The Fountain of Life Opened

First, God hath peculiarly obliged you to purity and strictness of Life. Yea every person in the blessed Trinity hath cast his Cord over your Souls, to bind up your hearts and lives to the most strict and precise obedience of his commands.¹ The Father hath obliged you and that not only by the common tie of Creation which is yet of great efficacy in it self: for is it reasonable, that God should create and form so excellent a piece, and that it should be employed against him? That he should plant the Tree, and another eat the Fruit of it? But besides this common engagement, he hath obliged you to holiness of life.

1. 1Obligations fr•m the Father.Obli•ations fr•m the Father.

First, By his wise and merciful designs and counsels for your recovery and salvation by Jesus Christ. It was he that laid the corner stone of your salvation with his own hands. The first motion sprang out of his breast. If God had not designed the Redeemer for you, the world had never seen him; he had never left that sweet bosom for you. It was the Act of the Father to give you to the Son to be Redeemed, and then to give the Son to be a Redeemer to you. Both of them stupendous and astonishing Acts of grace. And in both God acted as a most free Agent. When he gave you to Christ before the beginning of time, there was nothing out of himself that could in the least move him to it. When the Father, Son, and Spirit sate (as I may say) at the Counsel Table, contriving and laying the design for the salvation of a few out of many of Adams degenerate off-spring, there was none came before them to speak one word for thee; but such was the divine pleasure to insert thy name in that Catalogue of the saved. Oh how much owest thou to the Lord for this! And what an engagement doth it leave upon thy soul to obey, please and glorify him?