And the first is, that I take it for granted you believe religion to be an inward thing; you believe it to be a work of the heart, a work wrought in the soul by the power of the Spirit of God.  If you do not believe this, you do not believe your Bibles.  If you do not believe this, tho you have got your Bibles in your hand, you hate the Lord Jesus Christ in your heart; for religion is everywhere represented in Scripture as the work of God in the heart.  “The kingdom of God is within us,” says our Lord; and, “he is not a Christian who is one outwardly; but he is a Christian who is one inwardly.”  If any of you place religion in outward things, I shall not perhaps please you this morning; you will understand me no more when I speak of the work of God upon a poor sinner’s heart than if I were talking in an unknown tongue.

I would further premise a caution, that I would by no means confine God to one way of acting.  I would by no means say that all persons, before they come to have a settled peace in their hearts, are obliged to undergo the same degrees of conviction.  No; God has various ways of bringing His children home; His sacred Spirit bloweth when, and where, and how it listeth.  But, however, I will venture to affirm this:  that before ever you can speak peace to your heart, whether by shorter or longer continuance of your convictions, whether in a more pungent or in a more; gentle way, you must undergo what I shall hereafter lay down in the following discourse.

First, then, before you can speak peace to your hearts, you must be made to see, made to feel, made to weep over, made to bewail, your actual transgressions against the law of God.  According to the covenant of works, “the soul that sinneth it shall die”; curst is that man, be he what he may, be he who he may, that continueth not in all things that are written in the book of the law to do them.

We are not only to do some things, but we are to do all things, and we are to continue to do so, so that the least deviation from the moral law, according to the covenant of works, whether in thought, word, or deed, deserves eternal death at the hand of God.  And if one evil thought, if one evil word, if one evil action deserves eternal damnation, how many hells, my friends, do every one of us deserve whose whole lives have been one continued rebellion against God!  Before ever, therefore, you can speak peace to your hearts, you must be brought to see, brought to believe, what a dreadful thing it is to depart from the living God.

And now, my dear friends, examine your hearts, for I hope you came hither with a design to have your souls made better.  Give me leave to ask you, in the presence of God, whether you know the time, and if you do not know exactly the time, do you know there was a time when God wrote bitter things against you, when the arrows of the Almighty were within you?  Was ever the remembrance of your sins grievous to you?  Was the burden of your sins intolerable to your thoughts?