Numbers 15

REFLECTIONS UPON CHAP. XV.—Behold the propriety of a just proportion in our religious services, and the care of God to have his ministers decently provided for! But chiefly behold the agreeable nourishment and heart-cheering consolations of the Holy Ghost, which attend the offering of our Redeemer once for all! Behold the kindness of God, in inviting Gentiles to his church, and presaging their entrance into it in due time, in such a multitude of laws, favourable to strangers! Behold how the Lord must be honoured with the first-fruits of all our substance. But especially behold the indispensable necessity of Christ, as our propitiation for sin, however inadvertently it be committed; and the infinite danger of wilful and presumptuous supine exemplified in this lation of the sabbath! Is it not shameful that we should need memorials of dience to the laws of God, so great and gracious—nay, God, even our God! Enter then, my soul, into the spirit of these things. While I live Jesus’ flesh and blood, and rely on his atonement alone, let me cheerfully myself, and all that I have, to the Lord. Never dare to sin against light love; to violate the sabbath of the Lord my God, by thinking my own thought speaking my own words, doing my own ways, or finding my own plea But let his law be written on my heart; and every providence, every enjoym be improved by me as an excitement to holy obedience!