This should teach Christians to be low and little in their own eyes, and to forbear to intrude into airy and vain speculations, and to take heed of being puffed up with a foul and empty mind.

Zeal.

The loaves or showbread in the temple were to have frankincense strewed upon them as they stood upon the golden table, which was a type of the sweet perfumes of the sanctification of the Holy Ghost.

They were to be set upon the pure table, new and hot, to show that God delights in the company of new and warm believers.  “I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth; when Israel was a child, I loved him.”  Men at first conversion are like to a cake well baked, and new taken from the oven; they are warm, and cast forth a very fragrant scent, especially when, as warm, sweet increase is strewed upon them.

“When the showbread was old and stale, it was to be taken away, and new and warm put in its place, to show that God has but little delight in the service of his own people, when their duties grow stale and mouldy.  Therefore he removed his old, stale, mouldy church of the Jews from before him, and set in their room upon the golden table the warm church of the Gentiles.”

Zeal without knowledge is like a mettled horse without eyes, or like a sword in a madman’s hand; and there is no knowledge where there is not the word.

Repentance.

Repentance carries with it a divine rhetoric, and persuades Christ to forgive a multitude of sins committed against him.

One difference between true and false repentance lieth in this:  the man who truly repents crieth out against his heart; but the other, as Eve, against the serpent, or something else.

There are abundance of dry-eyed Christians in the world, and abundance of dry-eyed duties too—­duties that never were wet with the tears of contrition and repentance.

Take heed that a sin in thy life goes not unrepented of, for that will make a flaw in thine evidence, a wound in thy conscience, and a breach in thy peace; and a hundred to one if at last it doth not drive all the grace in thee into so dark a corner of thy heart, that thou shalt not be able, for a time, by all the torches that are burning in the gospel, to find it out to thy own comfort and consolation.

As vices hang together, and have the links of a chain, dependence one upon another, even so the graces of the Spirit also are the fruits of one another, and have such dependence on each other that the one cannot be without the other.

No faith, no fear of God:  devil’s faith, devil’s fear; saints’ faith, saints’ fear.

XIX.  PRAYER.

Characteristics of prayer.

What is prayer?  A sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the soul to God, through Christ, in the strength and assistance of the Spirit, for such things as God hath promised.