God - The Chief Good

We should seek for no blessing of God so much as for himself. What is there in the world of equal goodness to draw us away from our God? If to preserve the dearest thing we have in the world, we break with God, God will take away the comfort we look to have by it, and it will prove but a dead contentment, if not torment to us. Whereas, if we care to preserve communion with God, we will be sure to find in him whatsoever we deny for him, honour, riches, pleasures, friends, all; so much the sweeter, by how much we have the more immediately from the spring-head. We will never find God to be our God more than when, for making of him to be so, we suffer anything for his sake. We enjoy never more of him than then.
At the first we may seek him because he is rich to supply our wants, or as a physician to cure our souls and bodies; but here we must not rest until we come to rejoice in him as our friend, and from there rise to an admiration of him for his own excellencies. We should delight in the meditation of him, not only as good to us, but as good in himself; because goodness of bounty springs from goodness to dispostion. He does good because he is good.
A natural man delights more in God's gifts than in his grace. But alas! what are all other goods, without the chief good? They are but as flowers, which are long in planting and growing, but short in enjoying the sweetness of them. David joys in God himself; he cares for nothing in the world but what he may have with his favour; and whatever else he desires he desires only that he may have the better ground from where to praise his God (Psa. 42:11).

Devotional Readings taken from Puritan Richard Sibbes 'Refreshment for the Soul.'
The Soul's Conflict with Itself, Works, vol. I, pp. 278
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