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2dly, Would you be fed, yea, feasted, this day, at a communion-table, with the fatness of God's house, with fat things full of marrow? Oh! then, here is the way to it; put your trust in a God of love, come in under his wings: Psal. xxxvii. 3:"Trust in the Lord, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed." You see you have not only his promise, that you shall be fed, but his promise supported and ratified by a strong asseveration, Verily, thou shalt be fed. Would you be fed with the blessings of heaven, the blessings of a well-ordered covenant, the sure mercies of David! Oh! then, trust in a God of love; for "blessed are all they that trust in him," Psal. lxxxiv. 12. Would you have languishing grace revived, brought into a thriving and blooming condition? Oh! then, trust in a God of love, Jer. xvii. 7, 8: "Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green, and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit." Would you be filled with peace? then trust in a God of love: Is. xxvi. 3: "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee; because he trusteth in thee." Would you be filled with the joys of God's salvation? then trust in a God of love: Psal. xiii. 5: "I have trusted in thy mercy, my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation." In a word, not to insist, trust in a God of love, and you shall never perish: "none perish that trust in him:" you shall never be confounded nor dismayed; and he will never forsake you: "Thou, Lord, hast not forsaken them that seek thee, and trust in thee." You shall have all needful preparation for a communion table; for "the preparation of the heart, and answer of the tongue, comes from him." So, then, I say, trust in a God of love. I think it is enough to engage you all to trust him, to repeat the text, and to say, God is love. If any of you apprehend a man to be your enemy, in that case you will have no trust to put in him; but if you be once persuaded he loves you, and wants only an opportunity to do you all the service he can, in that case you will trust him with assured confidence. Well, sirs, we tell you, that God is not only a friend, bearing good-will to you, but he is love, love itself; love is the imperial or commanding attribute of his nature: O, how excellent is his loving kindness! therefore, let the sons of men, let sinners and saints, put their trust under the shadow of his wings.

4. A fourth exhortation from the text is this: Is it so, that a God in Christ is a God of love? Oh, then, sirs, reciprocate your love on a God of love, and render him love for love

"This is the first and great commandment" of the moral law, and the sum of the first table of the law, Matth. xxii. 37, 38: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind." Here is the most reasonable and just command that ever was. What can be more reasonable than to love him, who is not only lovely, but love itself, and whose love runs out towards us in such a surprising and astonishing way? Sure I am, it is your "reasonable service," to love him with all thy heart, soul, strength, and mind. And, sirs, this is a command which, to obey, I am sure will not be painful; for, when God commands you to love him, he commands you to make yourselves happy; for the very happiness of the rational soul lies in the outgoings of God's love to you, and the outgoings of your love and affections towards him. Oh, sirs! love to a God of love "is the fulfilment of the law;" you perform all duties, and exercise all graces at once, when you get your hearts drawn out in love to a God in Christ. What is faith, but love trusting and confiding in the beloved object? What is hope, but love expecting and longing after the enjoyment of him? What is patience, but love bearing and suffering what a God of love lays on? What is humility, but love lying at the feet of a God of love? What is heavenly-mindedness, but love soaring, as upon eagles' wings, after a God of love? What is zeal, but love inflamed with desire to serve a God of love? What are all good works, but love displaying itself in actions of obedience to the commands of a God of love? What is it to communicate? It is just to show forth the dying love of a God of love. What is it to pray, but to offer up our desires to a God of love? What is it to praise, but to give vent to the heart in the commendation of a God of love? So that, I say, when you love a God of love, you, as it were, do all things at once. And then, to engage and encourage your love, in the command itself he presents himself to thee as thy God, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." Thus, he ushers in the commandment of the moral law, with, "I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the house of bondage." He is thy God, not only by creation, as he is the God of all living; but he is thy God in covenant, thy God in Christ: and when he says, I am thy God," he in effect says, All that I am, all that I have, all that I can do, I make over to you in an everlasting covenant, which shall never be broken. Oh, sirs! shall not all this kindle a flame of love in your bosoms to a God of love? This is a large field, and would admit of a great enlargement: but, that I may not hinder the great work of the day, I shall proceed no farther. The Lord bless what has been said, and to his name be praise.

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SERMON XIII.

UNBELIEF ARRAIGNED AND CONDEMNED AT THE BAR OF GOD.*

JOHN XVI. 8, 9.-And when he is come, he will convince the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they believe not on me.

He that believeth not, is condemned already.-JOHN III. 18.

CHRIST having, in the preceding verse, declared the great end and design of his mission by the Father, or of his manifestation in our nature; namely, not that he should “condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved;" in the verse where my text lies, deduces a two-fold inference therefrom. The first is very sweet and comfortable, in the former part of the verse; "He that believeth on him, is not condemned;" that is, he who falls in with the great end of my manifestation in the nature of man, he who gives me my errand, by intrusting his lost and ruined soul into my hand, although he be a sinner, and a great sinner, though the law and justice of God be pursuing him, for the many millions of talents he is owing: yet the process shall be stopped, the judgment arrested, the sentence of the broken law cancelled, insomuch that he cannot come into condemnation; and if he be not condemned, he must be absolved and acquitted. I, as his Surety, have paid the debt, and obtained the discharge under the hand of justice; I was made sin for him, that he might be made the righteousness of God in me: and, therefore, who can lay any thing to his charge?

The second inference, drawn from the design of the incarnation of the Son of God, is very terrible and awful; and you have it in the words I design to insist a little upon, He that believeth not, is condemned already. For which there is a very relevant reason given, in the close of the verse: "Because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God."

It is the middle clause of the verse on which I am to speak

* Preached at the Tolbooth Church of Edinburgh, March 2, 1727.

He that believeth not, is condemned already. Where we may notice, (1.) A capital crime chargeable upon most of gospel hearers, not believing. (2.) An awful sentence passed against the criminal; he is condemned. (3.) The quality of the sentence implied in that expression, condemned already. Which may point either at the certainty of the unbeliever's condemnation: it is not simply a thing future, or to be done; but it is done already. The sentence is pronounced and gone forth against him, from the mouth of the righteous Judge; yea, not only is sentence passed, but is partly executed, the law having delivered him over, in a way of righteous judgment, into the power and dominion of sin, which is spiritual death. Or, the word already may point at the severity of the unbeliever's sentence; his sin is of such a deep dye; of such a criminal nature, that the Judge cannot sit with it, as he doth with other sins, Psal. 1. 21. It offers such indignity to his beloved Son, the darling of his soul, that he cannot shun to adjudge the panel to immediate death. Or, the word may intimate this much to us, that the sentence of the broken law stands in full force and vigour against the unbelieving sinner, for all his other sins: he despises the only remedy, the only sacrifice for sin; and therefore every sinful thought, word, and action, exposes him to the just vengeance of a righteous God, in time, and through endless eternity.

My doctrine is, "That every unbeliever is a sentenced and condemned criminal before God. Or, take it, if you will, in the very words of the text, He that believeth not, is condemned already."

Here, through divine assistance, I shall speak,

I. Of the crime.

II. Of the sentence.

III. Of the grounds on which the sentence is founded.
IV. Deduce some inferences from the whole.

I would speak a little of the crime, which is unbelief, by giving some account of it, 1. In its nature; 2. In its causes. As for the first, namely, the nature of unbelief. Before I proceed to show in what it consists, to prevent mistakes, I shall name a few things, which will not amount to this heavy charge in God's reckoning, whatever they may sometimes do in the court of an erring or misinformed conscience.

1. Unbelief does not lie in a person's being in the dark as to his actual union with Christ, or interest in him. A real believer may want the sensible assurance of God's love, and yet, at the same time, be acting faith with an assurance of appropriation upon the promise of a reconciled God in Christ.

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Sense may be saying, as in the case of Heman, Psal. lxxxviii. "Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps. I am afflicted and ready to die, from my youth up: while I suffer thy terrors, I am distracted." And yet faith breathing out its appropriating act, and saying, "O Lord God of my salvation;" it will look in the face of a hiding and smiting God, and say, "Though he should slay me, yet will I trust in him." And, seeing it is so, it must needs follow, that unbelief does not lie in a person's being in the dark as to his actual interest in Christ; to say so, were to "offend against the generation of the righteous," who may be "trusting in the name of the Lord, and staying themselves upon their God, while they walk in darkness, and see no light."

2. Unbelief does not lie in the interruption of the actings and exercise of faith. We find the faith of the most eminent saints many times interrupted in its exercise, through the prevalency of temptation and indwelling corruption. Psal. Ixxvii. 7, &c., the holy man there, in a fit of unbelief, cries, "Hath God forgotten to be gracious? doth his promise fail for evermore?" David, in the like case, gives the lie to a God of truth, through the sides of all his prophets, Psal. cxvi. 10, 11: "I said in my haste, All men are liars." This was indeed a pang of unbelief; but it did not argue unbelief in its reign. Many times faith is laid asleep in its habit, while yet the life of it remains; like Samson in the hands of the Philistines, though his life was continued, yet the locks, in which his strength lay, were cut off.

3. This unbelief, of which I speak, does not consist in a disbelief of some particular truths of the word, through ignorance, providing they be not fundamental. Every error in the head, through ignorance, does not destroy the being of faith in the heart; no more than every miscarriage in the life, through weakness, destroys the being and reality of the grace of God in the soul. The apostles, we find, all the time of Christ's life, yea, after his resurrection also, were in an error as to the nature of the Messiah's kingdom, imagining that it was to be modelled after the fashion of the kingdoms of this world; neither did they believe the universal call and offer of the gospel to the Gentile nations, as well as to the Jews, until they were convinced of their error by Peter's vision. But, notwithstanding of this error of theirs, they believed in Christ as the promised Messiah, and rested on him as the Saviour of the world.

4. I do not here speak of the negative unbelief of the Heathen world, who never had the benefit of gospel revelation: "How shall they believe," (says the apostle, Rom. x. 14,) "in him of whom they have not heard?" Their unbelief, or in

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