SERMON XXIX. Upon our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount. DISCOURSE IX. Matt. vi. 24‒34. SERMON XXX. Upon our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount. DISCOURSE X. Matt. vii. 1‒12. Illustration: (‡ decoration) SERMON XVII.[1] THE CIRCUMCISION OF THE HEART. ROM. ii. 29. _Circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit and not in the letter._ 1. ’TIS the melancholly remark of an excellent man, that “He who now preaches the most essential duties of Christianity, runs the hazard of being esteemed by a great part of his hearers, _a setter forth of new doctrines_.” Most men have so _lived away_ the substance of that religion, the profession whereof they still retain, that no sooner are any of those truths proposed, which difference the Spirit of _Christ_ from the Spirit of the world, than they cry out, _Thou bringest strange things to our ears; we would know what these things mean_.――Though he is only preaching to them _Jesus and the resurrection_, with the necessary consequence of it. If _Christ_ be risen, ye ought then to die unto the world, and to live wholly unto God. 2. A hard saying this to the _natural man_, who is alive unto the world, and dead unto God, and one that he will not readily be persuaded, to receive as the truth of God, unless it be so qualified in the interpretation, as to have neither use nor significancy left. He _receiveth not the_ words _of the Spirit of God_, taken in their plain and obvious meaning. _They are foolishness unto him: neither_ indeed _can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned_: They are perceivable only by that spiritual sense, which in him was never yet awakened; for want of which he must reject as idle fancies of men, what are both the _wisdom_ and the _power of God_.