l in it. You sit down to pray out of
custom, morning and evening; and if there were no more to prove it, this
may suffice. When pray you but at such times? You have an ordinary, and go
not by it. No advantage is taken of providence, no necessity constraineth
when occasion offereth; and so it is like the world's appointed hours. How
great deadness and indisposition creepeth in! so that this is the ordinary
complaint; yea, all prayers are filled with it,--scarcely any room for
other petitions, because of the want of frame for prayer itself. The word
is heard as a discourse, and on whom hath it operation to stir up
affections, either of joy or of trembling? Christians, you come not to
hear God speak, and so you meet with empty ordinances--God is not in them.
How often do crooked and sinister ends creep in, and bias the spirit! Men
ask, to spend on their lusts, and to satisfy their own ambition. Some
would have more grace to be more eminent, or to have a more pleasant life;
and this is but the seeking to spend on your lusts. If affection run in
the channel of a duty, it is often muddy, and runneth through our
corruptions: liberty in duties is principled with carnal affection and
self-love. Will not often the wind of applause in company fill the sails,
and make your course swifter and freer nor when you are alone? And often
much love to a particular(308) maketh more in seeking it. And that which
is a moth to eat up and consume all our duties is conceit and
self-confidence in going about them, and attributing to ourselves after
them. It is but very rare that any man both acted from Jesus Christ as the
principle, and also putteth over his work on Christ singly as the end.
Alas! too often do men draw out of Christ's fulness, and raise up their
own glory upon it, and adorn themselves with the spoils of his honour; for
we use to pray from a habit of it, and go to it as men acquainted with it,
and when we get any satisfaction to our own minds, O how doth the soul
return on itself, and goeth not forward as it goeth! It is so well pleased
with itself, when it getteth liberty to approach, that it doth not put all
over on Jesus, and take shame to itself. As long as there is a body of
death within, holiness cannot be pure and unmixed; our duties run through
a dirty channel, and cannot choose but contract filth. While sin lodgeth
under one roof so near grace, grace must be in its exercise marred; and
therefore the holy apostle must cry, Ro