An exposition with practical observations continued upon the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters…

Answ, 5 Fifthly, Offer up your selves as a sacrifice unto God do not content your selves to offer up a prayer unto God as a sacrifice, or alms or such duties only, but be sure together with these sacrifices to offer up your selves as a living sacrifice to God, as the Apostle speaks Rom. 12.1. I beseech you by the mercies of God that you offer up your bodies a living sacrifice unto God. God cares for none of your sacrifices except you offer your selves to be a sacrifice unto him. That is a very observable place in 1 King. 8. the latter end of it, there you shall find that Solomon offered two and twenty thousand Oxen and one hundred and twenty thousand Sheep, here was a great sacrifice to be offered at one time unto God, but mark, (though this sacrifice was great) what God says unto him in the 9. chapter presently so soon as the sacrifice was done, verse 4. If thou wilt walk before me as David thy father did to do according unto all ⟨p. 335⟩that I command thee, and wilt keep my statutes and my judgments &c. God puts it to an If for all this, for all these sacrifices If thou thy self in the constant obedience of thy life wilt be a constant sacrifice, then will I do thus and thus, but verse 6. If thou at all turn from following me, if notwithstanding all these sacrifices thou at all turn from following of me, I will do thus and thus. Many of us think when we have been in a day of fasting and spent a whole day in it, and our hearts have been let out and we have been enlarged and have offered up a great sacrifice to God, that we may take the more liberty afterward; No, though you offer twenty two thousand Oxen and an hundred and twenty thousand sheep yet if after this at all thou shalt forsake me, all that thou hast done shall be rejected. Therefore those sacrifices that are not joined with offering up of our selves as a sacrifice, are such as God will make us ashamed of; But if together with our sacrifices we offer up our selves as a sacrifice, you shall never be ashamed of that sacrifice. Therefore you that are poor people and weak parted, and have but little grace, yet if you have true grace, though you cannot offer up such large prayers, your heart is not so enlarged perhaps as others are, and you look upon your sacrifices as poor and mean and as unworthy to be tendered up unto the great God, but dost thou then offer up thy self unto God as a sacrifice?