What does Edwards want the audience to feel emotionally?

Jonathan Edwards was a powerful and influential Puritan preacher known for his ability to persuade his congregation to live pure and upright lives. He did so by evoking fear in his congregation through his powerful sermons that were full of imagery and figurative language. For example, he states in his sermon:
"Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy with head, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure toward Hell: and if God would let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into a bottomless gulf...".
Here he demonstrates that without God's mercy, his congregation has no hope to escape the fate of Hell; therefore, they must dedicate their lives to God to save themselves from damnation. Edwards continues, stating
"O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God whose wrath is provoked...you hang by a slender thread, with the flames of the divine wrath flashing about it...".
The use of metaphor ("a great furnace of wrath"), the imagery of hanging by a slender spider thread over Hell, and the repetition of the word "wrath throughout the sermon are just a few examples of how Edwards evokes fear in his audience and making it imperative that they do all they can to save themselves from God's fury.

More than anything else, Edwards wants his audience to be very afraid. To be precise, he wants them to be afraid of hell. In his famous sermon, Edwards is attempting to put the fear of God into his listeners so that they will see the error of their ways and repent of their sins. Edwards believes that the good folk of New England have become dangerously lax in their moral behavior by frequenting taverns and openly consorting with members of the opposite sex. As a devout Puritan, he regards this as deeply sinful behavior, which can lead to the people who behave in such a way being sent to hell. Puritans like Edwards believed that hell was a literal place, a fiery pit full of unspeakable torment and suffering. He knew, therefore, that the best way to get his message across would be to play upon his audience's fear of the traditional fate of sinners.