SUFFERING

'Afflictive providences are of great use to the people of God; they cannot live without them. The earth does not need more chastening frosts and mellowing snows than our hearts do nipping providences. Let the best Christians be but a few years without them, and he will be aware of the need of them; he will find a sad remisiveness and declining upon all his graces.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.209. 

GOD'S SOVEREIGNTY

'...all providences are overruled and ordered for good according to that blessed promise (Rom. 8.28); not only things that are good in themselves, as ordinances, graces, duties and mercies, but things that are evil in themselves, as temptations, afflictions, and even their sins and corruptions, shall turn in the issue to their advantage and benefit. For though sin is so intrinsically and formally evil in its own nature, then in itself it is not capable of sanctification, yet out of this worst of evils God can work good to His people. And though He never makes sin the instrument of good, yet His providence may make it the occasion of good to his people, so that spiritual benefits may, by the wise overruling of Providence, be occasioned by it.'

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.198.  

PATIENCE

'...nothing can be more precise, certain and punctual than is the performance of mercy at the time and season which God has appointed, however long it is, or however many obstacles lie in the way of it.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.190. 

GOD'S GOODNESS

'Compare the behaviour of Providence towards you, with your own behaviour towards the Lord; and it must needs melt your hearts to find so much mercy bestowed where so much sin has been committed. What place did you ever live in, where you cannot remember great provocation committed, and notwithstanding that, manifold mercies received? O with how many notwithstandings and neverthelesses has the Lord done you good in every place! What relationship has not been abused by sin, and yet both raised up and continued by Providence for your comfort! In every place God has left the marks of His goodness, and you the remembrances of your sinfulness. Give yourselves but leave to think of these things, and it will be strange if your hearts do not melt at the remembrance of them.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.166. 

GOD'S GOODNESS

'Other men pursue good, and it flies from them, they can never overtake it; but goodness and mercy follow the people of God, and they cannot avoid or escape it. It gives them the chase day by day, and finds them out even when they sometimes put themselves by sin out of the way of it. In all the providences that befall them goodness and mercy pursue them.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.150. 

REASON

'Beware therefore you do not lean too much on your own reasonings and understandings. Nothing is more plausible, nothing more dangerous.'  

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.142. 

SUFFERING

'Eye the wisdom of God in all your afflictions. Behold it in the choice of the kind of your affliction, this, and not another; the time, now and not at another season; the degree, in this measure only, and not in the greater; the supports offered you under it, not left together helpless; the issue to which it is overruled, it is to your good, not ruin. Look upon these and then ask your heart, that question God asked Jonah, "Doest thou well to be angry?" (4.9). Surely, when you consider all - what need you had of these rods, that your corruptions will require all this, it may be much more, to mortify them; that without the perishing of these things you might have perished for ever - you will see great reason to be quiet and well-satisfied under the hand of God.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.131. 

GOD'S GOODNESS

'Ah, sirs, let me tell you, there is not such a pleasant history for you to read in all the world as the history of our lives, if you would but sit down and record from the beginning hitherto what God has been to you, and done for you; what signal manifestations and outbreakings of His mercy, faithfulness and love there have been in all the conditions you have passed through. If your hearts do not melt before you have gone half through that history, they are hard hearts indeed.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.118. 

BUSYNESS

'Beware you do not lose your God in the crowd and hurry of earthly business.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.79. 

WORK

'If any that fear God shall complain that, although they have a calling, yet it is hard and laborious one, which takes up too much of their time which they would gladly employ in other and better work, I answer that it is likely that the wisdom of Providence foresaw this to be the most suitable and proper employment for you; and if you had more ease and rest, you might have more temptations than now you have. The strength and time which is now taken up in your labours, in which you serve God, might otherwise have been spent upon such lusts in which you might have served the devil.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.78. 

PARENTING

'It is a greater mercy to descend from praying parents than from the loins of nobles.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.54. 

SUFFERING

'Are you ready to conclude that you have no part in the favour of God, because you are visited with some extraordinary affliction? If so, do you then rightly conclude that great trials are tokens of God's hatred? Does the Scripture teach this? And dare you infer the same with respect to all who have been as much or more afflicted than yourself? If the argument is good in your case, it is good in application to theirs, and more conclusive with respect to them, in proportion as their trials were greater than yours. Woe then to David, Job, Paul, and all who have been afflicted as they were! But had you passed along in quietness and prosperity; had God witheld those chastisements with which he ordinarily visits his people, would you not have far more reasosn for doubts and distress than you now have?'

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart, p.89.

HYPOCRISY

'Every appearance of hypocrisy does not prove the person who manifests it to be a hypocrite. You should carefully distinguish between the appearance and the predominance of hypocrisy.'

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart, p.87.

HOPE

'It is better to be as low as hell with a promise, than to be in paradise without one.'

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart, p.61.

GUILT

'A guilty sinner carries a witness against himself in his own bosom. It was guilty Herod cried out, "John the Baptist is risen from the dead." Such a conscience is the devil's anvil, on which he fabricates all those swords and spears with which the guilty sinner pierces himself. Guilt is to danger, what fire is to gun-powder: a man need not fear to walk among many barrels of powder, if he have no fire about him.'

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart, p.56.

SUFFERING

'It is a pity that our tears on account of our troubles should so blind our eyes that we should not see our mercies.'

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart, p.47.

SUFFERING

'Affliction is a pill, which, being wrapt up in patience and quiet submission, may be easily swallowed; but discontent chews the pill, and so embitters the soul.'

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart, p.41. 

SUFFERING

'It may support thy heart, to consider that in these troubles God is performing that work in which thy soul would rejoice, if thou didst see the design of it. We are clouded with much ignorance, and are not able to discern how particular providences tend to the fulfilment of God's designs; and therefore, like Israel in the wilderness, are often murmuring, because Providence leads us about in a howling desert, where we are exposed to diificulties; though then he led, and is now leading us, by the right way to a city of habitations. If you could but see how God in his secret counsel has exactly laid the whole plan of your salvation, even to the smallest means and circumstances; could you but discern the admirable harmony of divine dispensations, their mutual relations, together with the general respect they all have to the last end; had you the liberty to make your own choice, you would, of all the conditions in the world, choose that in which you now are. Providence is like a curious piece of tapestry made of a thousand shreds, which, single, appear useless, but put together, they represent, a beautiful history to the eye.'

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart, p.40.

SUFFERING

'O my heart, my haughty heart! Dost thou well to be discontent, when God has given thee the whole tree, with all the clusters of comfort growing on it, because he suffers the wind to blow down a few leaves.'

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart, p.36.

TEMPTATION

'Divines observe this to be the method in which temptations are ripened and brought to their full strength. There is the irritation of the object, or that power it has to provoke our corrupt nature; which is either done by the real presence of the object, or by speculation when the object (though absent) is held out to the imagination before the soul. Then follows the motion of the appetite, which is provoked by the fancy representing it as a sensual good. Then there is a consultation in the mind about the best means of accomplishing it. Next follows the election, or choice of the will. And lastly, the desire, or full engagement of the will to it.

All this may be done in a few minutes, for the debates of the soul are quick and soon ended: when it come thus far, the heart is won, Satan hath entered victoriously and disoplayed his colours upon the walls of that royal fort; but, had the heart been well-guarded at first, it had never come to this - the temptation had been stopped in the first or second act. And indeed there it is stopped easily; for it is in the motion of a soul tempted to sin, as in the motion of a stone falling from the brow of a hill - it is easily stopped at first, but when once it is set in motion "it acquires strength by descending."'

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart, p.28.