Direct. VIII. Be always suspicious of carnal self-love, and watch against it.—For that is the burrow or fortress of sin; and the common patron of it; ready to draw you to it, and ready to justify it. We are very prone to be partial in our own cause; as the case of Judah with Tamar, and David when Nathan reproved him in a parable, show. Our own passions, our own pride, our own censures, or backbitings, or injurious dealings, our own neglects of duty, seem small, excusable, if not justifiable things to us; whereas we could easily see the faultiness of all these in another, especially in an enemy: when yet we should be best acquainted with ourselves, and we should most love ourselves, and therefore hate our own sins most.
Direct. IX. Bestow your first and chiefest labour to kill sin at the root; to cleanse the heart, which is the fountain; for out of the heart cometh the evils of the life.—Know which are the master-roots; and bend your greatest care and industry to mortify those: and they are especially these that follow; 1. Ignorance. 2. Unbelief. 3. Inconsiderateness. 4. Selfishness and pride. 5. Fleshliness, in pleasing a brutish appetite, lust, or fantasy. 6. Senseless hardheartedness and sleepiness in sin.
Direct. X. Account the world and all its pleasures, wealth, and honours, no better than indeed they are, and then Satan will find no bait to catch you.—Esteem all as dung with Paul, Phil. iii. 8; and no man will sin, and sell his soul, for that which he accounteth but as dung.
Direct. XI. Keep up above in a heavenly conversation, and then your souls will be always in the light, and as in the sight of God, and taken up with those businesses and delights which put them out of relish with the baits of sin.
Direct. XII. Let christian watchfulness be your daily work; and cherish a preserving, though not a distracting and discouraging fear.
Direct. XIII. Take heed of the first approaches and beginnings of sin. Oh how great a matter doth a little of this fire kindle! And if you fall, rise quickly by sound repentance, whatever it may cost you.
Direct. XIV. Make God's word your only rule; and labour diligently to understand it.
Direct. XV. And in doubtful cases, do not easily depart from the unanimous judgment of the generality of the most wise and godly of all ages.
Direct. XVI. In doubtful cases be not passionate or rash, but proceed deliberately, and prove things well, before you fasten on them.
Direct. XVII. Be acquainted with your bodily temperature, and what sin it most inclineth you to, and what sin also your calling or converse doth lay you most open to, that there your watch may be the stricter. (Of all which I shall speak more fully under the next Grand Direction.)