We were created and redeemed for the sole purpose of praising and glorifying our creator.

If we refuse or neglect to do this, we transgress the great law of creation, frustrate the end of our existence, leave unperformed the work for which we were made, do all in our power to prove that we were created in vain, and to cause God to repent of having made us.

Should the sun refuse to shine, should the showers refuse to descend, should the earth refuse to bring forth food, or should trees in a fruitful soil continue barren? Then would you not say that it was contrary to nature and to the design of their creation when and that since they no longer fulfilled this design then they might properly be reduced to nothing again? And do you not see that while you refuse to praise God your conduct is equally unnatural and that you may justly be made the monuments of his everlasting displeasure? What would only
be unnatural in inanimate creatures is the height of folly and wickedness in us because we are capable of knowing our duty and are under innumerable obligations to practice it.

Let the sun then refuse to shine, the showers to descend, and the earth to be fruitful.

But let not rational creatures refuse to praise their creator since it is the purpose for which they were created.

How can creatures glorify God if it be asked how creatures so feeble and ungrateful as we are can glorify God? And I answer by living in such a manner as naturally tends to make him appear glorious, amiable, and excellent in the view of his creatures.

A son, for instance, honors his parents when he evidently loves, reverences, confides in, and obeys them, because such conduct tends to make those who know him think favorably of his parents.

A subject honors his sovereign when he cheerfully submits to his authority and appears to be contented and happy in his government because this tends to give others a favorable opinion of his sovereign.

In the same way, men honor and glorify God when they show by their conduct that they consider him the most perfect and best of beings and love reverence and confide in him as such.

For these things naturally tend to excite a high estimation of God in the minds of their fellow creatures.

Out of reverence for God, with what profound veneration does it be us to enter the presence and to receive the favors of the awesome majesty of heaven and earth? And how ought we to dread grieving or offending goodness so great, so glorious, so venerable.

To illustrate this remark, suppose that the sun, whose brightness, even at this distance, you cannot gaze upon without shrinking, were an animated, intelligent body, and that with a design to do you good, he should leave his place in the heavens and gradually approach you.

As he drew more and more near, his apparent magnitude and eulgence would every moment increase.

He would occupy a larger and larger portion of the visible heavens until at length all other objects would be lost and yourselves swallowed up in one insufferably dazzling overpowering flood of light.

Would you not since such circumstances feel the strongest emotions of all of something like fear? Would a knowledge that the glorious luminary was approaching with a benevolent design for your good banish these emotions? What then ought to be the feelings of a sinful worm of the dust when the father of lights, the eternal son of the universe, who dwells
in the high and holy place and in the contrite heart, stoops from his awesome throne to visit him, to smile upon him, to pardon him, to purify him from his moral defilement, to adopt him as a child, to make him an heir of heaven, to take possession of his heart as his earthly habitation.

The duty of loving God.

We ought to love God because he has given us the power to love.

He might have formed us gloomy, morose, misanthropic beings, destitute of all the social affections and without the power of loving any object and strangers to the happiness of being beloved.

Should God withdraw unto himself, not only all the amiiable qualities which excite love, but the very power of loving would vanish from the world.

And we would not only like the evil spirits become perfectly hateful but should like them hate one another.

Every object which can be presented to us has a claim on our affections corresponding to its character.

If any object is admirable then it possesses a natural and inherent claim to our admiration.

If it is venerable then it has a claim to our reverence.

If it is terrifying then it demands our fear.

If it is beautiful and amiable, then it claims and deserves our love.

But God is perfectly and infinitely lovely.

Nay, he is excellence and loveliness itself.

If you doubt this, and ask those who can tell you.

Ask Christ who is in the bosom of the father and he will tell you that God is infinitely lovely.

Ask the holy angels who dwell in his immediate presence, and they will tell you that he is lovely beyond all that even angelic minds can conceive.

Ask godly men in all ages, and they will lament that they cannot tell you how amiable and excellent Jehovah is.

Ask everything beautiful and amiable in the universe, and it will tell you that all its beauty is but a faint reflection of his.

If all this does not satisfy you, ask the spirits of disobedience.

And they though filled with malice and rage against him will tell if you can constrain them to speak.

That the being they hate is lovely and that it constitutes the essence of their misery that they can find no blemish in his character.

But if God be thus infinitely lovely, then we are under infinite obligations to love him.

Obligations from which he himself cannot release us, but by altering his character and ceasing to be lovely.

the folly of preferring creatures to God.

Would you not consider a person foolish and absurd, who would extravagantly love and prize a drop of stagnant water, and yet view the ocean with indifference or disgust? Or who would constantly gravel in the dust to admire a shining grain of sand, and yet neglect to admire the sun which caused it to shine? Of what folly and absurdity, then are we guilty? When we
love the imperfectly amiable qualities of our fellow worms, or admire the sublimity and beauty of the works of nature, and yet exercise no love to him to whom they are indebted for all, him whose glory guilds the heavens, and from whom angels derive everything that can excite admiration or love.

God the only source of excellence.

God only, the Father of lights, from whom comes down every good and perfect gift, makes one creature to differ from another.

They are wise only by his wisdom, strong only in his strength, and good only in his goodness.

He is entirely the author of everything good in heaven and on earth.

When creatures acknowledge this and ascribe all the excellencies they possess to him alone, they then in the language of scripture bring forth fruit not to themselves but to his glory.

God is the source of everything excellent or praiseworthy in the intellectual world.

To him angels and men are alike indebted for all their faculties.

Reason, memory, wit, prudence, invention and imagination are only his gifts.

The statesman, the warrior with a mathematician, the poet, the ortor, the historian, the astronomer, the painter and the sculptor.

All were formed, instructed, and directed by him.

By his assistance, all the great enterprises, splendid achievements, and admirable works which the world ever saw were performed.

It is he, says David, who teaches my hands to war and my fingers to fight.

It was he who guided Columbus to the discovery of this new world.

It was he who qualified our revered Washington for the great work of delivering his country and assisted him in its accomplishment.

And while we admire the gifts of God in men, shall we not admire the great giver? While we admire the achievements, enterprises, and works of men, shall we not admire him who enabled men to perform them? Shall we rest in streams and admire them only without praising
the fountain? Surely this is highly unreasonable.

 

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