THREE WAYS by which faith teaches the soul to draw out the virtue of the promises 1/4

 1. Way.  Faith leads the soul to the spring‑head of the promises, where it may stand with best advan­tage, to take a view of their greatness and precious­ness.  Indeed we understand little of things till we trace them to their originals and can see them lying in their causes.  Then a soul will know his sins to be great when he sees them in their spring and source flowing from an envenomed nature that teems with enmity against God.  Then the sinner will tremble at the threatenings which roll like thunder over his head, ready to fall every moment in some judgment or other upon him, when he sees from whence they are sent; the perfect hatred that God bears to sin, and infinite wrath with which he is inflamed against the sinner for it.  In a word, then the poor trembling soul will not count the consolation of the promises small when it sees from what fountain it flows—the bosom of God’s free mercy.  This indeed is the original source of all promises.  The covenant itself, which comprehends them all is called ‘mercy,’ because the product of mercy.  ‘To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant,’ Luke 1:72.  Now, saith faith, if the promises flow from the sea of God’s free mercy, then they must needs be infinite as he is, boundless and bottomless as that is; so that to reject the promise, or question the suffi­ciency of the provision made in it upon this account, because thy sins are great or many, casts a dishonour­able reflection on that mercy, in whose womb the promise was conceived; and God will certainly bring his action of defamation against thee, for aspersing this his darling attribute, which he can least endure to see slandered and traduced.  God makes account you have done your worst against him, when once you re­port him to be unmerciful or but scant in his mercy. How great a sin this is may be conceived by the thoughts which God hath of this disposition and frame of spirit in his creature.  An unmerciful heart is such an abomination before the Lord that it hath few like it.  This lies at he bottom of the heathen’s charge, as the sediment and grossest part of all their horrid sins—they were ‘implacable, unmerciful,’ Rom. 1:31. Now, to attribute that to God which he so abhors in his creature, must needs make a heart tender of the good name of God to tremble and exceedingly fear. It was a dreadful punishment that God brought upon Jehoram, king of Judah, whom he ‘smote in his bowels with an incurable dis­ease,’ that after two years’ torment his very bowels fell out, II Chr. 21:18, 19.  And why did this sore and heavy plague befall him? Surely to let him know his want of bowels of mercy to his brethren and princes, whom he most cruelly butch­ered.  He had not bowels in his heart, and he shall therefore have none in his body.  Now, darest thou, saith faith, impute want of bowels to God, that he will not show mercy to thee, who penitently seeks it in Christ’s name, when thou seest what testimony he gives of his incensed wrath against those men who have hardened their bowels against their brethren, yea, their enemies?  O, have a care of this.  To shut thy own bowels of compassion from thy brother in need is s grievous sin, and brings it into question whether the love of God dwells in thee, I John 3:17; but, to asperse the merciful heart of God, as if his bowels of compassion were shut against a poor soul in need, that desires to repent and return, is transcen­dently the greater abomination, and it puts out of all question—where it is persisted in—that the love of God dwells not in him.  It is impossible that love to God should draw such a misshapen portraiture of God as this is