Christ? let go these lusts to which you have hitherto lived, and embrace him, and in him there is spirit and life for you. He shall enable you to live this heavenly life to the will of God, his God and your God, and his Father and your Father". Oh! delay no longer this happy change; how soon may that puff of breath that is in thy nostrils, who hearest this, be extinguished! and art thou willing to die in thy sins, rather than that they die before thee? thinkest thou it a pain to live to the will of God? sure it will be more pain to lie under his eternal wrath. Oh! thou knowest not how sweet they find it that have tried it! or thinkest thou, I will afterwards? Who can make thee sure either of that afterwards, or of that will, if but afterwards? why not now presently, without further debate? hast thou not served sin long enough? may not the time past in that service suffice, yea, is it not too much? wouldest thou only live unto God as little time as may be, and think the dregs of thy life good enough for him? what ingratitude and gross folly is this! yea, though thou wert sure of coming in to him, and being accepted; yet, if thou knowest him in any measure, thou wouldst not think it a privilege to defer it, but willingly choose to be free from the world and thy lusts to be immediately his, and wouldst, with David, make haste, and not delay to keep his righteous judgments: all the time thou livest without him, what a filthy wretched life is it, if that can be called life that is without him? to live to sin, is to live still in a dungeon; but to live to the will of God, is to walk in liberty and light; to walk by light unto light, by the beginnings of it to the fulness of it, that is in his presence.

u John xx. 17.

Ver. 4, 5. Wherein they think it strange that you run not with them to the same excess of riot, speaking evil of you; Who shall give account to him that is ready to judge the quick and the dead.

GRACE, until it reach its home, and end in glory, is still in conflict, with a restless party within and without, yea, the whole world against it. It is a stranger here, and is accounted and used so; they think it strange that you run not with them, and they speak evil of you. These wondering thoughts they vent in reproaching words.

In these two verses we have these three things: 1. The Christian's opposite course to the world. 2. Their opposite thoughts and speeches of this course. 3. The supreme and final judgment of both.

1. The opposite course in that, They run to excesses of riot. 2. You run not with them. They run to excesses, dorías, of riot or luxury. Though all natural men are not, in the grossest kind, guilty of this, yet they are all of them some way truly riotous or luxurious, lavishing away themselves, and their days, upon the poor perishing delights of sin, each according to his own palate and humour. As all persons that are riotous, in the common sense of it, gluttons or drunkards, do not love the same kind of meats or drink, but have several relishes or appetites; yet they agree in the nature of the sin; so the notion enlarged after that same manner, to the different custom of corrupt nature, takes in all the ways of sin; some glutting in, and continually drunk with pleasures and carnal enjoyments, others with the cares of this life, which our Saviour reckons with surfeiting and drunkenness, as being a kind of it, and surcharging the heart as they do, as there he expresses it, Take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and cares of this life. Whatsoever it is that draws away the heart from

a Luke xxi. 34.

God, that, how plausible soever, doth debauch and destroy us. We spend and undo ourselves upon it, as the word ȧowría signifies, making havock of all. And the other word árázvos, profusion and dissolute lavishing, pouring out the affection upon vanity. It is scattered and defiled as water spilt upon the ground, that cannot be cleansed nor gathered up again. And the representation is indeed very just; it passes all our skill and strength to recover and recollect our hearts for God; he only can do it for himself; he that made it can gather it, and cleanse it, and make it new, and unite it to himself. Oh! what a scattered, broken, unstable thing is the carnal heart till it be changed, falling in love with every gay folly it meets withal, and running out to rest profusely upon things like its vain self, that suit and agree with it, and serve its lusts: it can dream and muse upon these long enough, any thing that feeds the earthliness or pride of it, can be prodigal of hours, and let out floods of thoughts, where a little is too much, but is bounded and straitened where all are too little; hath not one fixed thought in a whole day to spare for God.

And truly this running out of the heart is a continual drunkenness and madness: it is not capable of reason, and will not be stopped in its current by any persuasion; it is mad upon its idols, as the Prophet speaks. You may as well speak to a river in its course, and bid it stay, as speak to an impenitent sinner in the course of his iniquity; and all the other means you can use, is but as the putting of your finger to a rapid stream to stay it. But there is a hand can both stop and turn the most impetuous torrent of the heart, be it even of a King, that will least endure any other controulment.

Now, as the ungodly world naturally moves to this profusion with a strong and swift motion, runs to it, so it runs together to it, and that makes the current both the stronger and swifter; as a number of brooks falling into one main channel make a mighty

stream. And every man naturally is, in his birth, and in the course of his life, just as a brook, that of itself is carried to that stream of sin that is in the world, and then falling into it, is carried rapidly along with it. And if every sinner, taken apart, be so inconvertible by all created power, how much more hard a task is a public reformation, and turning a land from its course of wickedness; all that is set to dam up their way, doth at the best but stay them a little, and they swell, and rise, and run over with more noise and violence than if they had not been stopped. Thus we find outward restraints prove, and thus the very public judgments of God on us. They may have made a little interruption, but, upon the abatement of them, the course of sin, in all kinds, seems to be now more fierce, as it were, to regain the time lost in that constrained for bearance: So that we see the need of much prayer to entreat his powerful hand, that can turn the course of Jordan, that he would work, not a temporary, but an abiding change of the course of this land, and cause many souls to look upon Jesus Christ, and flow into him, as the word is, in Psal. xxxiv. 5.

This is their course, but you run not with them. The godly are a small and weak company, and yet run counter to the grand torrent of the world, just against them. And there is a Spirit within them, whence that their contrary motion flows; a Spirit strong enough to maintain it in them, against all the crowd and combined course of the ungodly ". Greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. As Lot in Sodom, his righteous soul was not carried with them, but vered with their ungodly doings. There is to a believer the example of Christ, to set against the example of the world, and the Spirit of Christ against the spirit of the world; and these are by far the more excellent and stronger. Faith, looking to him, and drawing virtue from him, makes the soul surmount all discouragements and oppositions; so, Looking to Jesus:

d 1 John iv. 4.

VOL. II.

M

e Heb. xii. 2.

And not only as an example worthy to oppose to all the world's examples; the saints were so; but he more than they all: But further, he is the Author and Finisher of our Faith; and so we eye him, as having endured the cross, and despised the shame, and as set down at the right hand of the throne of God. Not only that in doing so, we may follow him in that way, unto that end as our pattern, but as our Head, from whom we borrow our strength to follow so, the Author and Finisher of our faith. And so, This is our victory, whereby we overcome the world, even our faith.

The Spirit of God shews the believer clearly both the baseness of the ways of sin, and the wretched measure of their end. That divine light discovers the fading and false blush of the pleasures of sin, that there is nothing under them but true deformity and rottenness, which the deluded gross world does not see, but takes the first appearance of it for true and solid beauty, and so is enamoured with a painted strumpet. And as he sees the vileness of that love of sin, he sees the final unhappiness of it, that her ways lead down to the chambers of death. Methinks a believer is as one standing upon a high tower, that sees the way wherein the world runs, in a valley, as an unavoidable precipice, a steep edge, hanging over the bottomless pit, where all that are not reclaimed fall over before they be aware; this they, in their low way, perceive not, and therefore walk and run on in the smooth pleasures and ease of it towards their perdition; but he that sees the end will not run with them.

And as he hath by that light of the Spirit this clear reason of thinking on, and taking another. course, so by that Spirit he hath a very natural bent to a contrary motion, that he cannot be one with them. That Spirit moves him upwards, whence it came, and makes that, in so far as he is renewed, his natural motion, though he hath a clog of flesh that cleaves to him, and so breeds him some diffif Chap. xi. and xii.

g1 John v. 4.