The saints everlasting rest

1. That you get your hearts affected with the misery of your brethren's souls: be compassionate towards them; yearn after their salvation. If you did earnestly long after their conversion, and your hearts were fully set to do them good, it would set you on work, and GOD would usually bless it. 2. Take all opportunities that possibly you can, to instruct and help them to the attaining of salvation. And lest you should not know how to manage this work, let me tell you more particularly what you are herein to do. 1. If it be an ignorant person you have to deal with, who is an utter stranger to the mysteries of religion, and to the work of regeneration, the first thing you have to do, is, to acquaint him with these doctrines: labour to make him understand wherein man's chief happiness doth consist; and how far he ⟨p. 199⟩was once possessed of it; and what law and covenant GOD then made with him; and how he broke it; and what penalty he incurred, and what misery he brought himself into thereby: teach him what need men had of a Redeemer; and how Christ in mercy did interpose, and bear the penalty, and what covenant now he hath made with man; and on what terms only salvation is now to be attained; and what course Christ taketh to draw men to himself; and what are the riches and privileges that believers have in him.

If when he understands these things, he be not moved by them: or if you find that the stop lieth in his will and affections, and in the hardness of his heart, and in the interest that the flesh and the world have got in him; then show him the excellency of the glory which he neglecteth, and the intolerableness of the loss of it, and the extremity and eternity of the torments of the damned, and how certainly they must endure them; and how just it is for their wilful refusals of grace; and how heinous a sin it is to reject such free and abundant mercy, and to tread under foot the blood of the covenant: show him the certainty, nearness and terrors of death and judgment, and the vanity of all things below, which now he is taken up with; and how little they will bestead him in that time of his extremity. Show him that by nature he himself is a child of wrath, an enemy to GOD; and by actual sin much more: show him the vile and heinous nature of sin; the absolute necessity he standeth in of a Saviour; the freeness of the promise; the fullness of Christ; the sufficiency of his satisfaction; his readiness to receive all that are willing to be his; and the authority and dominion which he hath purchased over us; show him also the absolute necessity of regeneration, faith and holiness, how impossible it is to have salvation by Christ without these; and what they are, and the true nature of them.