The Communicant's Companion (continued)
beg them; for we buy without money and without price: and such buyers shall not be driven out of God's temple, nor slighted there, however they are looked on in men's markets.
2. Pray that our hearts may be enlarged in the duty. It is the gracious promise of God, that he will open rivers in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; and the joint experience of all the saints, that they looked unto him and were lightened: such outgoings of soul therefore towards God, as may receive the incomes of divine strength and comfort, we should earnestly desire and pray for. Pray that God would grace his own institutions with such manifest tokens of his presence as those two disciples had, who reasoned thus for their own conviction, that they had been with Jesus, "Did not our hearts burn within us?" Pray that, by the grace of God, the business of the ordinance may be faithfully done; the work of the day, the sacrament day, in its day, according as the duty of the day requires, (Ezra 3:4.) Pray that the ends of the ordinance may be sincerely aimed at and happily attained, and the great intention of the institution of it answered; that you may not receive the grace of God therein in vain. O that my heart may be engaged to approach unto God!—so engaged as that nothing may prevail to disengage it. Come, blessed Spirit, and breathe upon these dry bones! Move upon the waters of the ordinances, and produce a new creation! "Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; and blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow forth. And then let my beloved come into his garden," (his it is, and then it will be fit to be called his,) "and eat his pleasant fruits."
3. Pray that we may be favorably accepted 'of God, both in the preparation and in the performance. In vain do we worship, if God do not accept us. The applause of men is but a poor reward, (such as the hypocrites were content