X. CONVICTION OF SIN.

When man is taken and laid under the day of God’s power, when Christ is opening his ear to discipline, and speaking to him that his heart may receive instruction, many times that poor man is as if the devil had found him, and not God.  How frenzily he imagines; how crossly he thinks; how ungainly he carries it under convictions, counsels, and his present apprehension of things!  I know some are more powerfully dealt withal, and more strongly bound at first by the word; but others more in an ordinary manner, that the flesh and reason may be seen to the glory of Christ.  Yea, and where the will is made more quickly to comply with its salvation, it is no thanks to the sinner at all.  It is the day of the power of the Lord that has made the work so soon to appear.  Therefore count this an act of love, in the height of love; love in a great degree.

“I heard thy voice in the garden.”  Gen. 3:  10.  It is a word from without that does it.  While Adam listened to his own heart, he thought fig-leaves a sufficient remedy; but the voice that walked in the garden shook him out of all such fancies.

A man’s own righteousness will not fortify his conscience from fear and terror, when God begins to come near to him to judgment.

Few know the weight of sin.  When the guilt thereof takes hold of the conscience, it commands homeward all the faculties of the soul.

It was upon this account that Peter and James and John were called the sons of thunder, because in the word which they were to preach there were to be not only lightnings, but thunders—­not only illuminations, but a great seizing of the heart with the dread and majesty of God, to the effectual turning of the sinner to him.

Lightnings without thunder are in this case dangerous, because they that receive the one without the other are subject to miscarry:  they were once enlightened, but you read of no thunder they had, and they were subject to fall into an irrecoverable state.  Paul had thunder with his lightning, to the shaking of his soul; so had the three thousand, so had the jailer:  they that receive light without thunder, are subject to turn the grace of God into wantonness; but they that know the terror of God will persuade men.  So then, when he decrees to give the rain of his grace to a man, he makes a way for the lightning and thunder; not the one without the other, but the one following the other.

We have had great lightnings in this land of late years, but little thunders; and that is one reason why so little grace is found where light is, and why so many professors run on their heads in such a day as this is, notwithstanding all they have seen.

The method of God is to kill and make alive, to smite and then heal.

He that hath not seen his lost condition, hath not seen a safe condition; he that did never see himself in the devil’s snare, did never see himself in Christ’s bosom.