Use or Application 1/2

           Use First.  Must we pray above all for saints? Woe then to those who, instead of praying for them, had rather with those, Isa. 59:15, make ‘a prey’ of them; that, instead of praying for them, can curse them, and drink to their confusion.  Haply it is not under the plain name of saints, but as wrapped up in the bearskin of fanatic, puritan, or some other name of scorn, invented to cover their malice, so they can devour and tear them in pieces.  The saints are a sort of people that none love but those that are themselves such.  It is a good gloss of Jerome, estote sancti, ut oratis pro sanctis—be saints, and then you will pray for saints.  The righteous is an abomination to the wicked: it is a sect everywhere spoken against.  The feud began at first between Abel and Cain, and so spread over the whole world; one generation takes up the cudgel against them, as another lays it down. Hamilcar bequeathed his hatred against the Romans to his son Hannibal when he died.  So is the feud transmitted by the wicked from one generation to an­other against the saints.  Nothing can quench their wrath or take up the quarrel;—no moral perfections, which, were they in others, would be thought lovely. Let the saint be never so wise, meek, affable, and bountiful, yet this, that he is a Christian, is a ‘but’ that will blot all in the wicked world's thoughts. Bonus vir Cajus Sejus, sed malus tantum quod Christianus, was the language in Tertullian’s age —Cajus Sejus had been a good man if he had not had that without which he could not be good.  No near relation can wear off their spite.  Michal cannot bite in her scornful spirit, but jeers her husband to his face for his zeal before the Lord.

           In a word, no benefit which accrues to the wicked by the saints’ neighbourhood—and that is not a little—can make them lay down their hatred.  They are the only bail which God takes to keep a nation, when under his arrest, out of prison.  They are the cause of blessings to the families, towns, and king­doms they live in; yet the butt at which their enven­omed arrows are levelled against.  The whole city is against Lot; not a man among them to take his part, so true and constant are the wicked to their own side. Tertullian tells us of some heathen husbands that liked their wives, though loose and wanton, and lived with them, when such, before they were converted to Christianity, but when once they had embraced the faith, and thereby were made chaste, they put them away; fathers that could bear undutiful rebellious car­riages in their children, when once converted  and these amended, they turned them out of doors.  Ut quisque hoc nomine emendatur, offendit—as any were reformed in their lives by turning Christian, so he became an offender.  It were will if this were only the heathens’ sin; but by woeful experience we find that the true Christian hath not more cruel enemies in the whole world than some be that are of his own name.  The sharpest persecutions of the church have been by those that were in the church.  O what a dreadful will such have to make in the great day, who profess the name of Christ, yet hate his nature in the saints!—who call Christ Lord, yet persecute his best servants and destroy his loyalest subjects!  These are the men that above all other shall feel the utmost of the Lord’s fiery wrath in the day when he shall plead his people’s cause and avenge himself on their adversaries.

           Use Second.  Be exhorted tot his duty of praying for saints; you cannot do that which God will take more kindly at your hands.  He himself puts this petition into our mouths: ‘Ask me of things to come concerning my sons,’ Isa. 45:11. Courtiers frame their petitions according to their prince’s liking.  They are careful not to ask that which he is unwilling to give; but when they perceive he favours a person or busi­ness, then they are ambitious to present the petition. Joab knew what he did in sending the woman of Te­koah to David, with a petition wrapped up in a hand­some parable for Absalom the king’s son.  He knew the king’s heart went strongly after him, and so the motion could not but be acceptable.  And is not the Lord’s heart gone after his saints?  Thy prayer for them, therefore, must needs come in a good time, when it shall find the heart of God set upon the very thing thou askest.  This was it that God was so pleased with in Daniel, ch. 9:22, 23. Now, in your prayers for the saints, among other things that you pray for them, forget not these:

1. Pray for their lives.  They are such a blessing when they live, that they seldom fall but the earth shakes under them.  It is commonly a prognostic of an approaching evil when God takes them away by death.  Jeroboam had but one son in whom some good was found; he must die, and then the ruin of his father’s family follows, I Kings 14:7.  When Augustine died, then Hippo falls into the enemy’s hands.  If the wise man be gone that preserved the city, no wonder if its end hastens. God makes way to let his judg­ments in upon the world by taking the saints out of the world.  When God chambers his children in the grave, a storm is at hand, Isa. 26.  It is, you see, of con­cernment to do our utmost to keep them among us, especially when their number is so few and thin al­ready, that we may say, as once the prophet con­cerning Israel, ‘I am as when they have gathered the summer fruits, as the grape-gleanings of the vintage,’ Micah 7:1.  Did we indeed see them come up as thick in our young ones as they fall in the old, we might say a blessing is in them.  These would be as hope‑seeds at least for the next generation.  But when a wide breach is made and few to step into it, this is omi­nous.  At Moses’ death, Joshua stood up in his place, and it went well with Israel’s affairs.  But when Joshua died, and a generation rose up that had not seen the wonders God had done for his people, and so rebelled, then they to wrack apace, Judges 2:9, 10.