SERMON VIII.

MEETNESS FOR THE INHERITANCE.

COLOSSIANS, i. 12.

"Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light."

I cannot but fear that the nature of Gospelsalvation is in our day frequently and fatally misunderstood, being regarded prominently, if not exclusively, as a deliverance from the penalty and punishment of sin, through the vicarious sufferings and death of the Redeemer; a mistake the more dangerous, because it is peculiarly difficult of detection, from the semblance of scriptural truth which it wears, and the mixture of scriptural truth which it contains; so. that all those passages of the Word of God (and they are indeed most numerous and consolatory) in which the pardon of sin, through faith in the Redeemer's sin-atoning

blood, is spoken of as the primary blessing of the Gospel, (making it, as in truth such declarations do, good tidings of great joy to perishing sinners,) may be made to administer to that ruinous delusion of which I speak, when deliverance from the punishment of sin is contemplated as constituting the sum and substance, the ultimate aim and object of the salvation of the Gospel! Now, what renders this ruinous delusion so fatally liable to deceive and destroy its victim is, that under this false view of the Gospel-scheme a sentiment of gratitude to the Redeemer, regarded as the Deliverer from the penalty of sin, may be felt; and at the mention of His name there may be the stirrings of a grateful emotion; and in perusing the story of His sufferings there may be the excitement of a tender sympathy, testified even by tears; and all this may wear a most imposing aspect of genuine love to Christ; and thus there may be a confident expectation of that pardon—that justification, without which no sinner can be admitted into heaven, while there are no traces visible, either to the eye of God or man, of that holiness-that sanctification, without which no sinner, even if admitted into heaven, could for one moment be happy there! It becomes, then, the bounden duty of the spiritual watchmen of the church, in this professing age, marking carefully from their post of observation the signs of the times, to sound the trumpet of alarm, to awaken

those whom Satan may have lulled asleep by one of his most dangerous opiates, and to remind the flocks entrusted to their charge, that though the pardon of sin be indeed an indispensible and inestimable blessing, yet the purification of the sinner is a blessing equally inestimable, and equally indispensible-and moreover, that if they could be separated, (which they cannot,) and pardon be bestowed without purification following it, the former, without the latter, would be no blessing at all, at least so far as the happiness of the soul is concerned, unless God and heaven could become essentially different from what they now are; for, by an appointment of God that never can be changed till God himself is changed, holiness and happiness are, in the very constitution of things, indissolubly united; and this, not by an arbitrary, and therefore changeable appointment, but one so necessarily growing out of the essential holiness of God's character, that to alter it would be to degrade the character of God, by stripping Him of that very attribute which is preeminently His glory, and which commands the supreme veneration and love of all those holy beings who surround His throne; and who, when they veil their faces in humble reverence before Him, express the ground of their adoration, by crying out to Him that sitteth on the throne"Holy! Holy! Holy! Just and Righteous art thou, O King of Saints!" If then, my friends,

the blessed God Himself is infinitely happy, because He is infinitely holy-if no created being throughout His universe can be really happy, in spite of God or independently of God-and if God will never so degrade His own character, or sully His own glory, as to put forth His power to make an unholy spirit happy, is it not manifest that the ultimate design of the Gospel-scheme (if it be indeed a revelation from this God to capacitate His creatures for the enjoyment of true felicity) must be to establish in their souls the supreme dominion of that holiness, without which they cannot, by the righteous appointment of a holy God, be capacitated for real happiness? The salvation of the Gospel must, therefore, include not merely a reversal of the divine sentence of condemnation, but also a renewal of the divine image in holiness. We must be not only pardoned, but purified not only must an offended God be reconciled to us by a righteousness imputed to us, but we must be reconciled to a holy God by a righteousness imparted to us-not only must we be brought nigh to God by the blood, but also be made like to God by the spirit of Christ; in finenot merely must an inheritance in heaven be bestowed upon us, as the free gift of God, through His dear Son, but we must be made meet for that inheritance, by the sanctifying power of the Holy Ghost! Accordingly, we find the believer called

upon, in the text, to "give thanks unto the Father *for this meetness for the inheritance among the saints in light," as he is so often called upon elsewhere to give thanks unto the Father for the inheritance itself to regard each as equally the gift of the Father's grace and love, and equally the subject of the believer's gratitude and praise! The language of the text deserves to be here most carefully examined; for, how often are volumes of important meaning contained within the compass of a single sentence: yea, mines of precious truth in a single word, in this most blessed book! Look, for example, at that word inheritance! How completely does this one word, used here, and in numerous other passages of Scripture, to express the eternal weight of blessedness and glory reserved for the believer in heaven, exclude all idea of human merit in our salvation, or of our being able any the least degree meritoriously, by our repentance, faith, or obedience by any doings or deservings of our own, to purchase that inheritance! An inheritance, in truth, cannot be purchased. It must be ours, either as our birth-right, or as a free gift by adoption; in the first sense, what is our birth-right as sinners? Heaven!-alas! my friends, no child of Adam, since the fall, can claim any other inheritance, as his birth-right, but an inheritance of eternal wrath and woe! It is, then, in the second sense, even by adoption, that heaven

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