A guide to godliness or a Treatise of a Christian life showing the dutiesA guide to godlynesse or a Treatise of a Christian life shewing the duties

§. Sect. 1 That our seeking God daily, is a necessary duty.

The second main duty, which we are daily, and even throughout the day to perform, is, to seek the Lord our God, by consecrating our selves wholly both in our souls and bodies unto his worship and service. The which duty is required in many places of the Scriptures. So David exhorteth the Princes of Israel, to set their hearts and souls to seek the Lord their ¹God; and the Lord by his Prophet requireth it of all the people; Seek ye ²the Lord whilst he may be found, and call ye upon him while he is near. And again; Seek ye the Lord, and ye shall live. For howsoever the Lord, in ³respect of the infiniteness and immensity of his nature and essence, filleth all places with his presence, and therefore cannot be far (as the Apostle speaketh) from every one of us; for in him we live, and move, and have our being, as the heathens saw even by the very light of nature; and though ⁴in the state of innocency and integrity man had sweet communion with God, and enjoyed the comfortable and lively influences of his saving graces, and dwelled in God, and God in him: yet through the fall of our first parents, and the overspreading corruption which did accompany it; man lost God, & was deprived of his presence; was wholly estranged from that happy and holy communion, and had all influence of his grace stopped from: And together with this inestimable loss, he lost also the sense of this loss, and of all the miseries which did accompany it, and therefore never cared or desired to seek and find him, that being again reunited unto him, he might thereby recover his lost happiness; till God,