of his mind, and sometimes bringing him into captivity to the law of sin in his members :" and the more conversant we are with our own hearts, the more we shall bewail our innume- rable short-comings and defects. Our impatience, our distrust of God, our unbelief, our obduracy, our sloth, our coldness in duties, our sad mixture of principle even in our better actions ; our want of love to the Saviour, our want of compassion for our fellow-creatures, our want of zeal for God ; alas ! alas ! our want of every thing that is good, may well make the very best of us " sigh and cry," and, like Paul, to account ourselves " less than the least of all saints," or rather as " the chief of sinners."]
To bewail these abominations is characteristic of every child of God —
[Hear how Moses lamented them in his day e : how David alsof, and Ezra, bewailed themg: what extreme heaviness the Apostle Paul felt in his soul on this account11 ; and especially in relation to those very evils which we have specified as ob- taining amongst the professing people of God1 ! And where is the saint in all the Bible who did not " groan within himself" on account of the burthen of his own in-dwelling corruptions k? The more any person knows of God and of his own soul, the more disposed he is to say with Job, " Behold, I am vile1!"
Before we proceed to the second point for our consideration, let us examine ourselves, whether these things are a burthen to us, yea, our chief burthen m ? We have no pre- tensions to true religion, any farther than we answer to this character of mourners on account of sin — ]
From marking thus minutely the character of the Lord's people, we proceed to notice,
II. Their privilege —
God sets a mark on every one of his people, a mark on their foreheads, whereby they are infallibly known to him, and shall assuredly be screened from the destroying angels. They shall be protected,
1. Here —
[The deliverance of Noah from the Deluge, and of Lot from Sodom, shews not only what deliverances God can vouch- safe to his chosen people, but what may be expected by all who mourn over, and labour to counteract, the abominations that are around them11. In Babylon, God interposed to effect a
e Deut. ix. 18, 19. f Ps. cxix. 53, 136. s Ezra ix. 3, 5. i' Rom. ix. 1, 2. * Phil. iii. 18, 19. k Rom. viii. 23.
1 Job xl. 4. m Zeph. iii. 18. Jer. xiii. 17. Rom. vii. 24. n 2 Pet. ii. 5 — 9.