A post not from the reading

I’ve been reading a devotional book of some of Richard Sibbes’ writing. The past few days have been wonderful, and here is a little taste of what he wrote that was in my reading this morning:

“We should seek for no blessing of God so much as for himself.

What is there in the world of equal goodness to draw us away from our God? If to preserve the dearest thing we have in the world, we break with God, God will take away the comfort we look to have by it, and it will prove but a dead contentment, if not a torment to us. Whereas, if we care to preserve communion with God, we will be sure to find in him whatsoever we deny for him, honor, riches, pleasures, friends, all; so much the sweeter, by how much we have the more immediately from the spring-head. We will never find God to be our God more than when, for making of him to be so, we suffer anything for his sake. We enjoy never more of him than then.” (This abridged from The Soul’s Conflict with Itself, Works, vol. 1 p. 278)