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I would leave to speak anything to hinder your meditations, but I know that some hearts are so barren that they cannot find a good motion to meditate upon. If you find it so, it is a token you are blind; for if you will look in right to your own souls, you will find good motions there, that you may rejoice in them, or else you will find them to be fruitful in ill and bad thoughts, and barren in heavenly thoughts, which may humble you. And if you find your hearts barren of good thoughts, send up your prayers to heaven to fetch down thoughts from thence. If men have any good thing in their bodies, minds, estates, etc., they have a great care to show it; but we should show it before the world that we have Christ seated into our hearts and persons, in our families and congregations. Ay, the cross and the shame of Christ should be the matter of your boasting: think and talk upon that, and think upon nothing so much as that, and rejoice in it. “God forbid that I should rejoice in anything but in the cross of Christ,” says the apostle; and again, “I desire to know nothing but Christ, and him crucified.” These people, in compassing these walls, might have thought of the sacrifices of Abel and Cain,1 how Abel’s was acceptable, but not Cain’s. They might think, others may compass these walls about as well as we, and take the town. Ay, but they might think again, Cain offered a sacrifice as well as Abel, but Cain’s sacrifice was not accepted because it was not done in faith, nor in obedience to God’s warrant; but for Abel’s, it was accepted, because it was done according to God’s commandment, and in faith; but others cannot do so, and therefore we shall only prevail, but not they. And a wicked man may sit down at the Lord’s table with us, and partake of the sacrament; but he shall not taste of the sweetness thereof, if it be not done in faith, and in obedience to the commandment of God; but if you sit down here in that obedience to God, and in faith, and believe the promise that God has made, then your coming here, it shall be comfortable to you.