What is "godliness?"

Here's something really important.  The Bible says, "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness . . . "  But what is godliness?  Some years ago I got the idea of beginning the New Year with an exposition of 2 Peter 1: 5-7 so that as the year progressed we would be sure we were "adding to our faith" those things which Peter prescribed for being fruitful and making our "calling and election sure."  I preached the series a number of times in different churches and still find it edifying to myself.  The greatest help in preparing it was an exposition by a great Scottish preacher and commentator named John Brown and I would like to take a few days to share with you his remarks on this most important of subjects.  He begins--

"Godliness is just the yielding obedience to the first command­ment of the decalogue—a commandment which will be found to include all the other nine—" Thou shalt have no other God before Me," —a commandment excellently explained in our Shorter Catechism, as requiring " us to know and acknowledge God as the only true God, and as our God, and to worship and glorify Him accordingly." The subject is very extensive, and, from our limited capacities, we need to look at it from various points of view, in order to obtain any thing like ade­quate conceptions of it. God, in His character and works—in His revealed will and providential administration—and man, in his constitution and circumstances, as a rational, dependent, accountable being, capable of action, eujoyment, and suffering—and the relations the latter stands in to the former, as the creature of His hand, and as the subject of His holy moral government, as guilty, depraved, and wretched, yet under an economy through which he may obtain pardon, and sanctification, and eternal happiness—all these must, in some measure, be understood by us in order to apprehend distinctly what it is for man to be godly—what is the right state of the thoughts, affections, and conduct, of such a being as man with regard to such a being as God.

 To know and believe the truth respecting God, to love, trust, fear, believe, obey God, to submit to and worship Him, to seek and find happiness in Him, to be conformed to Him, to maintain fellow­ship with Him, supremely to desire His approbation, and steadily to seek the promotion of His glory, habitually to think of Him, and to look on every thing in its connection with Him,—all this is included in godliness.

The truth about God, known and believed, is the funda­mental part of godliness. This is thinking rightly in reference to God. The substance of that truth may be thus stated :—" There is a God, infinite, eternal, independent and unchange­able, omnipotent, omniscient, all-wise, immaculately holy, in­flexibly just and inconceivably kind—the creator, proprietor, preserver and governor of all things. This God is displeased with man on account of sin, yet disposed to pardon and save him through the mediation of His Son, whom He has set forth a pro­pitiation through His blood. He is " God in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing to men their trespasses, see­ing He has made Him who knew no sin, to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." " This is the true God," to use the language of an English theologian,'and there is none other but He, and if these great charac­teristics are denied, or any other assumed in their stead, a man is left without God ; he may call himself a deist if he will, but his God is a mere idol of the imagination, and has no corre­sponding reality in the whole universe of being." God is not known, if His glory in the face of Christ Jesus be not discerned

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And this truth must be apprehended in its evidence, as well as in its meaning, in order to the existence of godliness in the mind. We must know it, and be sure of it. It must not be to us, what it is to many, a mere creature of the imagination or abstraction of the reason. We never think rightly about God, except when the truth in reference to His existence, and presence, and greatness, and goodness, and justice, and mercy, comes upon the mind with such a sense of their reality, as to produce an impression similar to that made by sensible objects ; when, through the influence of faith, we, as it were, see what is invisible and feel what is impalpable."