USE OR APPLICATION Reproof and encouragement to ministers.

           Use First. To the ministers.  To reprove some; for encouragement to others.  It reproves,

1. The vainglorious preachers; that, instead of ‘making known the mystery of the gospel,’ makes it his errand into the pulpit to make himself known; who blows up his sermon, as butchers do their flesh they sell, with a windy pomp of words, and frames their discourse rather to tickle their ears, than to profit their souls; to send them home applauding the preacher for his wit and parts, rather than admiring the excellencies of Christ and riches of his grace. Thus many, alas! who should be factors for Christ, play the merchants for their own credit.  They are sent to woo souls for Christ, and they speak one word for him and two for themselves.  This is a great wickedness, which blessed Paul solemnly clears him­self of, ‘Nor a cloke of covetousness; God is witness: nor of men sought we glory, I Thes. 2:5, 6.  O how sel­dom are any converted by such sermons!  These gloriæ animalia—vainglorious preachers, they may be, like Rachel, fair, but their ministry is like to be barren.
2. Abstruse preachers; who do not make the mysteries of the gospel known, but make truths plain in themselves mysterious by their dark perplexed discourses upon them.  This was the unhappiness of the schoolmen, that ruffled and ensnarled the plain­est truths of the gospel with their harsh terms and nice questions, which else might have been wound off by an ordinary understanding.  What is said of some commentators, ‘The places on which they treat were plain till they expounded them,’ may be said of some preachers, their text was clear till their obscure dis­course upon it darkened it.  What greater wrong can a preacher do his hearers than this?  The preacher is to open scriptures; but these turn the key the wrong way, and lock the up from their knowledge.  They are to hold up the gospel glass before their people, whereby they may see to dress their souls, like a bride, against their husband’s coming; but by that time that they have breathed on their text, it is so obscured that they cannot see their face in it.  That water is not the deepest that is thickest and muddy; nor the matter always the most profound when the preacher’s expression is dark and obscure.  We count it a blemish in speech, when a man's pronunciation is not distinct.  I know not then how it should come to be thought a perfection to be obscure in the delivery of our conceptions.  The deeper and fuller the sculp­ture in the seal is, the clearer the impression will be on the wax. The more fully any man understands a thing, the more able he will be to deliver it plainly to others.  As a clipped stammering speech comes from an impediment in the instruments of speech, so a dark and obscure delivery of our thoughts bewrays a defect in our apprehensions; except it should come from an affectation of soaring high in our expressions above the reach of vulgar understandings—and this is worst of all.
3. The mere moral preacher; the stream of whose preaching runs not in an evangelical channel. Moral duties he presseth, and sins against the moral law he exclaims against.  Neither dare I blame him for that.  The Christian’s creed doth not vacate the ten commandments.  One of the first sermons our Sa­viour preached was most of it spent in pressing moral duties Matt. 5.  And never more need to drive this nail to the head than in our days, in which Christianity hath been so wounded in its reputation by the moral dishonesty of many of its professors.  But I level my reproof against them for this, that they do not preach the law evangelically, and make that the main design of their ministry for which they received their commission, and that is, ‘to make known the mystery of the gospel’—‘to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ; and to make all men see what is the fellow­ship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ,’ Eph. 3:8, 9.  Did it make the father un­dervalue Cicero’s works—which otherwise he ad­mired for their eloquence—only because his leaves were not perfumed with the sweet name of Jesus Christ?  Surely then it is a foul blot upon their ser­mons and labours, who reveal little of Christ and the mystery of the gospel through the whole course of their ministry.  The woe is pronounced not only against the non-preaching minister, but the not-gospel-preaching minister also: ‘Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel,’ I Cor. 9:16.  An ethic lecture will not make thy people ‘wise unto salvation.’  It were well if thou couldst preach thy drunken neigh­bour sober and the riotous temperate.  But this is no more than Plato did for his Polemo.  This may make them men that were before beasts; but thou must get them to be saints, regenerate ones; preach them out of themselves, as well as out of their flagitious prac­tices; from the confidence of their righteousness, as well as from the love of their sins; or else thou leavest them short of heaven.  Well then, smoke, yea fire, them out of their moral wickednesses, by the threat­enings of the law; but rest not till thou hast ac­quainted them with Christ, and the way of salvation by him.  In a word, preach moral duties as much as thou wilt, but in an evangelical strain.  Convince them they cannot do these without grace from Christ, for want of which the heathens’ virtues were but splendida peccata—gilded vices.  Per fidem venitur ad opera, non per opera venitur ad fidem—we must come to good works by faith, and not to faith by good works.  The tree must be good before the fruit it bears can be so.  ‘Without me ye can do nothing.’  And then convince them, when they are most exact in moral duties, that this must not be their righteousness before God; the robe which they must cover their souls with—if they would not be found naked in his sight—must not be the homespun garment of their own inherent righteousness wrought in them, but of Christ’s righteousness which he wrought for them.

   It affords a word of sweet encouragement to the faithful ministers of Christ.  Haply you have been long at work for Christ, and see little fruit of your labours; your strength is even spent, and candle almost at the socket of old age; but your people are still carnal and obstinate, no sun will tan them, no arguments move them, filthy they are, and so will continue; to hell they will go, no gate can stop them; thou hast done thy utmost to reclaim them, but all in vain.  This is sad indeed—to them, I mean—thus to go to hell by broad daylight, while the gospel shows the whither every step of their sinful course leads them.  But thou hast cause of much inward peace and comfort, that thou hast done what God expects at thy hands.  Remember thy work is, ‘To make known the mystery of the gospel,’ and upon their peril be it if they embrace it not.  God never laid it upon thee to convert those he sends thee to.  No; to publish the gospel is thy duty, to receive it is theirs.  Abraham promiseth to discharge his servant of his oath, if the woman which he was to woo for his son would not follow him; and so will God clear thee of their blood, and lay it at their own door.  ‘If thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness,...he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul,’ Eze. 3:19.  God judgeth not of his servants’ work by the success of their labour, but by their faithfulness to deliver his message.  ‘Though Israel be not gath­ered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the Lord,’ Isa. 49:5.