Before Sickness (2)

(4) Make up your accounts daily, that when sickness and weakness come, we have not our greatest and most laborious work to do. It is an atheistic folly to put off all until sickness, whereas they know not but God may call them by sudden death, or if he warns them by sickness, God may suffer their understanding and senses to be so troubled as they shall neither be able to conceive or judge. What madness it is to put off our hardest works to our weakest state.
(5) While you are in health, lay a foundation and a ground of comfort for sickness; and still be doing something that may testify of the reconciliation between God and you. A good death is ever laid in a good life. We spend all our wits and powers to get a little worldly capital; and will we think to go to heaven, and to be carried there through pleasures and ease? It is the good that we do in our health that comforts us in our sickness, by considering how it has pleased God not only to put into our minds but into our wills to this or that good. We think of it as an evidence of God's Spirit in us. Contrarily, When we think how brave our appearance has been, how gallant our company, what pleasing plays and spectacles we have seen, how can this comfort us? Will it not discomfort us to consider we have spent our means and time unprofitably; we have delighted in worldly delights? How shall I account with that just Judge for my time and means ill spent? Does not this argue want of grace, want of God's Spirit? Be wise therefore with Joseph against times of famine, of sickness, of death; prepare such cordials as may strengthen you.

Devotional Readings taken from Puritan Richard Sibbes 'Refreshment for the Soul.'
Of the Providence of God, Works, vol. 5, pp. 42-43
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