No body can say it like the puritans said it! And among those puritan brothers I can’t imagine a finer one than- pastor and brother- Richard Baxter. Read this nearly 250 word sentence to receive a strengthening word of grace from the dear Puritan pastor Richard Baxter!

(Taken from “Motives to a Heavenly Life“ in The Saint’s Everlasting Rest, page 107).

Whoever thou art, therefore, that readest these lines, I require thee, as thou tenderest thine allegiance to the God of heaven, as ever thou hopest for a part in this glory, that thou presently take thy heart to task; chide it for its wilful strangeness to God; turn thy thoughts from the pursuit of vanity; bend thy soul to study eternity; busy it about the life to come; habituate thyself to such contemplations, and let not those thoughts be seldom and cursory; but settle upon them; dwell here; bathe thy soul in heaven’s delights; drench thine affections in these rivers of pleasure, or rather, in the sea of consolation; and if thy backward soul begin to flag and thy loose thoughts to fly abroad, call them back, hold them to their work, put them on, bear not with their laziness, do not connive at one neglect; and when thou hast once in obedience to God tried this work, and followed on till thou hast got acquainted with it, and kept a close guard on thy thoughts till they are accustomed to obey, and thou hast got some mastery over them, thou wilt then find thyself in the suburbs of heaven, and, as it were in a new world; thou wilt then find, indeed, that there is sweetness in the work and way of God, and that the life of Christianity is a life of joy.