B36604:310
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.
Secure to your selves an interest in the heavenly glory. Rule. 2 When once you clearly see your propriety in the Kingdom above, you will set the lighter and lower by all things on earth. That is a pregnant Text to this purpose, Heb. 10.34. It's our darkness and uncertainties about those, that make us cling so fast to these.
Settle this principle in your heart, Rule. 3 as that which you will never depart from, That it's better for you to fall into any suffering, then into the least sin, Heb. 11.24, 25. This all will acknowledge, but how sew practise it! Oh that you would practically understand ⟨p. 108⟩and receive it! Sufferings is but a respective, external, and temporal evil; but sin is an universal, internal, and everlasting evil.
Believe that God hath cursed and blasted all the ways of sin, Rule. 4 that they shall never be a shelter to any soul that flies for refuge to them, Mark 8.35. Prov. 13.15. The way of Transgressors is an hard and difficult way. There is no security in the way of iniquity. He that runs from suffering to sin, runs from the seeming to the real danger; from the painted, to the living Lion.
Believe that God hath cursed and blasted all the ways of sin, Rule. 4 that they shall never be a shelter to any soul that flies for refuge to them,