How to Know if You Love God (3)

(3) It is in the nature of love to place contentment in the thing we desire. Now we may know if God is our contentment by the inward quiet and peace of the soul in all conditions. He is able to satisfy all the delights and desires of our soul. Where else could we go for contentment? Why should we go out of religion to content ourselves in vain recreations and pleasures of sin for a season, when we have abundance in God? Where there is contentment in God, there will be trusting in him and relying upon him. A man will not rely upon riches, or friends, or anything; we repose our confidence and trust in him. He will be our rock and castle and strength. Would you know whether you rest in him or not? In the time of danger, where does your soul run? He that is a child of God flies to him for refuge, and there he covers himself, and is safe (Psa. 61:3). He enters into those chambers of divine providence and goodness, and there he rests in all troubles. He has God reconciled in Christ, and in his love he plants himself in life and death. He makes God his habitation and his castle. 'I love the Lord dearly, my rock and my fortress' (Psa. 18:2). A Christian has his contentment and his habitation in God; he is the house he dwells in, his rock, his resting-place, his centre in which he rests. 'Come unto me, and you will find rest for your souls' (Matt. 11:28). In losses and crosses you have contentment in God, you will fetch what you lose out of the love of God. You will say, 'This and that is taken from me, but God is mine; I can fetch more good from him by faith than I can lose in the world.’ As Augustine said to God, 'Take all from me, so you leave me yourself.’ Where will a man have comfort in the many passages of his life, if he finds it not in God?

Devotional Readings taken from Puritan Richard Sibbes 'Refreshment for the Soul.'
A Glance of Heaven, Works, vol. 4, pp. 186-87
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