tenance and discomposed carriage of his outward man; and that passage, ver. 12, ‘A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth,’ the Septuagint read thus, FJX<T< 6" JDXµT< §F® ¦B J­H (­H —thou shalt be sighing and trembling in the earth. No convulsion fit so distorts the body as sin doth the soul.—Now in this prayer against guilt, and for pardon, observe these particulars.