A treatise of delighting in God from Psal. xxxvij. 4. Delight thy self also…

And will you dream and slumber all your days? How much time have you lost, that might have been pleasantly spent in a course of godliness! Do you not aim at a life of eternal delights with God? If you now begin not to live to God, when will you? That life which you reckon shall never end with you, must yet have a beginning. Will you defer till you dye your beginning to live? Have you any hope God will deal in a peculiar way with you from all men, and make the other world the place of your first heart-change? How dismal should it be to you, to look in and still ⟨p. 234⟩find your heart dead towards God, and the things of God; so that you have no delight in them. Think what the beginnings of the Divine life, and the present delights of it, must be the earnest of to you, and make sure the ground (betime) of so great an hope.

BUT I forbear here to insist further; and pass on to the Discourse of Delighting in God, under the other more strict notion of it, viz. As the very act of delight hath its direct exercise upon himself. So we are to consider this delight, not as a thing some way adherent to all other duties of Religion; but as a distinct Duty of it self, that requires a solemn and direct application of our selves thereunto. For though it seems little to be doubted, but there is in this Precept a part of Religion put for the whole (as having a real influence, and conferring with its name a grateful savour and tincture upon the whole); it would yet be very unreasonable, not to take special notice of that part from whence the entire frame of Religion hath its name.

BUT I forbear here to insist further; and pass on to the Discourse of Delighting in God, under the other more strict notion of it, viz. As the very act of delight hath its direct exercise upon himself. So we are to consider this delight, not as a thing some way adherent to all other duties of Religion; but as a distinct Duty of it self, that requires a solemn and direct application of our selves thereunto. For though it seems little to be doubted, but there is in this Precept a part of Religion put for the whole (as having a real influence, and conferring with its name a grateful savour and tincture upon the whole); it would yet be very unreasonable, not to take special notice of that part from whence the intire frame of Religion hath its name.