The divine life in three treatises

But perhaps you will think that you walk with God, because you think of him sometimes ineffectually, and as on the by. But is he esteemed as your God, if he have not the Command, and if he have not the precedency of his creatures? Can you dream that indeed you walk with God, when your hearts were never grieved for offending him, nor never much solicitous how to be reconciled to him; nor much inquisitive whether your state or way be pleasing or displeasing to him? when all the business of an unspeakable importance, which you have to do with God, before you pass to judgement, is forgotten and undone, as if you knew not of any such work that you had to do! when you make no serious preparation for death, when you call not upon God in secret, or in your families, unless with a little heartless lip labour; and when you love not the spirituality of his worship, but only delude your souls with the mockage of hypocritical outside complement. Do you walk with God while you are plotting for preferment, and gaping after worldly greatness, while you are gratifying all the desires of your flesh, and making provision for the future satisfying of its lusts? Rom. 13. 13. Are you walking with God when you are hating him in his Holiness, his Justice, his Word and Ways, and hating all that seriously love and seek him? when you are doing your worst to dispatch the work of your damnation, and put your salvation past all hope, and ⟨p. 222⟩draw as many to Hell with you as you can: If this be a walking with God, you may take further comfort that you shall also dwell with God according to the sense of such a walk: you shall dwell with him as a devouring fire, and as just, whom you thus walked with in the contempt o• his mercies, and the provocation of his Justice.

But perhaps you will think that you walk with God, because you think of him sometimes ineffectually, and as on the by. But is he esteemed as your God, if he have not the Command, and if he have not the precedency of his creatures? Can you dream that indeed you walk with God, when your hearts were never grieved for offending him, nor never much solicitous how to be reconciled to him; nor much inquisitive whether your state or way be pleasing or displeasing to him? when all the business of an unspeakable importance, which you have to do with God, before you pass to judgement, is forgotten and undone, as if you knew not of any such work that you had to do! when you make no serious preparation for death, when you call not upon God in secret, or in your families, unless with a little heartless lip labour; and when you love not the spirituality of his worship, but only delude your souls with the mockage of hypocritical outside complement. Do you walk with God while you are plotting for preferment, and gaping after worldly greatness, while you are gratifying all the desires of your flesh, and making provision for the future satisfying of its lusts?