These rules I have offered you concerning the time of this great duty of preparation which I am speaking unto ; and I shall add one more, without which you will easily grant that all the rest will fall to the ground, and with which God will teach you all the rest; and that is, be sure you set apart some time. I am greatly afraid of customariness in this matter. Persons complain that, in waiting upon God in that ordinance, they do not receive that entertainment at the hand of God, that refreshment, which they looked for. They have more reason to wonder that they were not cast out, as those who came without a " wedding garment." That is not only required of us, that we come with our wedding garment, which every believer hath, but that we come decked with this garment. A man may have
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a garment that may fit very ill, very unhandsomely about him. The bride decks herself with her garments for the bridegroom. We are to do so for the meeting with Christ in this ordinance, — to stir up all the graces God hath bestowed upon us, that we may be decked for Christ. There lies the unprofitableness under that ordinance, — that though God has given us the wedding garment, we are not cast out, yet we take not care to deck ourselves, that God and Christ may give us refreshing entertainment when we come into his pre- sence. Our failing herein evidently and apparently witnesses to the faces of most professors that this is the ground of their unprofitable- ness under that ordinance. So much for the time.
II. I shall now speak a little to the duty itself of preparation for that ordinance ; remembering what I spake before of preparation in general unto all solemn ordinances, which must still be supposed.
Now, the duty may be reduced to these four heads: — meditation; examination; supplication; expectation. And, if I mistake not, they are all given us in one verse ; and though not directly applied to this ordinance, yet to this, among other ways, of our intimate communion with Christ, Zech. xii. 10, "I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplica- tions: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his first-born." There is, — 1. Meditation: " They shall look upon him;" this is no otherwise to be performed but by the meditation of faith. Our look- ing upon Christ is by believing meditation. Looking argues the fixing of the sight ; and meditation is the fixing of faith in its actings. Looking is a fixing of the eye ; faith is the eye of the soul : and to look, is to fix faith in meditation. And there is, — 2. Examination ; which produceth the mourning here mentioned. For though it is said, " They shall mourn for him," it was not to mourn for his suffer- ings,— for so he said, " Weep not for me," — but to mourn upon the account of those things wherein they were concerned in his sufferings. It brings to repentance, which is the principal design of this exami- nation. 3. There is supplication; for there shall be poured out a spirit of grace and supplication. And, 4. There is expectation ; which is included also in that of looking unto Christ.
1. The first part of this duty of preparation consists in meditation; and meditation is a duty that, by reason of the vanity of our own minds, and the variety of objects which they are apt to fix upon, even believers themselves do find as great a difficulty therein as any.
I shall only mention those special objects which our thoughts are to be fixed upon in this preparatory duty; and you may reduce them to the following: heads: —
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(1.) The principal object of meditation, in our preparation for this ordinance, is the horrible guilt and provocation that is in sin. There is a representation of the guilt of sin made in the cross of Christ. There was a great representation of it in the punishment of angels ; a great representation of it is made in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah ; and both these are proposed unto us in a special manner, 2 Pet. ii. 4-6, to set forth the heinous nature of the guilt of sin : but they come very short, — nay, give me leave to say, that hell itself comes short, — of representing the guilt of sin, in comparison of the cross of Christ. And the Holy Ghost would have us mind it, where he saith, " He hath made him sin for us," 2 Cor. v. 21. " See what comes of sin," saith he, "what demerit, what provocation there is in it." To see the Son of God praying, crying, trembling, bleeding, dying; God hiding his face from him ; the earth trembling under him ; dark- ness round about him; — how can the soul but cry out, "0 Lord, is this the effect of sin? is all this in sin?" Here, then, take a view of sin. Others look on it in its pleasures and the advantages of it, and cry, " Is it not a little one?" as Lot of Zoar; but look on it in the cross of Christ, and there it appears in another hue. " All this is from my sin," saith the contrite soul.