for which you
pray, your sorrow is away, and ye can no more mourn for sin; and take
something away, and your joy is gone, ye cannot delight in God. Ye vex and
disquiet yourselves in vain, and are weighed down with it. Are ye not then
under the feet of this present world, when it tramples upon you? Are ye
not servants unto it, when your condition altereth and changeth according
to the nod of outward things? Ye may know what puts you up and down that
commands you, and this is not sobriety. Ye are drunk with the creature.
The child of God should be like mount Zion, that can never be moved.
Therefore,

III. We would exhort all the saints to study more sobriety in this world.
We need no more exhortation than what Paul gives, 1 Cor. vii. 29. It is a
strange language, saints, "Set not your affections upon the things of this
earth, but on the things which are above," Col. iii. 1, 2. "Love not the
world, nor the things of the world," &c., 1 John ii. 15-17. Ye ought to
study such a walk abstracted from this world, that ye might be as
strangers at home, as sojourners in your own country. The child of God
should sit down in his own family among his children, as if he were
abroad, and he ought to be abroad, as if he were at home. Wherefore your
life is called a pilgrimage, and ye strangers. Engage not much your heart
to any thing of this world. Take but a standing drink and be gone, ye may
not lay down your staff and burden, that his may bear you right. (1)
Consider that insobriety is idolatry. Insobriety puts the creature in
God's place, and sobriety puts all things in their own place. When a man's
heart or affections are set on any thing, that is his idol and his master,
and Christ says, "Ye cannot serve God and mammon," (Matt. vi. 24) these
two masters. Sure the worldling thinks not that he serves his riches, yet
Christ puts that construction upon his loving them well, Christ calls any
thing that is a man's master his god. Now, any thing that the heart goes
after is a man's master. That which commands a man's affections commands
the whole man, for the affections are the man's master, and they command
the man. If ye knew this, ye would be afraid of spending your hearts upon
vanity; ye put that vanity in the place of Jesus Christ, and so your heart
is a temple of idols, and the great gospel promise (Ezek. xxxvi. 25, 26)
hath not gotten place in you. The due place of the creature is to be
subservient to the Lord its Maker, to be onl