Stephen Charnock - The Existence and Attributes of God (Vol. 1&2)

3. Spiritual worship is done with sincerity. When the heart stands right to God, and the soul performs what it pretends to perform; when we serve God with our spirits, as the apostle (Rom. i. 9), “God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son:” this is not meant of the Holy Ghost; for the apostle would never have called the Spirit of God his own spirit; but with my spirit, that is, a sincere frame of heart. A carnal worship, whether under the law or gospel, is, when we are busied about external rites, without an inward compliance of soul. God demands the heart; “My son, give me thy heart;” 490not give me thy tongue, or thy lips, or thy hands; these may be given without the heart, but the heart can never be bestowed without these as its attendants. A heap of services can be no more welcome to God, without our spirits, than all Jacob’s sons could be to Joseph, without the Benjamin he desired to see. God is not taken with the cabinet, but the jewel; he first respected Abel’s faith and sincerity, and then his sacrifice; he disrespected Cain’s infidelity and hypocrisy, and then his offering. For this cause he rejected the offerings of the Jews, the prayers of the Pharisees, and the alms of Ananias and Sapphira, because their hearts and their duties were at a distance from one another. In all spiritual sacrifices, our spirits are God’s portion. Under the law, the reins were to be consumed by the fire on the altar, because the secret intentions of the heart were signified by them (Psalm vii. 9), “The Lord trieth the heart and the reins.” It was an ill omen among the heathen, if a victim wanted a heart. The widow’s mites, with her heart in them, were more esteemed than the richer offerings without it. 491Not the quantity of service, but the will in it, is of account with this infinite Spirit. All that was to be brought for the framing of the tabernacle was to be offered “willingly with the heart.” 492The more of will, the more of spirituality and acceptableness to God (Psalm cxix. 108), “Accept the free‑will offering of my lips.” Sincerity is the salt which seasons every sacrifice. The heart is most like to the object of worship; the heart in the body is the spring of all vital actions; and a spiritual soul is the spring of all spiritual actions. How can we imagine God can delight in the mere service of the body, any more than we can delight in converse with a carcass? Without the heart it is no worship; it is a stage play; an acting a part without being that person really which is acted by us: a hypocrite, in the notion of the word, is a stage‑player. We may as well say a man may believe with his body, as worship God only with his body. Faith is a great ingredient in worship; and it is “with the heart man believes unto righteousness.” 493We may be truly said to worship God, though we want perfection; but we cannot be said to worship him, if we want sincerity; a statue upon a tomb, with eyes and hands lifted up, offers as good and true a service; it wants only a voice, the gestures and postures are the same; nay, the service is better; it is not a mockery; it represents all that it can be framed to; but to worship without our spirits, is a presenting God with a picture, an echo, voice, and nothing else; a compliment; a mere lie; a “compassing him about with lies.” 494Without the heart the tongue is a liar; and the greatest zeal a dissembling with him. To present the spirit, is to present with that which can never naturally die; to present him only the body, is to present him that which is every day crumbling to dust, and will at last lie rotting in the grave; to offer him a few rags, easily torn; a skin for a sacrifice, a thing unworthy the majesty of God; a fixed eye and elevated hands, with a sleepy heart and earthly soul, are pitiful things for an ever‑blessed and glorious Spirit: nay, it is so far from being spiritual, that it is blasphemy; to pretend to be a Jew outwardly, without being so inwardly, is, in the judgment of Christ, to blaspheme. 495And is not the same title to be given with as much reason to those that pretend a worship and perform none? Such a one is not a spiritual worshipper, but a blaspheming devil in Samuel’s mantle.

4. Spiritual worship is performed with an unitedness of heart. The heart is not only now and then with God, but “united to fear or worship his name.” 496A spiritual duty must have the engagement of the spirit, and the thoughts tied up to the spiritual object. The union of all the parts of the heart together with the body is the life of the body; and the moral union of our hearts is the life of any duty. A heart quickly flitting from God makes not God his treasure; he slights the worship, and therein affronts the object of worship. All our thoughts ought to be ravished with God; bound up in him as in a bundle of life; but when we start from him to gaze after every feather, and run after every bubble, we disown a full and affecting excellency, and a satisfying sweetness in him. When our thoughts run from God, it is a testimony we have no spiritual affection to God; affection would stake down the thoughts to the object affected; it is but a mouth love, as the prophet praiseth it; 497but their hearts go “after their covetousness;” covetous objects pipe, and the heart danceth after them; and thoughts of God are shifted off to receive a multitude of other imaginations; the heart and the service staid awhile together, and then took leave of one another. The Psalmist 498still found his heart with God when he awaked; still with God in spiritual affections and fixed meditations. A carnal heart is seldom with God, either in or out of worship; if God should knock at the heart in any duty, it would be found not at home, but straying abroad. Our worship is spiritual when the door of the heart is shut against all intruders, as our Saviour commands in closet‑duties. 499It was not his meaning to command the shutting the closet‑door, and leave the heart‑door open for every thought that would be apt to haunt us. Worldly affections are to be laid aside if we would have our worship spiritual; this was meant by the Jewish custom of wiping or washing off the dust of their feet before their entrance into the temple, and of not bringing money in their girdles. To be spiritual in worship, is to have our souls gathered and bound up wholly in themselves, and offered to God. Our loins must be girt, as the fashion was in the eastern countries, where they wore long garments, that they might not waver with the wind, and be blown between their legs, to obstruct them in their travel: our faculties must not hang loose about us. He is a carnal worshipper that gives God but a piece of his heart, as well as he that denies him the whole of it; that hath some thoughts pitched upon God in worship, and as many willingly upon the world. David sought God, not with a moiety of his heart, but with his “whole heart;” with his entire frame; 500he brought not half his heart, and left the other in the possession of another master. It was a good lesson Pythagoras gave his scholars, 501“Not to make the observance of God a work by the bye.” If those guests be invited, or entertained kindly, or if they come unexpected, the spirituality of that worship is lost; the soul kicks down what it wrought before: but if they be brow‑beaten by us, and our grief rather than our pleasure, they divert our spiritual intention from the work in hand, but hinder not God’s acceptance of it as spiritual, because they are not the acts of our will, but offences to our wills.

5. Spiritual worship is performed with a spiritual activity, and sensibleness of God; with an active understanding to meditate on his excellency, and an active will to embrace him when he drops upon the soul. If we understand the amiableness of God, our affections will be ravished; if we understand the immensity of his goodness, our spirits will be enlarged. We are to act with the highest intention suitable to the greatness of that God with whom we have to do (Psalm cl. 2): “Praise him according to his excellent greatness;” not that we can worship him equally, but in some proportion the frame of the heart is to be suited to the excellency of the object; our spiritual strength is to be put out to the utmost, as creatures that act naturally do. The sun shines, and the fire burns to the utmost of their natural power. This is so necessary, that David, a spiritual worshipper, prays for it before he sets upon acts of adoration (Psalm lxxx. 18): “Quicken us, that we may call upon thy name;” as he was loth to have a drowsy faculty, he was loth to have a drowsy instrument, and would willingly have them as lively as himself (Psalm lvii. 8): “Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp; I myself will awake early.” How would this divine soul screw himself up to God, and be turned into nothing but a holy flame! Our souls must be boiling hot when we serve the Lord. 502The heart doth no less burn when it spiritually comes to God, than when God doth spiritually approach to it; 503a Nabal’s heart, one as cold as a stone, cannot offer up a spiritual service. Whatsoever is enjoined us as our duty, ought to be performed with the greatest intenseness of our spirit. As it is our duty to pray, so it is our duty to pray with the most fervent importunity. It is our duty to love God, but with the purest and most sublime affections; every command of God requires the whole strength of the creature to be employed in it. That love to God wherein all our duty to God is summed up, is to be with all our strength, with all our might, &c. 504Though in the covenant of grace he hath mitigated the severity of the law, and requires not from us such an elevation of our affections as was possible in the state of innocence, yet God requires of us the utmost moral industry to raise our affections to a pitch, at least equal to what they are in other things. What strength of affection we naturally have, ought to be as much and more excited in acts of worship, than upon other occasions and our ordinary works. As there was an inactivity of soul in worship, and a quickness to sin, when sin had the dominion; so when the soul is spiritualized, the temper is changed; there is an inactivity to sin, and an ardor in duty; the more the soul is “dead to sin,” the more it is “alive to God,” 505and the more lively too in all that concerns God and his honor; for grace being a new strength added to our natural, determines the affections to new objects, and excites them to a greater vigor. And as the hatred of sin is more sharp, the love to everything that destroys the dominion of it is more strong; and acts of worship may be reckoned as the chiefest batteries against the power of this inbred enemy. When the Spirit is in the soul, like the rivers of waters flowing out of the belly, the soul hath the activity of a river, and makes haste to be swallowed up in God, as the streams of the river in the sea. Christ makes his people “kings and priests to God;” 506first kings, then priests; gives first a royal temper of heart, that they may offer spiritual sacrifices as priests, kings and priests to God, acting with a magnificent spirit in all their motions to him. We cannot be spiritual priests, till we be spiritual kings. The Spirit appeared in the likeness of fire, and where he resides, communicates, like fire, purity and activity. Dulness is against the light of nature. I do not remember that the heathen ever offered a snail to any of their false deities, nor an ass, but to Priapus, their unclean idol; but the Persians sacrificed to the sun a horse, a swift and generous creature. God provided against those in the law, commanding an ass’ firstling, the offspring of a sluggish creature, to be redeemed, or his neck broke, but by no means to be offered to him. 507God is a Spirit infinitely active, and therefore frozen and benumbed frames are unsuitable to him; he “rides upon a cherub” and flies; he comes upon the “wings of the wind;” he rides upon a “swift cloud;” 508and therefore demands of us not a dull reason, but an active spirit. God is a living God, and therefore must have a lively service. Christ is life, and slothful adorations are not fit to be offered up in the name of life. The worship of God is called wrestling in Scripture; and Paul was a striver in the service of his Master, 509“in an agony.” 510Angels worshipped God spiritually with their wings on; and when God commands them to worship Christ, the next Scripture quoted is, that he makes them “flames of fire.” 511If it be thus, how may we charge ourselves? What Paul said of the sensual widow, 512that she is “dead while she lives,” we may say often of ourselves, we are dead while we worship. Our hearts are in duty as the Jews were in deliverances, as those “in a dream;” 513by which unexpectedness God showed the greatness of his care and mercy; and we attend him as men in a dream, whereby we discover our negligence and folly. This activity doth not consist in outward acts; the body may be hot, and the heart may be faint, but in an inward stirring, meltings, flights. In the highest raptures the body is most insensible. Strong spiritual affections are abstracted from outward sense.