Mercy magnified on a penitent prodigal, or, A brief discourse

5. All this is done to restore comfort to the soul: Sense of his sin, and the great wrong that he had done to his father, by so vilely leaving him, and profusely spending his estate, had filled him with sorrow and bitterness; his Father now kisseth him to comfort him: They are called the kisses of the mouth, Can. 1. 2. which are given in the application of the promises to the soul, and enabling of him to close with them, suck the sweet out of them, and draw to his consolation the good that is in them: and thus it is also a glorifying kiss. Put altogether and it telleth us what a wonderful declaration of God's love it is that comes into the soul at the hour of Conversion.

USE 1. For Information.

1. We hence learn that the soul is passive in vocation: I do not mean as it is a Rational, but as it is a spiritual Agent. If God had not come to the sinner, he had never come to God, nor could he have done it: As well might the widows son lying upon the bier, and carrying ⟨p. 315⟩to the grave, have fetched back his departed soul as a sinner dead in trespasses and sins, recover the lost Image of God. Hither every Regenerate man owes his spiritual original, viz. Not to the strength of his nature, or flexibility of his will, but to God, who came to him there where he lay a dying, and whence he was not able so much as to lift up his eyes towards heaven, without God put the ability into him by reviving Grace. And this proclaims the wonderful concescendency of the great God to undone men and women, in that he is not only ready and willing to receive them when they come to him, but he runs forth to meet them, and to do them good: The condition that all men are lying in, at such time as he speaks that happy word to them, live; tends mightily to enhance or illustrate the unspeakable kindness, of God, and hence deserves an ingemination,