main of your
aims and endeavours is to please yourselves, or to please men. This makes
many men's pains, even in religion displeasing to God, because they do not
indeed mind his pleasure, but their own or other's satisfaction. What they
do, is but to conform to the custom of the time, or commandments of men,
or their own humour, and all this must needs be abominable to God. Truly,
that which is in great account among men, is an abomination to God, as our
Saviour speaks of the very righteousness and professed piety of the
Pharisees, Luke xvi. 15, the more you please yourselves and the world, the
further you are from pleasing God. The very beginning of pleasing God is
when a soul falls in displeasure at itself, and abhorrence of his own
loathsomeness, therefore it is said, The humble and contrite spirit I will
look unto, and dwell with him, and such sacrifices do please God, Isa.
lxvi. 2, Psal. li. 17. For the truth is, God never begins to be pleasant
and lovely to a soul till it begins to fall out of love with itself, and
grow loathsome in its own eyes. Therefore you may conclude this of
yourselves, that with many of you God is not well-pleased, although you be
all baptized unto Christ, and do all eat of that same spiritual meat, and
drink of that same spiritual drink, though you have all church privileges,
yet with many of you God is not well pleased, as 1 Cor. x. 2-5, not only
because those works of the flesh that are directly opposite to his own
known will, such as fornication, murmuring, grudging at God's
dispensation, cursing and swearing, lying, drunkenness, anger, malice,
strife, variance, and such like, abound as much among you as that old
people, but even those of you that may be free from gross opposition to
his holy will, your nature hath the seed of all that enmity, and you act
enmity in a more covered way; you are so well pleased with yourselves,
your chief study is to please men, you have not given yourselves to this
study, to conform yourselves to the pleasure of God, therefore know your
dreadful condition, you cannot please God, without whose favour and
pleasure you cannot but be eternally displeased and tormented in
yourselves. Certainly, though now you please yourselves, yet the day shall
come that you shall be contrary to yourselves and all to you, as it is
spoken as a punishment of the Jews, (1 Thess. ii. 15) and there is some
earnest of in this life. Many wicked persons are set contrary to
themselves,