Richard Sibbes - Let Not Your Hearts Be Troubled

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wcf_linux

Puritan Board Freshman
Yesterday while packing up books I found, well-hidden, a little volume of Richard Sibbes sermons titled Let Not Your Hearts Be Troubled (GLH Publishing, 2016). A timely find. I found the following especially helpful in light of the likelihood that the present epidemic will made it difficult-to-impossible for the churches to gather physically and visibly:

Obj. But Christ could as well have cured [our being overly troubled], being God, as easily as forbidden it.
Ans. It is true, but he cures it by forbidding it. With the words, there went forth a spirit of comfort into their hearts; an influence of grace accompanied his commands, for the word and the Spirit go together. Christ deals with mean by men. The Spirit of comfort is a spirit of truth; and therefore God comforts by truths. He gives us sanctified understandings and affections; and then works on them by sanctified truths.
And sometimes Christ cures it by real comfort; for comforts are either rational, which are fetched from grounds, which faith ministers; or real, from the presence of anything which comforts; as the sight of friends, or the accommodating of us in anything wherein we see the love of God conveyed. How many real comforts doth God bestow, when he fitteth us with conveniences on our way to heaven, so that we may read the love of God in them! God doth not only comfort us by his gracious promise, by his word and sacraments, administering heavenly comforts by them; but also by the conveying of himself and his love, by outward comforts that we enjoy in the world. Howsoever carnal men abuse them (making all things to work for the worst); yet that love, that intends heaven, sweetens all things in the passage to heaven, to his children; because they see the love of God in the least comfort.​
 
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