DIRECTIONS to believers for the preserving of faith 2/4

 Second Direction.  Wouldst thou preserve thy faith, look to thy conscience.  A good conscience is the bottom faith sails in.  If the conscience be wrecked, how can it be thought that faith should be safe?  If faith be the jewel, a good conscience is the cabinet in which it is kept; and if the cabinet be broken, the jewel must needs be in danger of losing. Now you know what sins waste the conscience—sins either deliberately committed, or impudently contin­ued in.

           O take heed of deliberate sins!  Like a stone thrown into a clear stream, they will so roil thy soul and muddy it, that thou, who even now couldst see thy interest in the promise, wilt be at a loss and not know what to think of thyself.  They are like the fire on the top of the house; it will be no easy matter to quench it.  But, if thou hast been so unhappy as to fall into such a slough, take heed of lying in it by im­penitency.  The sheep may fall into a ditch, but it is the swine that wallows in it; and therefore, how hard wilt thou find it, thinkest thou, to act thy faith on the promise, when thou art, by thy filthy garments and besmeared countenance, so unlike one of God's holy one’s?  It is dangerous to drink poison, but far more to let it lie in the body long.  Thou canst not act thy faith, though a believer, on the promise, so as to ap­ply the pardon it presents to thy soul, till thou hast renewed thy repentance.

           Third Direction.  Exercise thy faith, if thou meanest to preserve it.  We live by faith, and faith lives by exercise.  As we say of some stirring men, they are never well but at work—confine them in their bed or chair and you kill them; so here, hinder faith from working, and you are enemies to the very life and being of it.  Why do we act faith so little in prayer, but because we are no more frequent in it?  Let the child seldom see its father or mother, and when he comes into their presence he will not make much after them. Why are we no more able to live on a promise when at a plunge?  Surely because we live no more with the promise.  The more we converse with the promise, the more confidence we shall put in it.  We do not strangers as we do our neighbours, in whose company we are almost every day.  It were a rare way to secure our faith, yea, to advance it and all our other graces, would we, in our daily course labour to do all our ac­tions, as in obedience to the command, so in faith on the promise.  But alas! how many enterprises are un­dertaken where faith is not called in, nor the promise consulted with, from one end of the business to the other?  And therefore, when we would make use of faith in some particular strait, wherein we think our­selves to be more than ordinary at a loss, our faith itself is at a loss, and to seek, like a servant who, be­cause his master very seldom employs him, makes bold to be gadding abroad, and so when his master doth call him upon some extraordinary occasion, he is out of the way and not to be found.  O Christian! take heed of letting your faith be long out of work.  If you do not use it when you ought, it might fail you when you desire most to act it.