Cast Down? Diagnosing Spiritual Discouragement (3)

(4) We need go no farther than ourselves to find causes of discouragement; there is a seminary of them within us. Consider these discouragements in ourselves.
(4a) When there is a lack of true knowledge, this ignorance, being darkness, is full of false fears. Our forefathers in times of ignorance were frightened by everything. Some spiritual leaders keep people in darkness, that they might make them fearful and might heal them with false cures.
(4b) When the soul is not ignorant, yet if it be forgetful and mindless, as Hebrews 12:5 says, ‘you have forgotten the consolation that speaks to you.' We have no more present actual comfort than we have remembrance. Help a godly man's memory, and you help his comfort. Like charcoal, which, having once been kindled, is easier to take fire. He that has formerly known things, takes ready acquaintance of them again, as old friends.
(4c) The lack of setting due price upon comforts as the Israelites did when they set no value on the pleasant land. It is a great fault when, as they said to Job, 'the consolation of the Almighty seems light and small to us' (Job 15:11).
(4d) Add to this a childish kind of peevishness when they don't have what they want, like children, they throw away all. Abraham himself, wanting children (Gen. 15:2), undervalued all other blessings. Jonah, because he was angry about his gourd plant, was weary of his life. The same may be said of Elijah, flying from Jezebel. This peevishness is increased by a flattering of their grief, so far as to justify it. Like Jonah, ‘I do well to be angry even to death' (Jonah 4:9). Some, with Rachel, are so overtaken, that they ‘will not be comforted' (Jer. 31:15), as if they were in love with their grievances. There are no men more subject to discontentment than those who would have all things after their own way.

Devotional Readings taken from Puritan Richard Sibbes 'Refreshment for the Soul.'
The Soul's Conflict with Itself, Works, vol. 1, pp. 135-37
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