Use 3

USE III.

This may also be for a word of trial to spared sinners. If the case stands thus with you, that you are now upon the trial with God, and if upon it you do not bring forth fruit to his praise, you must for all this be destroyed, it loudly calls upon you, seriously and throughly to examine yourselves, under which of these hypotheses you now stand. The difference is vastly great, if you bear fruit well, but if not, you see what is your doom: and does not this call for your reflection upon this? Does it not say, that it infinitely concerns you to know what improvement you have made of this mercy of God that has spared you? Will it not be a fearful thing to be mistaken here? And that you may be guided aright in this self-examination, take diligent notice of the condition expressed in the text; it does not say if you grow worse, and fall into grosser abominations than before you indulged yourselves in; if you grow more lewd, and more debauched; which yet it is to be feared, is the woful effect of sparing mercies upon too many unhappy creatures, whom their deliverances have emboldened in sin; but if you [illegible]: If the judgment found you unconverted, and leaves you unconverted, and [illegible] about your conversion, this is [illegible] to bring you under the sentence, whatever reformation it may work in your [illegible] conversation, however you may [illegible] from some sins which you formerly lived in, and do some duties which heretofore you lived in the neglect of, yet if there be no thorough change wrought in you, [illegible] not effectually brought home to [illegible] be it, [illegible] is still a truth as to you, that [illegible] fruit: God reputes you barren still: the end of God's trial is not attained in you, and you are fully open to the doom that is here declared. This then is the question that you are to put to your own souls, Am I converted to God? Am I brought in to Jesus Christ? By a living faith? Am I throughly turned from sin to God? Be not deceived, for God is not mocked? Read the sentence you are under, and tremble at it (Matthew 3:10): Now the ax is laid to the root of the trees; therefore every tree that brings not forth good fruit, is hewn down, and cast into the fire.