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

2. Your little delight in him argues much unmindfulness of him; At least that you have not minded him duly, and according to what you have known. It might here be seasonable to suggest to you, how likely it is, that several ways your great faultiness in the matter of thinking of God may have contributed to the withholding of your delight from him. Consider therefore,

1. Have not your thoughts of him been slight and transient? Have they not been overly superficial thoughts? casual only, and such as have dropped into your minds as it were by chance, fluid and roving, fixed neither upon him nor into your hearts? Too much resembling what is said of the wicked man,¹ God is not in all his thoughts; He hath not been amidst them. Your thoughts have not united upon him, he hath not been situated and ⟨p. 277⟩centred in them. Was not this the case? You bestowed upon him it may be now and then an hasty passant glance, the careless cast of a wandering eye; and was this likely to beget an abiding permanent delight? Have you been wont to compose your selves designedly and on purpose to think of him, so as your thoughts might be said to have been directed towards him by the desire and inclining bent of your heart; according to that,² The desire of our Soul is towards thy name, and to the remembrance of thee? Whence it is that 'tis represented as the usual posture of them whom he reckons among his Jewels, and for whom the book of remembrance was written,³ that they thought on his name. A thing that they might be known by, and distinguished from other men; (wherefore it is observable, that their remembrance of him, was thought worth the remembering, and to be transmitted into records, never to be forgotten). The evil of your not-delighting in God, hath a great accession from your negligent thinking of him.