Important Advice for Life¹

Samuel Shaw

Suffer me . . . as a result of all that I have seen and suffered, to commend to you a few excellent and necessary duties. I have much difficulty in being brief here; but I have already transgressed on this point, therefore I will pass by such common themes as remembering your Creator early, of hearkening to the voice of His Word before His rod speaks, of living in continual preparation for death, of repenting and renewing repentance. I only commend two or three things, which seem to me of excellent and necessary importance.

1. Love and enjoy all things in God. Admire divine goodness in every created excellence, and taste a divine sweetness in every created comfort. How the noble soul of man is debased, straitened and confined by low and earthly loves, while many men love the creature in opposition to the Creator – most men do so in competition with Him, and almost all men in a way of separation from Him! O base and degenerate affections! Let God be all things in your eye, so that you shall not see or know or love or taste anything but Him in the world. Deliver yourselves (O immortal souls to whom I write) from all those low and straitening and starving creature-loves, but long and labour to be filled with pure, holy and spiritual delights, such as the angels of God have, such as the Son of God had when He made it His meat and drink to do the will of His Father.

2. Live purely at the pleasure of God, and maintain a universal and hearty compliance with His holy and perfect will. Believe it, you will never enjoy a firm and steady peace till you have committed all your will and ways to Him and have wrapped up all your interests and ends in Him, till your hearts are conformed to the honour of God and your wills moulded into His will. It is a difference of will and ends, and a distinction of interests, that beget all these ragings and stormings in the hearts of men against God. Mine and thine do not only divide the world among men, but divide men against God, earth against heaven. Take this for an undoubted aphorism: the grand interest of a soul is to comply with God and be one with Him. Communion of hearts and wills, and interests and ends, is that glorious fellowship which a creature has with its Creator; it is indeed the interest and honour, the duty and dignity – indeed the heaven and happiness – of the reasonable creature.

3. I beseech you, Christians, do not be content to say that you have chosen God for your chiefest good, but pursue after Him as such, without grudging and without ceasing, longing to be as much one with Him, in a participation

¹Another edited extract, the concluding part of the preface to A Welcome to the Plague. For background, see the footnote at the start of last month’s extract.

of divine perfections, as our created natures are capable of. Maintain a holy and secret striving of soul towards this blessed object continually, as a thing moves towards its centre, as a soul ought to endeavour to accomplish its own perfections. Stand not gazing upon a heaven to come, but labour to draw down all that peace, joy, love, purity, which heaven is, into your own souls by growing up into the life of God daily. Reckon that you are never in a right temper, unless you are in David’s temper, when he waited for God “more than they that watch for the morning”, when his soul broke for the longing that it had unto Him at all times.

I do not say that you should prepare for death. That seems too low, both the word and the thing. Look and live beyond death and the grave; be lifting up your heads to discover the dawns of the day of your redemption; be laying hold upon immortality and eternal life.

And now accept, I pray you, these poor labours, which I make public for the glory of my God; that since, like Hezekiah, I may not go up to the house of the Lord to declare the goodness of the Lord, yet I may leave some monument of it in writing, as he did, when he had been sick and was recovered of his sickness. I will add no more but entreat all serious and devout readers to magnify the holy name of God on my behalf, adding their earnest prayers to God for me that the same fire that burned up the standing corn of my creature comforts may also happily consume the stubble of my creature delights and loves, that my God would give me “a name better than of sons and of daughters”, the blessed fruits of His Spirit instead of the beloved fruits of the womb; that I may for ever live under the most powerful influences of these events in providence; and that the glory of the Lord may never depart out of the temple of my soul as it departed out of the temple made with hands.

Now, to the God of all grace and peace be all praise and glory! To Him I commit you all.