I. The spirit which God infuses into the souls of his people — It is " not a spirit of fear" — [" Fear" is discarded from the soul that is truly given up to God. There may remain, indeed, what I may call a con- stitutional fear ; (some persons, whose piety cannot be dovibted, have a strange and unaccountable fear of this or that animal^;) and no depth of religious principle will prevent its operation ; for its seat is in the imagination, and not in the heart : but the fear of man, which has so great an ascendant over the carnal mind, will be dismissed; being subjected to, and, if I may so express myself, swallowed up by, the fear of Godb ]
It is a spirit " of power " —
[A holy resolution will be formed to serve the Lord, and " to follow him fully." Whatever means be used to deter a child of God from his purpose, he will hold on his way. Father, mother, brother, sister, houses, lands, yea, and life itself, are regarded by him as of no account, in comparison with his duty to God: he " hates them all" in comparison of his God and Saviour ° : as for sin, it is a foe which he pursues with unrelenting animosity, determined, through grace, that not one lust shall continue in him unmortified and unsubdued. His besetting sin, whatever it may be, is pursued by him with more than ordinary vigilance, if by any means he may prevail to bring it into subjection, and to destroy it utterly '^ And he does advance from victory to victory ; finding that, however weak he be in himself, " through the strength communicated to him from above, he can do all things*^."]
This power, however, is blended with a spirit " of love "—
[The energy which we have just spoken of has some- what of an unamiable aspect ; and would be unamiable in the highest degree, if it were not tempered with love. To resist all authority of parents, and the solicitations of most endeared relatives, bears with it an aspect of culpable self-will, and of deplorable self-conceit. The believer, therefore, must be par- ticularly on his guard to cut off all occasion for such misap- prehensions. His whole spirit must savour of love. He must shew, that whatever he does, he does from absolute necessity : and that, as far as love can operate in conformity to God's will, no child of man shall exceed him in the cultivation of it.
°- A toad, for instance, or a mouse, or some insect, b Luke xii. 4, 5. = Luke xiv. 26.
^ Heb. xii. 1. c phj], [y^ i^