Section 15
The last subject of meditation is, meditate upon your experiences. Look over your receipts; 1. Has not God provided liberally for you, and vouchsafed you those mercies which he has denied to others who are better than you? Here is an experience, Genesis 48.15. The God who has fed me all my days. You never feed, but mercy carves for you; you never go to bed, but mercy draws the curtains, and sets a guard of Angels about you. Whatever you have is out of the Exchequer of free grace. Here is an experience to meditate upon.
2. Has not God prevented many dangers, has he not kept watch and ward about you? 1. What temporal dangers has God screened off? Your neighbor's house on fire, and it has not kindled in your dwellings. Another infected, you are free; Behold the golden feathers of protection covering you. 2. What spiritual dangers has God prevented? When others have been poisoned with error, you have been preserved. God has sounded a retreat to you; you have heard a voice behind you, saying, this is the way, walk in it; When you have listed yourself, and taken pay on the devil's side, that God should pluck you as a brand out of the fire, that he should turn your heart, and now you espouse Christ's quarrel against sin. Behold preventing grace! Here is an experience to meditate upon.
3. Has not God spared you a long time? Whence is it that others are struck dead in the act of sin, as Ananias and Sapphira, and you are preserved as a monument of patience? Here is an experience; God has done more for you than for the Angels; he never waited for their repentance, but he has waited for you year after year, Isaiah 30.18. Therefore will the Lord wait that he may be gracious. He has not only knocked at your heart in the Ministry of the Word, but he has waited at the door: How long has his Spirit striven with you? Like an importunate suitor, that after many denials, yet will not give over the suit. Methinks I see justice with a sword in its hand ready to strike, and mercy steps in for the sinner, Lord have patience with him a while longer: Methinks I hear the Angels say to God as the King of Israel once said to the Prophet Elisha, 2 Kings 6.22. Shall I smite them? shall I smite them? So methinks I hear the Angels say, shall we take off the head of such a drunkard, swearer, blasphemer? And mercy seems to answer as the Vinedresser; Luke 13.8. let him alone this year. See if he will repent. Is not here an experience worth meditating upon? Mercy turns Justice into a rainbow; the rainbow is a bow indeed, but has no arrow in it; that justice has been like the rainbow without an arrow, that it has not shot you to death. Here is a receipt of patience to read over and meditate upon.
4. Has not God often come in with assisting grace? When he has bid you mortify such a lust, and you have said as Jehoshaphat, 2 Chronicles 20.12. I have no might against this great army. Then God has come in with auxiliary forces, his grace has been sufficient. When God has bid you pray for such a mercy, and you have found yourself very unfit; your heart was at first dead and flat, all on a sudden you are carried above your own strength; your tears drop, your love flames; God has come in with assisting grace. If the heart burn in prayer God has struck fire. The Spirit has been tuning your soul, and now you make sweet melody in prayer. Here is an experience to meditate upon.
5. Has not God vanquished Satan for you? When the Devil has tempted to infidelity, to self-murder, when he would make you believe either, that your graces were but a fiction, or God's promise but a counterfeit bond, now that you have not been foiled by the Tempter, it is God who has kept the garrison of your heart, else his fiery darts would have entered. Here is an experience to meditate upon.
6. Have you not had many signal deliverances? When you have been even at the gates of death, God has miraculously recovered you, and renewed your strength as the Eagle; may not you write that writing which Hezekiah did, Isaiah 38.6. The writing of Hezekiah King of Judah, when he had been sick and was recovered of his sickness; you thought the Sun of your life was quite setting, but God made this Sun return back many degrees. Here is an experience for meditation to feed upon. When you have been imprisoned, your foot taken in the snare, and the Lord has broken the snare, nay, has made those to break it who were the instruments of laying it. Behold an experience; Oh let us often revolve in mind our experiences. If a man had physic receipts by him, he would be often looking over his receipts. You that have rare receipts of mercy by you, be often by meditation looking over your receipts.
The meditation of our experiences would, 1. Raise us to thankfulness. Considering that God has set a hedge of providence about us, he has strewed our way with roses; this would make us take the Harp and Vial, and praise the Lord; and not only praise, but record, 1 Chronicles 16.4. The meditating Christian keeps a Register or Chronicle of God's mercies, that the memory of them does not decay. God would have the Manna kept in the Ark many hundred years, that the remembrance of that miracle might be preserved; a meditating soul takes care that the spiritual Manna of an experience be kept safe.
2. The meditation of our experiences would engage our hearts to God in obedience. Mercy would be a needle to sew us to him. We would cry out as Bernard, I have, Lord, two mites, a soul and a body, and I give them both to thee.
3. The Meditation of our experiences would serve to convince us that God is no hard master; we might bring in our experiences as a sufficient confutation of that slander. When we have been falling, has not God taken us by the hand? When I said my foot slippeth, thy goodness, O Lord, held me up, Psalm 94.18. How often has God held our head and heart when we have been fainting? And is he a hard Master? Is there any master besides God who will wait upon his servants? Christians summon in your experiences. What vails have you had? What inward serenity and peace, which neither the world can give, nor death take away? A Christian's own experiences may plead for God against such as desire rather to censure his ways, than to try them, and to cavil at them than to walk in them.
4. The meditation of our experiences would make us communicative to others. We would be telling our children and acquaintance what God has done for our souls; at such a time we were brought low, and God raised us; at such a time in desertion, and God brought a promise to remembrance which dropped in comfort. The meditation of God's gracious dealing with us would make us transmit and propagate our experience to others, that the mercies of God shown to us may bear a plentiful crop of praise when we are dead and gone.
