Human nature in its fourfold state ... In several practical discourses

USE I. By what is said, you may try whether you are in the state of grace or not. If ye be brought out of the state of wrath or ruin, into the state of grace or salvation; ye are new creatures, ye are born again. But ye will say, "How shall we know whether "we be born again or not?" Ans. Do you ask me, if the sun were risen, and how you should know, whether it were risen, or not? I would bid you look up to the heavens, and see it with your eyes. And would you know if the light be risen in your heart? Look in, and see. Grace is light, and discovers itself. Look into thy mind, see if it has been illuminate in the knowledge of God. Hast thou been inwardly taught what God is? Were thine eyes ever turned inward to see thyself, the sinfulness of thy depraved state; the corruption of thy nature; the sins of thy heart and life? Wast thou ever let into a view of the exceeding sinfulness of sin? Have thine eyes seen King Jesus in his beauty; the manifold wisdom of God in him, his transcendent excellency, and absolute fullness and sufficiency, with the vanity and emptiness of all things else? Next, What change is there on thy will? Are the setters taken off, wherewith it was sometimes bound up from moving heavenwards? And has thy will got a new set? Dost thou find an aversion to sin, and a proneness to good wrought in thy heart? Is thy soul turned towards God as thy chief end; is thy will new-moulded, into some measure of conformity to the preceptive and providential will of God: Art thou heartily reconciled to the covenant of peace, and fixedly disposed to the receiving of Christ▪ as he is offered in the gospel? And as to a change on your affections, are they rectified, and placed on right objects? Are your desires going on after God? Are they "to his name, and remembrance of him?"