A treatise of self-denial. By Richard Baxter, pastor of the church at KidderminsterA treatise of self-denial. By Richard Baxter, pastor of the church at Kederminster

CHAP. LXVI. Self-seeking is self-losing: self-denying our safety.

4. Moreover, consider that self-seeking is self-destroying, and self-denial is the only way to our safety. We were well when we were in the hands of God, and had no need to care for our selves. But we were lost as soon as we left him and turned to our selves. If God care for you, infinite Wisdom cares for you; whom no enemy is able to over-wit or circumvent; who can foresee all your dangers, and is acquainted with all the ways of your enemies, and with all that is necessary to your preservation. But if you be at your own care, you are at the care of fools, and short-witted people, that are not acquainted with the depths of Satan, the subtleties of men, nor the way of your escape, but may easily be over-reached to your undoing. If you are in your own hands, you are in the hands of bad men, that though they have self-love, yet are so blinded by impiety that they will live like self haters; And this experience fully manifesteth, in that all sinners are self-destroyers: No enemy could do so much against us as the best of us doth against himself: Did a man hate himself as bad as the Devil hateth him, he could show it by no worse a way than sin; nor do himself a greater mischief than by neglecting God, and the life to come, and undoing his own soul, as the ungodly do. Should you sit down of purpose to study how to do all the hurt to your selves that you can, and to play the part of your deadliest enemies, I know not what you could do more than is ordinary with ungodly men to do, except to go a little further in the same way. Nothing but sin could alienate you from God, or make you liable to his ⟨p. 369⟩heavy wrath: and this no man else could make you guilty of, if you did not voluntarily choose to be evil. If you could ask any man that is this day in Hell, or that will ever be there, what brought him thither, and who it was long of that he came to such a miserable end, he must needs tell you it was himself. If you come to any in earthly misery, and ask them, who brought this upon them? If they speak truly they must say, it was themselves. And this will be a great aggravation of their misery, and the fuel that will feed the unquenchable fire, to think that all this was their own doing, and that they had not been deprived of the heavenly Glory but for their own refusal or neglect.