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To be thus minded is life and peace; or the life of true piety is a life of peaceful pleasure.

1. A life of holiness is calculated to fill the mind with the richest enjoyment, and raise it to its highest state of improvement. The objects of contemplation that lie before the believing mind are dignified and worthy its occupancy.

2. A life of piety furnishes the heart with those affections which give it the highest pleasure, and best promote its improvement. There is no small object in God's kingdom. If He is not the immediate object of the affections of His people, still they have a noble object. If they love His law, His gospel, His government, His Church, or even the humblest individual in His household, there is no one of these affections of which angels would be ashamed.

3. Piety cultivates a better conscience than can be found in the carnally-minded. Other things being equal, he is far the happiest man who has the purest conscience, who most promptly applies for its decision, and most cheerfully obeys its dictates. Still, in every good man, conscience is more or less honoured and cultivated, while in the opposite character it is hated and neglected as Heaven's unwelcome sentinel.

4. A life of piety promotes happiness. To be spiritually-minded is life and peace. This is a point that will generally be con. ceded. It is said, however, that there are some whom religion has made unhappy. They are cut off from the pleasures of sense, while their hopes of glory and their enjoyment of God are too inoperative to render them happy. That in many cases this appears to be true there is no doubt; but there can be as little doubt that the failure is chargeable, not to religion, but to its absence.

5. There is opened before the believer a vast resource of comfort. He has joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, whom having not seen we love, and in whom though now we see Him not, yet believing, we rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. He has fellowship with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. He enjoys the ministry of angels. He is conscious of penitence, and has ordinarily a hope of forgiveness. He is permitted through rich grace to cast an eye forward toward heaven as his everlasting home.

6. The covenant that binds him to his Lord is an everlasting covenant, well ordered in all things and sure. Hence, while he is assured that to live is Christ, he is equally confident that to die would be gain. What he shall be it does not yet appear.

(D. A. Clark.)

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KJV: For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.

WEB: For the mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of the Spirit is life and peace;