The Thirty-Third Sacrament, March 4, 1733

It has been a sad instance of my negligence and folly, that I have taken no more notice of what has passed between God and my soul on such occasions as this for many months; as well as that

I have totally neglected my Diary for a considerable time. I began to be a little more careful towards the beginning of the year; and I plainly find that the time I have since saved for those memorandums had been before lost in that carelessness consequent upon such instances of remissness and folly.

I was this day at the table of the Lord, and I introduced the ordinance by some meditation on those words, “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” Rom. viii. 32. I observed the title given to Christ — “his own Son.” I hope we are the children of God, else we have no business here. But he was so in a peculiar and eminent sense, such as no creature is; yet God did not spare him. He was so far from being excused, that he was not favoured, that the cup might not pass away from him.

Behold His severity as well as His goodness. He “delivered him up.” It was not merely a thing that happened in the common course of human events; but he was by the determined counsel and foreknowledge of God given up: there was the order of God in it; there was the act of God in it; and he was sent into the world on purpose that he might become a sacrifice for sin. And God delivered him “up for us” — mean and worthless creatures as we are; “for us all,” even for the meanest and the vilest of us; — gave him up to all that heavy load of punishment and wrath for you and for me. How amazing it was! Not because he needed us: Christ was in the enjoyment of eternal happiness and glory. What though ten thousand creatures were sentenced to everlasting destruction, and what if we had been in their number, had he not been still the same? But God gave him for us; and if so, shall “he not with him also freely give us all things?” temporal blessings, so far as we need them; above all, the blessings of his covenant. If he has given Christ to purchase them for us, shall they be purchased in vain; if reconciled by his death, shall we not be saved by his life! Let us come with boldness to receive those blessings. God will give them, and let us come and give up ourselves to him: shall we not freely and faithfully give ourselves up to that God who has given us so much?

In breaking the bread, I particularly considered how, in this dispensation, sin appeared exceeding sinful. Few have just notions of it. It is the great design of the devil, to represent it as no very considerable evil, so ihat sinners may be. easily drawn into it, and kept from repentance. But here God has contrived a method to show how malignant it is. We must have low thoughts of Christ, or we cannot have low thoughts of sin. Could it have pleased the Lord to wound him, and to put him to grief, had not such an atonement been fit, and, if fit, necessary? How odious and hateful must we appear to ourselves in this view, as polluted with that, which the soul of God hated, and which the blood of Christ expiated.

In pouring out the cup, I remarked, God prepared him a body on purpose that he mio;ht suffer in it; that he mio-ht have somethins: to offer,

I have lost many other serious and good thoughts for want of a timely recollection of them after I came home; yet I remember to have pressed a renunciation of all sin. The Lord grant I may act according to the tenor of that discourse.