Phil D.
Puritan Board Senior
A Word of Advice to my own heart and thine. Thou art a professor, and partakest of all ordinances, thou dost well, they are glorious privileges. But if thou hast not the blood of Christ at the root of thy profession, it will wither and prove but painted pageantry to go to hell in.
...Consider, the greatest sins may be hid under the greatest duties, and the greatest terrors. See that the wound that sin has made in your soul be perfectly cured by the blood of Christ! not skinned over with duties, humblings and enlargements. Apply what you will besides the blood of Christ, it will poison the sore. You will find that sin was never mortified truly, if you have not seen Christ bleeding for you upon the cross. Nothing can kill it, but beholding Christ's righteousness.
...Men talk bravely of believing, whilst whole and sound; few know it. Christ is the mystery of the scripture; grace the mystery of Christ. Believing is the most wonderful thing in the world. Put any thing of your own to it, and you spoil it. Christ will not so much as look at it for believing. When you believe and come to Christ, you must leave behind you your own righteousness, and bring nothing but your sin: (Oh, that is hard!) leave behind all your holiness, sanctification, duties, humblings, and so on; and bring nothing but your wants and miseries, or else Christ is not fit for you, nor you for Christ.
Christ will be a pure Redeemer and Mediator, and you must be an undone sinner, or Christ and you will never agree. It is the hardest thing in the world to take Christ alone for righteousness: that is to acknowledge Him Christ. Join anything to Him of your own, and you un-Christ Him.
...Search the scriptures daily as mines of gold in which the heart of Christ is laid open. Watch against sins to which you are prone, see them in their vileness, and they shall never break out into act. Keep always an humble, empty, broken frame of heart, sensitive to any spiritual misconduct, observing all inward workings, fit for the highest communications. Keep not guilt in the conscience, but apply the blood of Christ immediately. God charges sin and guilt upon you to make you look to Christ, the brazen serpent.
Judge not Christ's love by providences, but by promises. Bless God for shaking off false foundations, for any way whereby He keeps the soul awakened and looking after Christ; better sickness and temptations, than security and superficiality.
...Do Christ this one favor for all His love to you - love all His poor saints and churches, the most despised, the smallest, the weakest, notwithstanding any difference of judgment, they are engraved on His heart, as the names of the children of Israel on Aaron's breastplate, let them be so on yours.
(Thomas Wilcox [c. 1549–1608; early English Puritan], A Choice Drop of Honey; from the Rock of Christ.)
