Sermon 7. - Expostulation With Sinners.

It is true, that the living faith by which we are thus born again, is the gift of God, and the work of his Holy Spirit; but what said our blessed Lord? “Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you; for your heavenly Father will give his Holy Spirit to them that ask him.” Why should we then delay, brethren? If God is ready, as he most certainly is, now, while the door of mercy is yet open, while the Lord stretches still to us the arms of his patience and love, let us not harden our hearts. Let us break off our sins by repentance. With shame and sorrow let us arise and go to the blessed Jesus; resolve to wait at his feet in all the means of grace, till he is pleased to make us whole, and to prepare us for heaven by causing us to be born again of his Spirit; which if we do, I take heaven and earth to witness, with all the promises of that book lay which we are to be judged at the bar of God, that the Lord will be faithful on his part, and will bestow his grace upon us, so that we shall rejoice in the midst of all the misfortunes of life, exult in sickness, triumph in death, and shout for joy with all the sons of God, when this earth is burnt up in the day of the Lord: which may God grant, for his infinite mercy’s sake, through Jesus Christ our Lord; to whom, with God the Father, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed, as is most due, all honour and praise from this time forth for evermore.

SERMON 7. - EXPOSTULATION WITH SINNERS.

“And thou shalt speak my words unto them whether they will hear or whether they will forbear, for they are most rebellious,” Ezekiel 2:7. LAST Sunday I delivered to you, my dear brethren, the most awful message that was ever sent from God, the mighty God, to his undone creature man. I offered you life in his name, and upon his terms: I offered you Jesus Christ, the Prince of life, “the way, the truth, and the life.” I besought you to enter into covenant with him, yea, to accept your Maker for the husband of your souls, that being espoused and joined to him in one spirit, you might for ever dwell in him and he in you. How you received the message, whether you heartily accepted the gracious proposal, and have walked since as people who are new creatures in Christ; or whether the impressions which I would hope were made on some of your hearts have already vanished away like the early dew, is not my business to determine. Another messenger of the Lord, death, follows me. He will, ere long, summon you to the bar of Him who knows men’s hearts and judges righteous judgment. There you will give an account of your accepting or rejecting the message I delivered to you in his name; there you will find (may it not be to the endless confusion of any one!) that the matter was indeed for life and death, for eternal life or eternal death. However, as it is to be feared that the last sermon we have heard and the last communion we have received, have not had a better effect upon most of us than the foregoing ones; the want of outward reformation among us last week having visibly betrayed the want of inward conversion, I propose to - day to expostulate with these my unconverted hearers, and to show them that, notwithstanding their coming now and then into the house of the Lord, they are most rebellious against him. The task is not pleasant to me, nor do I suppose it will be so to you; but be this as it may, it must be performed; and though it be not agreeable, I trust it will be useful; the bitterest medicine often proving best for the soul as well as the body. And if any of you, my brethren, suppose we choose uncomfortable subjects, because we love to displease our hearers; not to mention that it is very unlikely ministers should thus endeavour to set their flocks against them; I answer, that we are the servants of God, and servants must not do what they please, but what their master commands, whether it be agreeable or disagreeable to them or to others. Our heavenly Master himself preached to convince and reprove, as well as to comfort his hearers, and he will have his servants do the same: witness the commission God gave again and again to Ezekiel in the chapter whence the text is taken. “Son of man, they are stiff - necked children, unto whom I send thee, and thou shalt say unto them, Thus says the Lord, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear, for they are most rebellious.” Having, therefore, last Sunday invited you to accept of Jesus Christ, and come to the marriage feast of the Lamb upon Gospel terms, I know not how I could one day answer it to God and your own souls, were I not to testify to those who make light of the invitation, whether they will hear or whether they will forbear, that they are most rebellious. Bear with me, my guilty brethren; and if you regard not my apology, regard, at least, the command given to Ezekiel in the text, and in him to all the ministers of God’s word. There we are sent to our stiff - necked hearers, and whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear, we are commanded to say unto them, “Thus says the Lord, you are a most rebellious house.” Permit me, therefore, my brethren, to consider myself at this time as an advocate of God, as one employed to plead against you who are such, and to charge you with nothing less than being rebels and traitors against the sovereign Majesty of heaven and earth: yes, did the noblest blood run in your veins, and were your seat among princes, it would be necessary you should be told, and told plainly, you are most rebellious: you leave broken the law of the King of kings, and by the breach of it you are become liable to his righteous condemnation, and are not in earnest to recover his favour.

Were not you born the natural subjects of God, born, as his creatures, under the indispensable obligations of his law? Does not your rational nature, whereby you are made capable of receiving law from God, bind you to obey it? And is it not equally evident and certain that you have not exactly obeyed this law; nay, that you have violated it in many aggravated instances?

Will you dare to deny this? Will you dare to assert your innocence? Remember, it must be a complete innocence; yes, and a perfect righteousness too, or it can stand you in no stead farther than to prove that, though condemned sinners, you are not quite so criminal as some others; and although dying unpardoned, you will not have quite so hot a place in hell as they. And, when this is considered, will you plead not guilty to the charge? Search the records of your own conscience, for God searcheth them, and ask it seriously whether you have not sinned against God. Solomon declared in his days there was not a just man upon earth, who did good and sinned not. And the Apostle Paul testified that all had sinned and come short of the glory of God; that both Jews and Gentiles (which you know comprehends the whole human race) were all under sin. And can you pretend any imaginable reason to believe the world is grown so much better since their days, that any should now plead his own case as an exception? Or will any of you presume to arise in the face of the heart searching Majesty of heaven, and say, “I plead not guilty, I never rebelled against God, I never broke his righteous law?”

Supposing you never allowed yourself to blaspheme God, to dishonour his name by customary swearing, or grossly to violate his Sabbaths, or commonly to neglect the solemnities of his public worship. Supposing again (and O that there were room to suppose this of every one!) that you have not injured your neighbours in their lives, their chastity, their character, or their property, either by violence or by fraud; and that you never scandalously debased your rational nature, or that of any man, by that vile intemperance which sinks a man below the worst kind of brutes; supposing all this, can you pretend that you have not in smaller instances violated the rules of piety, of temperance, and of chastity? Is there any one person who has intimately known you, that would not be able to testify you had said or done something amiss? Or, if others could not convict you, would not your own heart do it? Does it not prove you guilty of pride, of passion, of sensuality, of an excessive fondness for the world and its enjoyments; of murmuring, or at least of secretly repining against God under the strokes of an afflictive providence; of misspending a great deal of your time; of abusing the gifts of God’s bounty to vain, if not, in some instances, to pernicious purposes; of mocking him when you have pretended to engage in his worship, drawing near to him with your lips, while your heart has been far from him? Does not your conscience condemn you of some one breach of the law at least? And by one breach of it does not the Holy Ghost bear witness, James 2:10, that you are become guilty of all, and are as incapable of being justified before God by any obedience of your own, as if you had committed ten thousand offences? But, in reality, there are ten thousand and more to be charged to your account. When you come to reflect on all your sins of negligence, as well as on your voluntary transgressions; on all the instances in which you have failed to do good, when it was in your power to do it; on all the instances in which acts of devotion have been omitted, especially in secret; and on all those cases in which you have shown a stupid disregard to the honour of God, and to the temporal and eternal happiness of your fellow creatures: when all these, I say, are reviewed, the number will swell beyond all possibility of account, and force you to cry out, “I am rebellious, most rebellious, mine iniquities are more than the hairs of my head.” They will appear in such a light before you that your own heart will charge you with countless multitudes; and how much more then that God, “who is greater than your heart, and knoweth all things!”

And say, my fellow creatures, is it a little thing that you have presumed to set light by the authority of the God of heaven, and to violate his law, even if it had been by mere carelessness and inattention? How much more heinous then is the guilt, when in so many instances you have done it like an audacious rebel, knowingly and wilfully! Give me leave seriously to ask you, and let me entreat you to ask your own souls, “Against whom hast thou magnified thyself? Against whom hast thou exalted thy voice, or lifted up thy rebellious hand? On whose law, O sinner, hast thou presumed to trample? And whose friendship and enmity hast thou thereby dared to affront? Is it a man like thyself that thou hast insulted? Is it only a temporal monarch? Only one who can kill the body, and then hath no more that he can do? Nay, sinner, thou wouldst not have dared to treat a temporal prince as thou hast treated the King eternal, immortal, and invisible. No price could have hired thee to deal by the majesty of an earthly sovereign as thou hast dealt by that God before whom the cherubim and seraphim are continually bowing. Not one opposing or complaining, disputing or murmuring word is heard through the many millions of the heavenly host, when the intimations of their Maker’s will are published to them. And who art thou, O wretched man? Who art thou, that thou shouldest oppose him? That thou shouldest oppose a God of infinite power and terror, who needs but exert one single act of his sovereign will, and thou art in a moment stript of every possession; cut off from every hope; destroyed and rooted up from existence, if that were his pleasure; or, what is inconceivably worse, consigned over to the severest and most lasting agonies? Yet this is the God whom thou host offended; whom thou hast affronted to his face, presuming to violate his express laws in his very presence. This is the God against whom thou hast not only rebelled, but whose gracious offers of mercy in the Son of his love thou hast carelessly rejected. This is the God before whom thou standest a convicted criminal; convicted not of one or two particular offences, but of thousands and ten thousands, yea, of a course of rebellions and provocations in which thou hast persisted more or less ever since thou wast a child, and the particulars of many of which have been attended with aggravating circumstances. Reflect on particulars, and deny the charge if thou canst.

1. If sinning against any means of grace, and against knowledge, be an aggravation of guilt, thy guilt, O sinner, is greatly aggravated. For thou wast born in a Christian country, hast been brought up in a reformed Church; God has delivered unto thee his sacred word, and has provided for thee teachers, coming early and late, to show thee the things that belong to thy peace. The means of grace have been brought, as it were, to thy very door; the manna of God’s word runs round thy habitation. Thou canst not name one means of improving in Divine knowledge and grace, but what God has blessed thee with. Sacraments, plain sermons and lectures, reading of the word of God, and the soundest pieces of practical divinity, spiritual conferences, public and private prayers, instructions, singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs; all these means thou hast enjoyed, or mightest have enjoyed, if thy worldly and carnal mind had not made thee set light by then; still thou hast continued to dose on the pillow of security and presumption. And suppose thou art not one of those who entirely set at naught and turn from the instructions of their teachers, yet dost thou not often transgress in some such plain instances, that thins own reason, blinded as it is by the love of the world, manifests thy wilful disobedience; and knowing the righteous judgment of God, that they who commit such things are worthy of death, hast thou not done the same; nay, and, as St. Paul speaks, taken pleasure in those that did them, and even chosen them for thy ultimate friends and companions, so as thereby to strengthen, by the force of example and converse, one another’s hands in your contempt of vital religion and pursuit of vanity?

2. Add to this: if Divine love and mercy be an aggravation of the sins committed against it, your crimes, O sinner, have been heinously aggravated. “I have nourished and brought up children,” says the Lord, Isaiah 1., “and they have rebelled against me.” And is not this your very case, sinner? Did not God watch over you in your infant days, and guard you from a multitude of known and unknown dangers? Has he not given you rational faculties; has he not hitherto bestowed upon you the necessaries, and perhaps also the conveniences of life? Has he not frequently appeared for your deliverance, when in the distresses of nature you have called upon him for help? Has he not rescued you from ruin when unforeseen accidents have cut off in an instant some of your acquaintances about you? Hath he not, on some occasions, Sealed your diseases, when all that were around gave you up? Or, if it has not been so, has not the uninterrupted health which you have enjoyed been an equivalent obligation? Look round upon all your blessings, and name, if you can, one thing of which the God against whom you rebel has not been your bountiful giver and gracious preserver. Add to all these temporal mercies the many tender invitations at his Gospel, which you have heard and despised, and then say whether your rebellion hath not been aggravated by the vilest ingratitude, and whether that aggravation can be accounted small. Again: if it be any aggravation of sin to be committed against conscience, Your crimes, O sinner, have been thus aggravated: consult the records of it, and then dispute the fact if you can: conscience is the agent of God’s Spirit in the soul of man; it may be blinded and stupified, but it cannot be bribed. And it often condemns a sinner secretly, even while he endeavours to excuse himself outwardly. Have you not found it so? Has not conscience remonstrated against your past conduct, and have you not felt these remonstrances painful? Uncharitable as some think me in the pulpit, I cannot think you such a monster as to be void of conscience; or to have one so stupified, so seared, as it were, with a hot iron, that it never cried out against the violences you have done it, never warned you of the fatal consequences of one of your sins. These warnings, which you did not regard, were in effect the voice of God, the admonitions which he gave you by his agent in your breast. And if his sentence be executed upon you in everlasting death for your evil works, you will hear that voice speaking to you again, in a louder tone and a severer accent than before, and you will be tormented with its upbraidings through eternity, because you would not in time hearken to its admonitions.

Let me add, farther, that if it be any aggravation of guilt to have sinned against the motions of God’s Spirit on the mind, surely your sin has been attended with that aggravation also. St. Stephen charged it upon the Jews, that through all their generations they had always resisted the Holy Ghost. If the Spirit of God strove with the Jews, how much more with professing Christians! And have you never experienced any thing of this kind? Have you been so hardened from your infancy as never to have been wrought upon by an alarming or convincing discourse? Or when there was no pious teacher near you, have you never perceived a secret impulse upon your mind, leading you to think of religion, urging you to an immediate consideration of it, sweetly inviting you to make trial of it, and warning you that you would lament this stupid neglect? O sinner, why were not these happy motions attended to? Why did not you, as it were, spread out all the sails of your soul to catch that heavenly breath? But you have carelessly neglected it - you have suppressed these kind influences. How reasonably then might the sentence have gone forth in righteous displeasure: “My Spirit shall no more strive!” And, indeed, who can say that it has not already gone forth? Alas! if you feel no emotion of mind, no remorse, no awakening, while you listen to such a remonstrance as this, there will be room, great room, to fear it.

There is one aggravation more which probably attends your sins; I mean that of being committed against solemn engagements to the contrary. You promised in baptism to renounce all the pomps and vanities of this world, and all the sinful desires of the flesh; you vowed to keep God’s holy commandments all the days of your life: you have, perhaps, strengthened the obligation, already laid upon you by being confirmed, or coming to the Lord’s table with a public profession of having a stead fast purpose to lead a new life: but, alas! you are still the same, still a lover of pleasure, or of money, more than a lover of God! And, if you say you never come to the Lord’s table to vow him obedience, and so vou never aggravate your guilt by sinning against solemn engagements; I answer, it is the more shameful that you should so publicly forsake the God of your fathers, as never to attempt to enter into any engagement with him. The pleading that you are a heathen, makes Christ and his Church little amends for your not being a good Christian. But suppose you never took your baptismal vow upon yourself, hath your heart been, even from your youth, hardened to so uncommon a degree, that you never cried to God in any season of danger and difficulty? And did you never mingle vows with those cries? Did you never promise, that if God would hear and help you in that hour of extremity, you would forsake your sins, and serve him as long as you lived? He heard and helped you, otherwise you would not have been in his courts at this time; and by such deliverance did, as it were, bind down your vows upon you, and therefore your guilt in the violation of them remains before him, though you are stupid enough to forget them. Nothing is forgotten, nothing is overlooked by him; and the day will come when the record shall be laid before you too.

And now, sinner, think seriously with yourself, what defence you will make to all this. Will you fly in the face of God and that of your conscience, so openly as to deny one of the charges of rebellion, yea, of aggravated rebellion, I have advanced against you? Have you not lifted up yourself against the Lord of heaven? Have not you stiffened your neck and hardened your heart from his love and fear? Have you not sided with his sworn enemies, the world and the flesh? What part of your body, what faculty of your soul have you not employed as an instrument of unrighteousness? When did you live one day before God with the dependence of a creature, the gratitude of a redeemed creature, the heavenly frame of a sanctified creature? Nay, when did you live one hour without violating God’s known law either in word, or thought, or action? Have not you done it almost continually by the vanity of your mind and the hardness of your heart, if not by the open immorality of your life? And, what infinitely aggravates your guilt, have you not despised and abused God’s numberless mercies? Have not you affronted conscience, his deputy in your breast? Have not you resisted and grieved his Spirit? Yea, have not you trifled with him in all your pretended submissions or solemn engagements? In one word, and that in the language of Jeremiah, chap. 3., “Thou hast done evil things as thou couldest,” or as thou durst. Thousands are, no doubt, already in hell, whose guilt never equalled yours; and yet God has spared you to see the end almost of another year, and to hear now this plain representation of your case. And will you not yet consider? Shall nothing move you to shake off that amazing carelessness and stupid disregard of your salvation? Will you never begin to “work it out with fear and trembling?” Will you slumber in impenitency till eternal woes crush you into destruction? Is death, is judgment, is the bottomless pit so far off that you dare put off, from week to week, the day of your conversion? You have read in God’s word that there is mercy with him that he may be feared; but where did you read that there is mercy with him for those that fear him not; for those that are as unconcerned about his displeasure, as easy under his threatenings, as insensible of his mercies, as unmoved under his word as you are? Show me such a place, I shall not say any where in the Bible, but in any book written by a moral heathen! And yet you hope, you persist to hope, you are right, and can be saved in this way. When we expostulate with you, when we entreat you, after David, to “kiss the Son, lest he be angry,” and so you perish in this way of carnal security, “if his wrath be kindled, yea, but a little;” you blame us secretly, or openly, and are ready to quarrel with us for bringing you the unwelcome message: you will not blame yourselves for giving us cause to bring it, and obstinately refuse to fall out with the sins we exclaim against; but under the most cogent arguments, taken from reason and the nature of things, the most glaring proofs out of the word of God, the most earnest entreaties not to harden you heart, you remain as unshaken as an anvil under the workman’s stroke: or, if you relent a little, and conscience receives the dart of conviction, instead of driving it deeper and deeper, you instantly shake it off, and quench the Spirit of God; you run into the company of careless worldlings, and are afraid or ashamed to converse with those whose consciences are alarmed, and with whom you might learn the first principles of repentance never to be repented of; and thus you grow more insensible every day, more averse to pure and undefiled religion, more alienated from the life of God in your heart. And what do you think will be the end of these things? Has any one hardened himself against the Lord, says the prophet, and prospered? And do you suppose you shall first prosper in that way? “He that being often reproved,” says he again, “hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy;” and will the God of truth break his word, and commence a liar, by not spuing your lukewarm soul out of his mouth, by not cutting asunder such an unprofitable servant, such a rebellious subject as you are to him, if speedy conversion does not make him sheath the sword of his vengeance? If you say, that passion makes me represent your base worse than it really is, I put you to the proof: show wherein I speak not the words of soberness and truth. You cannot; and yet you condemn and slight them. If, therefore, I speak to any more particularly than to the rest of my careless hearers, it is to thee, whose heart is thus ready to say, “I am not a rebellious soul, but you are a false or enthusiastic teacher.” Alas! thou art the man - thou art the woman I chiefly address, and it appears clear that thou despisest reproof: and he that despises reproof, says the wise man, is brutish. “Yea, because I called,” (says God himself,) “and ye refused, and would none of my reproof, I also will laugh at your calamity, I will mock when your fear cometh.” And wilt not thou yet take warning, wilt thou to the end reject the very first exhortation of our Church, wilt thou go on cloaking and dissembling thy sins before the face of almighty God? O, if, notwithstanding my repeated endeavours to awaken thee, thou persistest and diest at last in this impenitency, remember me, sinner, when I stand at the bar of God, when the Lord maketh inquisition for blood, and the burning fiery furnace of his eternal wrath is heated seven times more for false teachers, who, by healing slightly the wound of the daughter of God’s people, betray souls into endless ruin, appear as a witness in my behalf and from the midst of everlasting burnings, let thy parched tongue send forth some such words as these: “Let not my teacher come into this place of torment, condemn him not on my account, I clear him, Lord, I clear him; he brought me thy messages, whether I would hear or whether I would forbear; he warned me of my rebellion against thee, and told me that these endless horrors would be my portion if I stiffened my neck and hardened my heart; but I set at naught all his counsels, and would none of his reproofs.” Yes, sinner, despise me here if thou wilt, and wonder why I urge thee so much to consider the things that belong to thy peace, before they be hid from thine eyes; call me here an enthusiast, and laugh at the concern I feel for thy perishing soul: but here after thou wilt do me justice, clear me before the Lord Jesus, and acknowledge that thy blood is upon thine own head, that thou art undone because thou wouldst be undone, because thou wouldst take neither warning nor reproof.

Yet if now thou art not quite given up to a reprobate mind; if thy stupid conscience is not entirely past feeling; if thy worldly soul is yet accessible to some touches of Divine grace, some motions of God’s Spirit; if thou yet desirest to arise and return to thy long - despised Father, to that God from