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unsearchable riches of Christ. In this happy condition, it arrives

3. At that peace of heart and conscience which is the believer's privilege and joy. The weight that before pressed down the soul is now taken off. Admitted to a new life, it is borne onwards to new hopes, new delights, and new prospects.

Now it contemplates God as no more a consuming fire, but as a reconciled Father, no longer as armed with vengeance, but as smiling with love. Now it sees him not dimly, through the mists of a cold, dark, or slumbering heart, but with that new mind which, enlightened as it is from above, can alone behold spiritual things in their exact proportion, character, and magnitude. Now it is fed on that hidden manna which the Lord provides for his waiting and believing people; and advancing in the life of religion, it is permitted to enjoy more and more of heavenly things, and enabled to care less and less for earthly ones. It now finds a sweetness in those gospel truths to which before, from day to day, and from year to year, it was wholly indifferent or insensible, nay, perhaps, sternly and radically opposed. It is carried forward to that victory over self and the world, over sin without and sin within, which is a principal feature in the angelic life, and which it never even desired, till it was created anew in Christ Jesus. Being the only soul that knows what true rest, and peace, and

blessedness are, it is the only soul also which can exist for a moment in that glorious state where the Lord and his ransomed people are for ever united.

Give me leave now, for one moment, to ask of each of you, for each of you has an immortal soul to be saved, are you brought, in a sense of your naturally lost and guilty state, to the Saviour's feet, with a temper like that of the humble penitent in the text? Do you foresee your inevitable lot, if you leave this world, however great or honoured you may be, for mind, body, or estate, in the eye of fallen man, without an interest in the blood shed upon the cross for your own soul? Are you praying from day to day for that new heart, without which the gospel sound is, of all sounds, to you the most harsh and grating? The life that you now live in the flesh, do you live in the faith of the Son of God who gave himself for you, or do you follow your own counsel, thoughts, and desires, fearless of their aspect before him, and of their soul-destroying tendency? Is his salvation the pearl of great price to you, to buy which you would willingly part with all you possess, and in parting, feel happy and blessed? Do you count all things but loss that you may win Christ and be found in him, not having your own righteousness, but the righteousness which is of God by faith? Oh! have we each a good hope, that when at last the Lamb shall come to be glorified

in his saints, we shall be found to have on our hearts his image, fully and indelibly engraven on it? May God grant it,-may he, in mercy, visit each soul here, not yet possessed by his gracious and life-giving Spirit! May he awaken from the sleep of death every one here, who is either ignorant or careless of the truths of his glorious word! May he give us all, that inward light by which alone we can follow on to know the Lord, and desire that entire spirituality of heart to which we are called, and the perfection of which is that very heaven we all profess to long for, and hope finally to attain! So shall we find more and more delight in prayer, more thirst also for the living water that Christ promised, and more, finally, of that genuine heart-love to the Redeemer which he will deign to recognise in each of us, as in the poor accepted penitent of our text, and to bless with the same life-giving words, "Thy faith hath saved thee, go in

peace."

189

SERMON XIII.

THE BLESSINGS OF SANCTIFIED AFFLICTION.

COLOSSIANS i. 27.

Christ in you the hope of glory.

Of the various evidences by which, without a fear of being misled, we may try the state of our hearts, perhaps there is none more clearly proving us to be at peace with God through Christ, on the one hand, or strangers to that peace, on the other, than the temper with which we bear the cares and the calamities of life. In some form or other afflictions are allotted to us all, and, to the believer in Jesus, we are taught to expect that they will be sent in number and severity at least as great as to the mere child of this world. It is stated to be part of God's dispensation to his people, as well in the more mature as in the infant state of his church, that through much tribulation they are to enter into the kingdom of heaven, and

that, like the Captain of their salvation, they are to be made perfect through sufferings. All mere hope and trust in the creature are to be entirely relinquished; they are led unreservedly to own and feel "the plague of their own hearts," and that sometimes, by the instrumentality of some "thorn in the flesh," which He provides, who knows the time, the way, and the mode best suited to their peculiar and respective cases. They are to be wholly weaned from every kind of complacency in the things of sense, which, in other days, they, like their fellow-sinners, found invested with an all-commanding power, and surrounded with allurement to their frail and wayward natures. They are to have wrought in their minds a conviction, not slight and transient, but abiding and influential, of the sin as well as misery of a state which is "without God in the world," that too common state of one who has no vital interest in his beloved Son. And they are to be entirely brought under the sway of a principle, in action as well as judgment, so paramount, as to possess the memory and affections with the truth, that life and peace can exist only in the changed, renewed, and spiritual mind. Now all this, the word of God assures us, is the growth of grace in a soil naturally unfit to receive it, the work of the Spirit on elements, by nature, wholly repugnant to it. Hence, in his dealings with the heirs of glory, the Lord often

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