Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ

HERE our Souls are burdened with innumerable Infirmities, and our Faith is clogged in its Operations by Ignorance and Darkness. This makes our best estate and highest attainments to be accompanied with groans for deliverance. We which have received the first fruits of the spirit, even we our selves groan within our selves, waiting for the Adoption, even the redemption of the body, Rom. 8. 23. Yea, whilst we are in this Tabernacle, we groan earnestly ⟨p. 154⟩as being burdened, because we are not absent from the body, and present with the Lord, 2 Cor. 5. 2, 4, 8. The more we grow in Faith, and Spiritual Light, the more sensible are we of our present burdens, and the more vehemently do we groan for deliverance into the perfect liberty of the Sons of God. This is the posture of their minds who have received the first fruits of the Spirit, in the most eminent degree. The nearer any one is to Heaven, the more earnestly he desires to be there, because Christ is there. For the more frequent and steady are our views of him by faith, the more do we long and groan for the removal of all obstructions and interpositions in our so doing. Now groaning is a vehement desire mixed with sorrow, for the present want of what is desired. The desire hath sorrow, and that sorrow hath joy and refreshment in it; like a shower that falls on a Man in a Garden in the Spring; it wets him, but withal refresheth him with the Savour it causeth in the Flowers and Herbs of the Garden, where he is. And this groaning, which when it is constant and habitual, is one of the choicest effects of Faith in this life, respects what we would be delivered from, and what we would attain unto. The first is expressed, Rom. 7. 24. The other in the places now mentioned. And this frame with an intermixture of some sighs from weariness by the troubles, sorrows, pains, sicknesses of this life, is the best we can here attain unto.

HERE our Souls are burthened with innumerable Infirmities, and our Faith is clogged in its Operations by Ignorance and Darkness. This makes our best estate and highest attainments to be accompanied with groans for deliverance. We which have received the first fruits of the spirit, even we our selves groan within our selves, waiting for the Adoption, even the redemption of the body,