2.  If God now comes up closer to them, and begins to fasten conviction upon the conscience, though such convictions be the first step to faith and repentance, yea, to life eternal, yet what shifts will they have to forget them and wear them off!  Yea, although they now begin to see that they must either turn or turn, yet ofttimes they will study to waive a present conversion.  They object, they are too young to turn yet; seven years hence is time enough; when they are old, or come upon a sick bed.

O what an enemy is man to his own salvation!  I am persuaded that God has visited some of you often with his word, and you have thrown water, as fast as he hath by the word cast fire, upon your conscience.

Christian, what had become of thee, if God had taken thy denial for an answer, and said, “Then will I carry the word of salvation to another, and he will hear it?”

“Sinner, turn!” says God.  “Lord, I cannot attend to it,” says the sinner.  “Turn or burn,” says God.  “I will venture that,” says the sinner.  “Turn and be saved,” says God.  “I cannot leave my pleasures,” says the sinner; “sweet sins, sweet pleasures, sweet delights,” says the sinner.  But what grace is it in God thus to parley with the sinner!  O the patience of God to a poor sinner!  What if God should now say, “Then get thee to thy sins, get thee to thy delights, get thee to thy pleasures, take them for thy portion; they shall be all thy heaven, all thy happiness, all thy portion?”

3.  But God comes again, and shows the sinner the necessity of turning now or not at all; yea, and giveth the sinner this conviction so strongly that he cannot put it if.  But behold, the sinner has one spark of enmity still:  if he must needs turn now, he will either turn from one sin to another, from great ones to little ones, from many to few, or from all to one, and there stop.  But perhaps convictions will not thus leave him.  Why, then he will turn from profaneness to the law of Moses, and will dwell as long as God will let him, upon his own seeming goodness.  And now observe him, he is a great stickler for legal performance; now he will be a good neighbor, he will pay every man his own, will leave off his swearing, the ale-house, his sports, and carnal delights; he will read, pray, talk of scripture, and be a very busy one in religion, such as it is; now he will please God, and make him amends for all the wrong he has done him, and will feed him with chapters, and prayers, and promises, and vows, and a great many more such dainty dishes as these; persuading himself that now he must be fair for heaven, and thinks besides that he serveth God as well as any man:  but all this while he is as ignorant of Christ as the stool he sits on, and no nearer heaven than was the blind Pharisee, only he has got in a cleaner way to hell than the rest of his neighbors are.

Might not God now cast off this sinner, and cast him out of his sight? might he not leave him to his own choice, to be deluded by and to fall in his own righteousness, because he trusts to it and commits iniquity?