Use 3. If we can in any degree make it good that God is our God and we his people, then let us make use of it for our comfort in all times, that u-e have a God to go to. Though we have no friend in the world, yet we have him in whom all friends meet. If we have no comfort here, yet we have him in whom all comforts meet, for all concentre in him. He hath father and friends, and worth and grace, and peace and comfort in him ; and all is in him. If we go to him, we shall find a confluence of everything that is good, suitable to any necessity of ours.
And therefore let us learu to single out of God whatsoever may help us to be in covenant with him. He having made himself over to be ours, let us learn this wisdom, to single out of God whatsoever is peculiar to our pre- sent condition ; for considering he hath made himself a God to us, he is all- sufficient to every turn. Therefore out of his all-sufficiency, take out what- soever is fit for any particular exigency. ' Lord, I am in a strait, and want wisdom.' Thou in Christ hast abundance of wisdom. Christ hath in him all treasures. I now want friends, I want counsel, I want help, I want strength. God hath a fulness of all this for his children. He hath it not only to content himself, and look on his own happiness, but for his friends that be in covenant with him, that be so near him that he will own him to be their God. If you ask, What is religion ? it is to know God, to have all-sufficiency in him for any good, and then to make use of him * That is, ' property or ownership.' — Ed.
476 A HEAVENLY CONFERENCE.
by dependence on him for that good, and b}' advanchig of him in giving him the duo honour and thanks of it. And therefore we deserve not the names of religious persons, if we do not study what he is to his creatures in the covenant of grace. Then make use of it by a spirit of dependency, and alwaj's giving praise and thanks. This is our whole man, and what is all else ? Nothing but trouble and vanity. Get our bonds sealed that he is our God, and then break with all the world beside. Come what can come, or what will come, we are sure to be safe. It is a comfort of wonderful large extent. The use of the sacrament is to seal that God is our God in particular, and that Christ is ours as verily as the bread and wine are ours. And let us desire the Lord to seal to every one of our souls, that are to have communion with him in particular, that he in Christ is ours : Christ with all his merits and fruits of them, forgiveness of sin and life everlasting, as verily as the outward man partakes of the outward seals ; and then we shall come and go away with comfort, and be made partakers of that end and use of the sacrament for which our blessed Saviour instituted it.
Having spoken before of common favours, which devils and castaways may have as well as we, I shall enlarge myself a little in this, because it is a point of concernment. As in other sins we be like the devil, so in this sin a man is worse than the devil himself, if a man will be a common swearer, and opposer, and malicious against goodness, being only in love with some idle conceit of his own, which he will have God himself stoop to else he wiU not to heaven ; he will not be saved but by his own foolery. A man that hath a bitter spirit against the power of grace, that is a common blas- phemer, that carrieth a spite against religion, for him to say, ' God is his God,' the devil will as well say so. He will say of Paul and Silas, These are the people of God ; but he will not say himself is, Acts xix. 15. For a man to live in sins against conscience, defend them, oppose all that opposeth his sins, and yet claim an interest while that disposition standeth in him, it is more than Satanical impudency, and it is extreme hardening of the heart against all goodness ; for how many thousands in the church perish and sink to hell under this presumptuous conceit, ' I am God's, and God is mine,' when the title is false, and the evidence false. And there- fore it is a point deserving thoroughly to be examined continually, what those evidences of graces be that we venture our souls and salvation upon. I will not stand much to press the point. But you see the necessity of it. Consider therefore, I beseech you, what I have said. If God be ours, there will be a separation. Where there is an owning of God for their God, there will be a separation from all that is not his, as well as a gathering to them that be his. The work of God's Spirit in his children is like fire, which hath two properties : to sever all heterogeneal and strange stuff, and dross, and the like, and gather all the homogeneal stufi'of one nature. And so the works of the Spirit gathcreth to the soul so much as is good, and refines that, and severeth that which is contrary. The Spirit of God, that telleth them that the}' be God's, it is a severing Spirit and a uniting Spirit. It severs contraries, and it uniteth things of the same nature. There is a joining to what is good, and a separating of what is evil.