1 Samuel 6

REFLECTIONS UPON CHAP. VI.—To be deprived of God’s ordinances, though it be only for a time, is very alarming; yet much more so to have them made a plague to us. By holding fast their sins, men only prolong their sorrows. God can easily make the stoutest of his enemies to bow down to him, and even cause them to become, to his honour, lasting memorials of their own shame. But it is much happier to be warned by other men’s experience than by our own. And, when we have repented of our sins, we may hope for a removal of our miseries. Wicked men would fain shift their convictions, and ascribe their sufferings to any cause rather than to the hand of God. And God often patiently suffers himself to be tempted and put to the trial; but the issue shall tend to his own glory; and the very means, which men had taken to confirm themselves in infidelity, shall turn out to their more unanswerable conviction of the truth. He alone can deliver his church, and restore his ordinances, when all others lie by unconcerned. And with great joy and thanksgiving, even to the interruption of the most urgent earthly concerns, ought his returns and revivals of religion to be welcomed. But what fear and reverence are due to him, and his ordinances, in the meetings of his saints! He is a holy Lord God! and it is dangerous to indulge a vain curiosity in our concerns with him; and infinitely destructive to come near to behold the broken law but as fulfilled in Christ. How miserable is that nation in which no common care is taken about the ordinances of Christ; but one place yields them to another, and forfeits those blessings which God has connected with them. Let us learn properly to value the privileges which God graciously bestows; and so to improve them, that they may not become—curse but a blessing to us