If you call on him as Father, who without respect of persons judges according to each man's work, pass the time of your living as strangers here in reverent fear:
      2. As obedient children, c., 1 Peter 1:14; 1 Peter 1:14. These words may be taken as a rule of holy living, which is both positive--"You ought to live as obedient children, as those whom God hath adopted into his family, and regenerated by his grace;" and negative--"You must not fashion yourselves according to the former lusts, in your ignorance." Or the words may be taken as an argument to press them to holiness from the consideration of what they now are, children of obedience, and what they were when they lived in lust and ignorance. Learn, (1.) The children of God ought to prove themselves to be such by their obedience to God, by their present, constant, universal obedience. (2.) The best of God's children have had their times of lust and ignorance; the time has been when the whole scheme of their lives, their way and fashion, was to accommodate and gratify their unlawful desires and vicious appetites, being grossly ignorant of God and themselves, of Christ and the gospel. (3.) Persons, when converted, differ exceedingly from what they were formerly. They are people of another fashion and manner from what they were before; their inward frame, behaviour, speech, and conversation, are much altered from what they were in times past. (4.) The lusts and extravagances of sinners are both the fruits and the signs of their ignorance.