How to Know if You Love God (4)

(4) Where the true affection of love to God is, it stirs up the soul to do all things that may please him. Isaac's sons saw that their father loved venison, therefore they provided venison for him (Gen. 25:28). Does God delight in a meek, broken, humble spirit? Then it will be the desire of a Christian to have such a spirit. Search in God's word for what he delights in and let us labour to bring ourselves to such a condition as God may delight in us. Love stirs up the affections of the party to remove all things that are distasteful to the party it loves. It will purge the soul; it will work upon the soul a desire to be clean as much as can be, because God is a pure, holy God, and it will 'have no fellowship with the works of darkness' (Eph. 5:11). As much as human frailty will permit, it will study purity, to keep itself 'unspotted of the world' (James 1:27). It will not willingly cherish any sin that may offend the Spirit. God hates pride and idolatry. A man that loves God will hate idols and all false doctrine. His heart will rise against them because he knows God hates it. He observes what is most offensive to God, and he will avoid it and seek what is pleasing to him. God and Christ are wondrously pleased with faith. Therefore, let us labour for faith, for all graces. Let us labour to be furnished with all things that he loves. Especially those graces that have some excellencies set upon them in the Scripture. Show me in your life what you do to please God. If you live in ways that are condemned, never talk of love. It is a pitiful thing to see in the bosom of the church, under the glorious revelation of divine truth, that men should live openly and impudently in sins against conscience, that glory in their shame. It is a strange thing that they should glory in their profaneness; that they should glory in a kind of atheistic life.

Devotional Readings taken from Puritan Richard Sibbes 'Refreshment for the Soul.'
A Glance of Heaven, Works, vol. 4, pp. 187-89
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