Armatura Dei, or, A preparation for suffering in an evil day showing how Christians…Armatura Dei, or, A preparation for suffering in an evil day shewing how Christians…

Having dispatched the first Direction, I come to a second: If we would be in a posture for suffering, let us seriously set our selves to mortify sin: There is in Christians a double conformity to Christs Death; the one stands in the mortification of Sin; our old man is crucified with him, Rom. 6.6. dying away by a secret virtue from his Cross: The other stands in bearing the Cross; thereby we fill up the afflictions of Christ, Col. 1.24. The Sufferings of Christ in his Natural Body were full, but the Sufferings of Christ in his Mystical Body at daily to be filled up: The first conformity ⟨p. 35⟩makes way for the second: The mortifying of inward Lusts, is an excellent preparative to the enduring of outward Sufferings. An unmortified man, that is under the power of his Lusts, is in no fit capacity to suffer for Christ: He is a part of that World that lieth in wickedness; the World will love him as a part of it self, and he will comply with the World as a part doth with the whole; a little particle of Water will, if it be possible, fall into a round drop, that it may answer to the figure of the great Ocean whereof it is a part; and an unmortified man will be All-amode, and of the same figure (be it Pagan or Popish Idolatry) with the corrupt World, whereof he is a part; his compliance will be such that he will have no occasion for sufferings, neither is imaginable for what he will suffer from the World: Will he suffer, as good men do, to avoid that greatest of evils, Sin? That is it which he allows and indulges in himself, that is the darling of his Soul, the joy of his way, the current of his life, the only element in which he converses, and may he suffer to avoid such a thing as that is? Or will he suffer to avoid, the greatest of punishments, Hell and Death? No surely, in willing his Lusts he virtually wills Hell and the torments ⟨p. 36⟩of it; in acting his sin, his feet go down to death, and all the wrath that is to come; Or will he suffer for God, out of Love to him, and respect to his glory? It is not imaginable, that he should suffer for God whom he Serves not, or Love him with the Idol in his heart, or respect his glory against whom he is in arms, and whose Laws and honour he treads down under his feet: Or will he suffer or Christ his Saviour, who died to wash away his Sins in his own blood?