When Christians Find No Peace Within (3)

(5) Observe further, that distrust is the cause of all disquiet. The soul allows itself by something here below to be drawn away from God but can find no rest until it returns to him. It is God's mercy to us, that when we have let go of our hold of God, we should find nothing but trouble and unquietness in anything else, so that we might remember from where we have fallen and return home. It is a good trouble that brings us back to the most comfortable rest. It is but an unquiet quiet, and a restless rest which is out of God. The soul that has had a saving work upon it, will always be impatient until it recovers its former sweetness in God. After God's Spirit has once touched the soul, it will never be quiet until it stands pointed God-ward.
(6) It is no easy thing to bring God and the heart together. As one striving to get to the harbour in a storm is driven back by the waves, but recovering himself, gets forward still, and after much beating back, at length obtains the wished for and restful haven, so much and more is there to bringing the soul to God, the harbour of true comfort. It would be an easy thing to be a Christian if religion stood only in a few outward works and duties, but to take the soul to task, and to deal roundly with our own hearts, and to let conscience have its full work, and to bring the soul into spiritual subjection to God, this is not so easy a matter, because the soul out of self-love is loath to enter into itself, lest it should have other thoughts of itself than it would have. The soul so far as it is gracious commands, so far as it is rebellious resists. The soul naturally sinks downward, and therefore has need often to be wound up.

Devotional Readings taken from Puritan Richard Sibbes 'Refreshment for the Soul.'
The Soul's Conflict with Itself, Works, vol. 1, pp. 199-201
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