Satan’s Stratagems to Disarm the Christian of his Breastplate Defeated 2/4

        

   (2.) They are sinful when not rightly timed.  Fruit ate out of its season is nought.  We read of ‘a time to embrace and a time to refrain,’ Ecc. 3:5.  There are some seasons that the power of holiness calls off, and will not allow what is lawful at another time.  As,

(a) On the Lord’s-day.  Then all carnal, creature-pleasures are out of season.  God calls us them to higher delights, and he expects we should lay the other aside, and not put our palates out of taste with those lower pleasures, that we may the better relish his heavenly dainties.  ‘If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable; and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words; then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord,’ Isa. 58:13, 14.  Mark! we can neither taste the sweetness of communion with God, nor pay the honour due to God in sanctifying his day, except we deny ourselves in our carnal delights.  If a king should at some certain times of the year invite some of his poor subjects to sit and feast with him at his own royal table, they should exceedingly dis­honour their prince, and wrong themselves, to bring their ordinary mean fare with them to court.  

Do glor­ified saints in heaven call for any of their carnal de­lights, or miss them, while they are taken up in heav­en praising God, and feeding on the joys that flow from the full-eyed vision of God?  And doth not God make account he gives you to enjoy heaven in a figure, when he admits you the service of his holy day?  (b) In days of solemn fasting and prayer.  We are on such occasions to afflict our souls, and creature-pleasures will fit that work no better than a silver lace would do a mourning suit.  (c) In times of public calamity in the church abroad, especially at home.  And this a gracious heart cannot but count reasonable, that he should deny himself, or at least tie up himself to a very short allowance in his creature-delights, when Christ in his church lies a‑bleeding. Sympathy is a debt we owe to our fellow‑saints —Christ mystical.  And truly the cords of others’ af­flictions will be little felt through our soft downy beds, if we indulge ourselves, I mean, to a full enjoyment of our ease and carnal delights.  What child that is mer­ry and pleasant in his own house, and hath a father or mother lying at the same time in great misery at the point of death, but unknown to him, will not, when the doleful news at last comes to him, change his note, yea, mourn that he did not know it sooner, and had not rather have been weeping for and with his dear relations in the house of mourning, than passing away his time pleasantly at home?  Hitherto I have answered by concession, confessing what pleasures a holy and righteous life denies and forbids, and I hope they appear to be no other than such as may, without any loss to the believer’s joy, be fairly dismissed.

           Answer Second.  Now, in the second place, I come to answer by way of negation; viz. that though a holy righteous life denies the Christian the pleas­ures forementioned, yet it doth not deprive him of any true pleasure the creature affords; yea, so far from this, that none doth or can enjoy the sweetness of the creature, like the gracious soul that walks in the power of holiness, as will appear in these two particulars.

1. The gracious person hath a more curious pal­ate,that fits him to taste a further sweetness in, and so draw more pleasure from, any creature-enjoyment, than an unholy person can do.  The fly finds no honey in the same flower from whence the bee goes laden away.  Nor can an unholy heart taste the sweetness which the saint doth in a creature.  He hath indeed a natural fleshly palate, whereby he relisheth the gross carnal pleasure the flesh affords, and that he makes his whole meal on; but a gracious heart tastes something more.  ‘All’ Israel drank of the rock, ‘and that rock was Christ,’ I Cor. 10:4.  But did all that tas­ted the water’s natural sweetness, taste Christ in it? No, alas! they were but a few holy souls that had a spiritual palate to do this.  Samson's father and mother ate of the honey out of the lion's carcass, as well as Samson, and may be liked the taste of it for honey as well as Samson; yet he took more pleasure sure than they.  He tasted the sweetness of God’s providence in it, that had delivered him from that very lion that now affords him this honey, Judges 14.