A Christian Directory, Part 1: Christian Ethics

by Richard Baxter

Direct. VII. Corrupt not your minds and appetites with contrary delights.—Addict not yourselves to fleshly pleasures: taste nothing that is forbidden. Sorrow itself is not such an enemy to spiritual delights, as sensual, sinful pleasures are. O leave your beastly and your childish pleasures, and come and feast your souls on God, Isa. lv. 1-3. Away with the delights of lust, and pride, and covetousness, and vain sports, and gluttony, and drunkenness, if ever you would have the solid and durable delights! Think not of joining both together. Bethink yourselves: can it be any thing but the disease and wickedness of thy heart, that can make a play, or a feast, or drunken, wanton company, more pleasant to thee than God? What a heart is that which thinketh it a toil to meditate on God and heaven; and thinks it a pleasure to think of the baits of pride and covetousness! What a heart is that which thinks that sensuality, wantonness, and vanity are the pleasure of their families, which must not be turned out; and that godliness, and heavenly discourse and exercises, would be the sadness and trouble of their families, which must not be brought in, lest it mar their mirth; that thinks it an intolerable toil and slavery to love God, and holiness, and heaven, and to be employed for them; and thinks it a delightful thing to love a whore, or excess of meat, or drink, or sports! Can you say any thing of a man that is more disgraceful, unless you say he is a devil? It were not so vile for a child to delight more in a dog than in his parents, or a husband to delight more in the ugliest harlot than in his wife, as it is for a man to delight more in fleshly vanities than in God. Will you be licking up this dung, when you should be solacing your souls in angelical pleasures, and foretasting the delights of heaven? Oh how justly will God thrust away such wretches from his everlasting presence, who so abhor his ways and him! Can they blame him for denying them the things which they hate, or set so light by, as to prefer a lust before them? If they were not haters of God and holiness, they would never be so averse even to the delights which they should have with him.

Direct. VIII. Take heed of a melancholy habit of body; for melancholy people can scarce delight in any thing at all, and therefore not in God. Delight is as hard to them, as it is to a pained member to find pleasure, or a sick stomach to delight in the food which it loathes. They can think of God with trouble, and fear, and horror, and despair; but not with delight.

Direct. IX. Take heed of an impatient, peevish, self-tormenting mind, that can bear no cross; and of overvaluing earthly things, which causeth impatience in the want of them. Make not too great a matter of fleshly pain or pleasure.—Otherwise your minds will be called to a continual attendance on the flesh, and taken up with continual desires, or cares, or fears, or griefs, or pleasures; and will not be permitted to solace themselves with God. The soul that would have pure and high delights, must abstract itself from the concernments of the flesh; and look on your body, as if it were the body of another, whose pain or pleasure you can choose whether you will feel. When Paul was rapt up into the third heaven, and saw the things unutterable, he was so far freed from the prison of sense, that he knew not whether he was in the body or out of it. As the separated souls, that see the face of God and the Redeemer, do leave the body to be buried, and to rot in darkness, and feel not all this to the interrupting of their joys; so faith can imitate such a death to the world, and such a neglect of the flesh, and some kind of elevating separation of the mind, to the things above. If in this near conjunction you cannot leave the body to rejoice or suffer alone, yet, as itself is but a servant to the soul, so let not its pain or pleasure be predominant, and control the high operations of the soul. A manly, valiant, believing soul, though it cannot abate the pain at all, nor reconcile the flesh to its calamity, yet it can do more, notwithstanding the pain, to its own delight, than strangers will believe.

Some women, and passionate, weak-spirited men, especially in sickness, are so peevish, and of such impatient minds, that their daily work is to disquiet and torment themselves. One can scarce tell how to speak to them, or look at them, but it offendeth them. And the world is so full of occasions of provocation, that such persons are like to have little quietness. It is unlike that these should delight in God, who keep their minds in a continual, ulcerated, galled state, incapable of any delights at all, and cease not their self-tormenting.

Direct. X. It is only a life of faith, that will be a life of holy, heavenly delight: exercise yourselves, therefore, in believing contemplations of the things unseen.—It must not be now and then a glance of the eye of the soul towards God, or a seldom salutation, which you would give a stranger; but a walking with him, and frequent addresses of the soul unto him, which must help you to the delights which believers find in their communion with him.

Direct. XI. Especially let faith go frequently to heaven for renewed matter of delight, and frequently think what God will be to you there for ever, and with what full, everlasting delight he will satiate your souls.—As heaven is the place of our full delight, so the foresight and foretaste of it, is the highest delight which on earth is to be attained. And a soul that is strange to the foresight of heaven, will be as strange to the true delights of faith.

Direct. XII. It is a great advantage to holy delight, to be much in the more delightful parts of worship; as in thanksgiving and praise, and a due celebration of the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ.—Of which I have spoken in the foregoing directions.

Direct. XIII. A skilful, experienced pastor, who is able to open the treasury of the gospel, and publicly and privately to direct his flock in the work of self-examination, and the heavenly exercises of faith, is a great help to christians' spiritual delight.—The experiences of believers teach them this: how oft do they go away refreshed and revived, who came to the assembly, or to their pastors, in great distress, and almost in despair! See Job xxxiii. 23; 2 Cor. i. 3, 4. It is the office and delight of the ministers of Christ, to be "helpers of his people's faith and joy," 2 Cor. i. 24; Phil. i. 4, 25; 1 Thess. ii. 20.

Direct. XIV. Make use of all that prosperity, and lawful pleasure, which God giveth you in outward things, for the increase and advantage of your delight in God.—Though corrupted nature is apter to abuse prosperity and earthly delights, than any other state, to the diverting of the heart from God; and almost all the devil's poison is given in sugared or gilded allectives; yet the primitive, natural use of prosperity, of health, and plenty, and honour, and peace, is to lead up the mind to God, and give us a taste of his spiritual delights! That the neighbourhood of the body might be the soul's advantage; and that God, who in this life will be seen by us but in a glass, and will give out his comforts by his appointed means, might make advantage of sensitive delights, for his own reception, and the communications of his love and pleasure unto man: that, as soon as the eye, or ear, or taste, perceiveth the delightfulness of their several objects, the holy soul might presently take the hint and motion, and be carried up to delightful thoughts of him that giveth us all these delights. And, doubtless, so far as we can make use of a delight in friends, or food, or health, or habitations, or any accommodations of our bodies, to further our delight in God, or to remove those melancholy fears or sorrows, which would hinder this spiritual delight, it is not only lawful, but our duty to use them, with that moderation as tendeth to this end.

Direct. XV. Make use of affliction, as a great advantage for your purest and unmixed delight in God.—The servants of Christ have usually never so much of the joy in the Holy Ghost, as in their greatest sufferings; especially if they be for his sake. The soul never retireth so readily and delightfully to God, as when it hath no one else that will receive it, or that it can take any comfort from. God comforteth us most, when he hath made us see that none else can or will relieve us. When all friends have forsaken us save only one, that one is sweeter to us then than ever. When all our house is fired down except one room, that room is pleasanter to us than it was before. He that hath lost one eye, will love the other better than before. In prosperity our delights in God are too often corrupted by a mixture of sensual delight; but all that remaineth when the creature is gone, is purely divine.