Christ's Dying Words of Comfort

'Let not your hearts be troubled.' Hear the dying words of our Saviour to his disciples.
Comforts must be founded on strong reasons. He stays our spirits by reasons stronger than the trouble. For what is comfort but that which establishes and upholds the soul against the evil that is feared or felt, from a greater strength which overmasters the evil? Christ's comforts are of a higher nature than any trouble. He had told them, that he should leave them; the best of them all, even Peter, should deny him, and that all the rest should leave him. From these they might gather that the approaching trouble should be great. Our Saviour saw into their hearts, and in their looks he saw a spirit of discouragement seizing on them. Christ discerning this dejection of their spirits, he raises them by this, 'Let not your hearts be troubled.' The heavenly Physician of our souls applies the remedy when it is the fittest season.
If they had not been at all affected with the absence of Christ, it would have been a sin, and no less a stupidity; yet it was their sin to be over much troubled. How do we know that our hearts are more troubled than they should be? In a word, a trouble is sinful when it hinders us in duties to God or to others; or from duty, that is, when the soul is disturbed by it, and, like an instrument out of tune, made fit for nothing. When we find this in our trouble, we may know it is not as it should be. Naturally, affections should be helps to duty, they are the winds that carry the soul on. So that a man without affections is like the Dead Sea, that moves not at all. But they must be raised up and laid down at the command of a spiritual understanding. When they be raised up of themselves, by shallow and false conceits and opinions, they be irregular. When they be raised up by a right judgment of things, and laid down again when they ought to be, then they are right and orderly.

Devotional Readings taken from Puritan Richard Sibbes 'Refreshment for the Soul.'
Sibbes's Last Two Sermons: First Sermon, Works, vol. 7, pp. 339-41
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