B36604:271
Preparation for sufferings. Or The best work in the worst times Wherein the necessity,…
Preparation for sufferings. Or The best work in the worst times Wherein the necessity, excellency, and means of our readiness for sufferings are evinced and prescribed; our call to suffering cleared, and the great unreadiness of many professors bewailed. By John Flavel minister of Christ in Devon.Preparation for sufferings. Or The best work in the worst times Wherein the necessity, excellency, and means of our readiness for sufferings are evinced and prescribed; our call to suffering cleared, and the great unreadiness of many profesours bewailed. By John Flavel minister of Christ in Devon.
London: printed for Robert Boulter, 1681
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
4. Get an Heart mortified to the excessive and inordinate love of life: This, I confess, is the highest and hardest point of Self-denial, because it wraps up all other Self Interests in it. But yet consider,
First, Though life be very dear, yet Jesus Christ is ten thousand times dearer than thy Life: If thou be a Saint, he is the Life of thy Life, and the length of thy days; and in comparison of him, and his glory, Saints should, and have despised and slighted their Lives, Luke. 14.26. Rev. 12.11.
Secondly, Die you must; and if by shrinking from Christ, you should protract a miserable Life for a few days longer, in the mean time losing that which is better that life, Psal. 63.3. Mat. 10.39. Oh when you lie upon your Death-bed, you will wish, that you had obeyed Gods Call, and so have departed in peace.