s the
consideration of what you are by gifts, or grace, or experience. Do not
consider that, but rather fix your eyes on the grace of Jesus Christ, and
upon the power and virtue of the Holy Spirit, which is given by promise,
that when the way is all the easier to you, both by delight and custom,
yet you may find it to your natural principles as insuperable as at the
beginning, and may still cry out, "Draw me, and I will run after thee,
lead me, and I will walk with thee." Do not measure the call into duties
by the strength thou findest in thyself, but look unto him who
strengtheneth us with all might. Now, the Spirit worketh in us by
subordinate spiritual principles, as believing in Christ and loving of
him, as our Lord and Saviour, and these two acts drive on a soul sweetly
in the way of obedience. Fear, where not mixed in its actings with faith
and love, is a spirit of bondage, but the Christian ought to walk
according to the spirit of adoption which cries "Abba, Father." Yet how
many Christians are rather in a servile and slavish manner driven on by
terrors and chastisements to their duty than by love! There is a piece of
liberty in Christian walking, when there is not a restraint upon the
spirit, by this slavish fear. This, I say, is not beseeming those that are
in Christ Jesus. You ought to have the Spirit of your Father for your
leader and guide. O how sweet, and how certain and necessary also, would
this walking be! The love of Christ would be an inward principle of
motion, and would make our spiritual actings as easy and pleasant as
natural motions are. Fear is but a violent principle, that is like the
impulse of a stone thrown upward, as long as that external impression
remains, it moves, but still slower and slower, and at length evanisheth.
But if you believed in him, and your hearts were engaged to love him, O
how would it be a pleasant and native thing to walk in his way, as a stone
goeth downward! Consider your principles, that act you to matters and
duties of religion. Many men there be, in whom there appears no difference
of their work to beholders; but O how wide a difference doth God discern
in them! Engines and artifice may make dead and lifeless things move and
walk as orderly as things that have life. But the principle of this motion
makes a huge difference:--the one is moved from without, the other from
itself. The most part of us act as irrational and brute beasts in
religion: nay, we walk as inanim