religion.—2. It is the rise of the performance of worship God regards.—3. True worship is only from a heart prepared by God's Spirit.—4. The soul of man is dead without the divine breath of life, and so not capable of worshipping the living God.—5. We are not to study what to pray for. How Christians should pray. The aid they have from God.—6. The way of obtaining this preparation: it is by waiting, as David and others did of old, in holy silence, that their wants and supplies are best seen.—7. The whole and the full think they need not this waiting, and so use it not; but the poor in spirit are of another mind, wherefore the Lord hears, and fills them with his good things.—8. If there were not this preparation, the Jewish times would have been more holy and spiritual than the gospel; for even then it was required; much more now.—9. As sin, so formality, cannot worship God: thus David, Isaiah, &c.—10. God's own forms and institutions hateful to Him, unless his own Spirit use them; much more those of man's contriving.—11. God's children ever met God in his way, not their own; and in his way they always found help and comfort. In Jeremiah's time it was the same; his goodness was manifested to his children that waited truly upon him: it was an inward sense and enjoyment of him they thirsted after. Christ charged his disciples also to wait for the Spirit.—12. This doctrine of waiting further opened, and ended with an allusion to the pool of Bethesda; a lively figure of inward waiting and its blessed effects.—13. Four things necessary to worship; the sanctification of the worshipper, and the consecration of the offering, and the thing to be prayed for, and lastly, faith to pray in: and all must be right, that is, of God's giving.—14. The great power of faith in prayer; witness the importunate woman. The wicked and formal ask, and receive not; the reason why. But Jacob and his true offspring, the followers of his faith, prevail.—15. This shows why Christ upbraided his disciples with their little faith. The necessity of faith. Christ works no good on men without it.—16. This faith is not only possible now but necessary.—17. What it is, further unfolded.—18. Who the heirs of this faith are; and what were the noble works of it in the former ages of the just.
I. But there be others of a more refined speculation, and reformed practice, who dare not use, and less adore, a piece of wood or stone, an image of silver and gold; nor yet allow of that Jewish, or rather Pagan pomp in worship, practised by others, as if Christ's worship were of this world, though his kingdom be of the other, but are doctrinally averse to such superstition, and yet refrain not to bow to their own religious duties, and esteem their formal performance of several parts of worship that go against the grain of their fleshly ease, and a preciseness therein, no small cross unto them; and that if they abstain from gross and scandalous sins, or if the act be not committed, though the thoughts of it are embraced, and that it has a full career in the mind, they hold themselves safe enough within the pale of discipleship and walls of Christianity. But this also is too mean a character of the discipline of Christ's cross: and those that flatter themselves with such a sort of taking it up, will in the end be deceived with a sandy foundation, and a midnight cry. For said Christ, "But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give an account thereof in the day of judgment." (Matt. xii. 36.)
II. For first, it is not performing duties of religion, but the rise of the performance that God looks at. Men may, and some do, cross their own wills in their own wills: voluntary omission and commission: "Who has required this at your hands?" (Isa. i. 12,) said the Lord of old to the Jews, when they seemed industrious to have served him; but it was in a way of their own contriving or inventing, and in their own time and will; not with the soul truly touched and prepared by the divine power of God, but bodily worship only: that, the apostle tells us, profits little. Not keeping to the manner of taking up the cross in worship as well as other things, has been a great cause of the troublesome superstition that is yet in the world. For men have no more brought their worship to the test, than their sins: nay less; for they have ignorantly thought the one a sort of excuse for the other; and not that their religious performances should need a cross, or an apology.
III. But true worship can only come from a heart prepared by the Lord. (Prov. xvi. 1; Rom viii. 14.) This preparation is by the sanctification of the Spirit; by which, if God's children are led in the general course of their lives, as Paul teaches, much more in their worship to their Creator and Redeemer. And whatever prayer be made, or doctrine be uttered, and not from the preparation of the Holy Spirit, it is not acceptable with God: nor can it be the true evangelical worship, which is in spirit and truth; that is, by the preparation and aid of the Spirit. For what is a heap of the most pathetical words to God Almighty; or the dedication of any place or time to him? He is a Spirit, to whom words, places, and times, strictly considered, are improper or inadequate. And though they be the instruments of public worship, they are but bodily and visible, and cannot carry our requests any further, much less recommend them to the invisible God; by no means; they are for the sake of the congregation: it is the language of the soul God hears, nor can that speak but by the Spirit, or groan aright to Almighty God without the assistance of it.
IV. The soul of man, however lively in other things, is dead to God, till He breathe the spirit of life into it: it cannot live to Him, much less worship Him, without it. Thus God tells us, by Ezekiel, when in a vision of the restoration of mankind, in the person of Israel, an usual way of speaking among the prophets, and as often mistaken, "I will open your graves," saith the Lord, "and put my Spirit in you, and you shall live." (Ezek. xxxvii. 12–14.) So, though Christ taught his disciples to pray, they were, in some sort, disciples before he taught them; not worldly men, whose prayers are an abomination to God. And his teaching them is not an argument that every body must say that prayer, whether he can say it with the same heart, and under the same qualifications, as his poor disciples or followers did, or not; as is now too superstitiously and presumptuously practised; but rather as they then, so we now, are not to pray our own prayers, but his: that is, such as He enables us to make, as He enabled them then.
V. For if we are not to take thought what we shall say when we come before worldly princes, because it shall then be given us; and that "it is not we that speak, but the Spirit of our heavenly Father that speaketh in us;" (Matt. x. 19, 20;) much less can our ability be needed, or ought we to study to ourselves forms of speech in our approaches to the great Prince of princes, King of kings, and Lord of lords. For be it his greatness, we ought not by Christ's command; be it our relation to him as children, we need not; he will help us, he is our Father; that is, if he be so indeed. Thus not only the mouth of the body but of the soul is shut, till God opens it; and then he loves to hear the language of it. In which the body ought never to go before the soul: his ear is open to such requests, and his Spirit strongly intercedes for those that offer them.
VI. But it may be asked, how shall this preparation be obtained?
I answer: By waiting patiently, yet watchfully and intently upon God: "Lord," says the Psalmist, "thou hast heard the desire of the humble; thou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine ear to hear:" (Psalm x. 17:) and, says wisdom, "The preparation of the heart in man is from the Lord." (Prov. xvi. 1.) Here it is thou must not think thy own thoughts, nor speak thy own words, which indeed is the silence of the holy cross, but be sequestered from all the confused imaginations that are apt to throng and press upon the mind in those holy retirements. It is not for thee to think to overcome the Almighty by the most composed matter, cast into the aptest phrase; no, no; one groan, one sigh, from a wounded soul, a heart touched with true remorse, a sincere and godly sorrow, which is the work of God's Spirit, excels and prevails with God. Wherefore stand still in thy mind, wait to feel something that is divine, to prepare and dispose thee to worship God truly and acceptably. And thus taking up the cross, and shutting the doors and windows of the soul against everything that would interrupt this attendance upon God, how pleasant soever the object be in itself, how lawful or needful at another season, the power of the Almighty will break in, his Spirit will work and prepare the heart, that it may offer up an acceptable sacrifice. It is he that discovers and presses wants upon the soul; and when it cries, it is he alone that supplies them. Petitions, not springing from such a sense and preparation, are formal and fictitious: they are not true; for men pray in their own blind desires, and not in the will of God; and his ear is stopped to them: "but for the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy," God hath said, "I will arise;" (Psalm xii. 5;) that is, the poor
