The Entireness of Our Armour - Application and Use

[Use and Application.]

             Use.  O how few are there endeavour thus to promove in their spiritual state, and labour to perfect what is yet lacking in their knowledge, patience, and the rest.

1. Tell some of adding faith to faith, one degree of grace to another, and you shall find they have more mind to join house to house, and lay field to field. Their souls are athirst, ever gaping for more.  But of what? not of Christ or of heaven.  It is earth.  Earth they never think they have enough of, till death comes and stops their mouth with a shovel-full, dig­ged out of their own grave.  What a tormenting life must they needs have, who are always crying for more weight, and yet cannot press their covetous desires to death?  O sirs, the only way—if men would believe it—to quench this thirst to the creature, were to en­kindle another after Christ and heaven.  Get but a large heart vehemently thirsting after these, and the other will die alone, as the feverish thirst doth when nature comes to her temper.
2. Others labour not thus to perfect grace, be­cause they have a conceit they are perfect already, and upon this fancy throw away praying, hearing, and all other ordinances, as strings for those babes in grace to be carried by, who are not arrived to their high attainments.  O what fools does pride make men! Truly heaven were no such desirable place, if we should be no more perfect than thus—a sort of people that are too high for this world, and too low for another.  The way by which God cures this frenzy of pride, we have in these days seen to be something like that of Nebuchadnezzar; to give them the heart of a beast, I mean, for a time, to suffer them to fall into beastly practices, by which he shows them how far they are from that perfection they dreamed of so vainly.
3. Others who have true grace, and desire the advancement of it, yet are discouraged in their en­deavour for more, from too deep a sense of their present penury.  Bid some such labour to get more power over corruption, more faith on, and love to God, that they may be able to do the will of God cheerfully, and suffer it in the greatest afflictions pa­tiently, yea, thankfully, and they will never believe, that they whose faith is so weak, love so chill, and stock so little in hand, should ever attain to anything like such a pitch.  You may as well persuade a beggar with one poor penny in his purse, that if he shall go and trade with that, he shall come to be lord-Mayor of London before he die.  But why, poor hearts, should you thus despise the day of small things?  Do you not see a little grain of mustard-seed spread into a tree, and weak grace compared to it, for its growth at last as well as littleness at first?  Darest thou say thou hast no grace at all?  If thou hast but any, though the least that ever any had to begin with, I dare tell thee, that he hath done more for thee in that, than he should in making that which is now so weak, as perfect as the saint's grace is now in heaven. (1.) He hath done more, considering it as an act of power.  There is a greater gulf between no grace and grace, than between weak grace and strong, between a chaos and nothing, than between a chaos and this beautiful frame of heaven and earth.  The first day's work of both creations is the greatest.  (2.) Consider it as an act of grace.  It is greater mercy to give the first grace of conversion, than to crown that with glory.  It is more grace and condescension in a prince to marry a poor damsel, than having married her, to clothe her like a princess; he was free to do the first or not, but his relation to her pleads strongly for the other.  God might have chosen whether he would have given thee grace or no, but having done this, thy relation to him, and his covenant also, do oblige him to add more and more, till he hath fitted thee as a bride for himself in glory.