3. Learn to live upon God alone; study his goodness, and faithfulness, and all-sufficiency; when you have not a place nor a friend in the world, that you can comfortably betake yourselves to for relief, retire unto God, and trust him, and dwell the more with him.[110] If your poverty have but this effect, it will be better to you than all the riches in the world.
4. Be laborious and diligent in your callings: both precept and necessity call you unto this; and if you cheerfully serve him in the labour of your hands, with a heavenly and obedient mind, it will be as acceptable to him, as if you had spent all that time in more spiritual exercises; for he had rather have obedience than sacrifice; and all things are pure and sanctified to the pure; if you cheerfully serve God in the meanest work, it is the more acceptable to him, by how much the more subjection and submission there is in your obedience.[111]
5. Be humble and submissive unto all. A poor man proud is doubly hateful; and if poverty cure your pride, and help you to be truly humble, it will be no small mercy to you.[112]
6. You are specially obliged to mortify the flesh, and keep your senses and appetites in subjection; because you have greater helps for it than the rich; you have not so many baits of lust, and wantonness, and gluttony, and voluptuousness as they.
7. Your corporal wants must make you more sensibly remember your spiritual wants; and teach you to value spiritual blessings: think with yourselves, if a hungry, cold, and naked body, be so great a calamity, how much greater is a guilty, graceless soul, a dead or diseased heart! If bodily food and necessaries are so desirable, oh how desirable is Christ and his Spirit, and the love of God and life eternal!
8. You must above all men be careful redeemers of your time; especially of the Lord's day; your labours take up so much of your time, that you must be the more careful to catch every opportunity for your souls! Rise earlier to get half an hour for holy duty; and meditate on holy things in your labours, and spend the Lord's day in special diligence, and be glad of such seasons; and let scarcity preserve your appetites.
9. Be willing to die; seeing the world giveth you so cold entertainment, be the more content to let it go, when God shall call you; for what is here to detain your hearts?
10. Above all men, you should be most fearless of sufferings from men, and therefore true to God and conscience; for you have no great matter of honour, or riches, or pleasure to lose: as you fear not a thief, when you have nothing for him to rob you of.
11. Be specially careful to fit your children also for heaven: provide them a portion which is better than a kingdom; for you can provide but little for them in the world.
12. Be exemplary in patience and contentedness with your state: for that grace should be the strongest in us which is most exercised; and poverty calleth you to the frequent exercise of this.