our own. Can there be any obligation imagined beyond this? Let us
therefore consecrate ourselves to his glory. Let all who believe the
gospel dedicate themselves to its obedience, not so much for salvation to
themselves, as their obligation to their Saviour. We are not called so
much to holiness and virtue that we may be saved, as, because we are
saved, to be blameless before God in love. O how gracious and honourable a
disposition of this kind would it be, to serve him more out of gratitude
for what he hath done, than merely for the reward that he will give!

Sermon IX.

Rom. xv. 13.--"Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace
in believing," &c.

It is usual for the Lord in his word to turn his precepts unto promises,
which shows us, that the commandments of God do not so much import an
ability in us, or suppose strength to fulfil them, as declare that
obligation which lies upon us, and his purpose and intention to accomplish
in some, what he requires of all: and therefore we should accordingly
convert all his precepts unto prayers, seeing he hath made them promises.
This gives us ground, as it were, to retort his commands by way of
requests and supplications. The scripture here gives us a precedent, and
often elsewhere hath made his command a promise. It is then in the next
disposition, and nearest capacity, to be turned into the form of a
supplication. The joy promised in the preceding verse is elsewhere
commanded; and this immediately disposes the sinner to receive a new form
of prayer, from a believing heart, and that not only for himself, but for
others. You see how frequently such holy and hearty wishes are interjected
in his writings. And indeed such ejaculations of the soul's desires,
whether kept within, or vented, will often interrupt the thoughts and
discourses of believers, but yet they break no sentence, they mar no
sense, no more than the interposition of a parenthesis. Such desires will
follow by a kind of natural resultance upon the lively apprehension of any
divine excellent thing, and secret complacency in it, and a stirring of
the heart to be possessed with it, will almost prevent deliberation. Such
an attractive power the excellency of any object hath in the heart, that
it draws it and engages it almost before any consultation be called about
it. Now there is something of this in these objects which we are naturally
delighted with. All at least that they want the apprehe