Quotes from Jeremiah Burroughs

This is how you honour God, that you can turn this way or that way, as God calls you to it.

Be sure of your call to every business you go about. Though it is the least business, be sure of your call to it; then, whatever you meet with, you may quiet your heart with this: I know I am where God would have me.

But you will say now, has faith a warrant to believe deliverance, that it shall be fully delivered? I dare not say so, but it may act upon it, to believe that God will make it good in his own way. Perhaps you have not done as much, and so because of that, this promise is not fulfilled to you.

The shoe may be smooth and neat without, while the flesh is pinched within. There may be much calmness and stillness outwardly, and yet wonderful confusion, bitterness, disturbance and vexation within.

Suppose for example, that he lacks outward comforts, good cheer and feasting, a good conscience in a continual feast; so he can make up the lack of a feast by the peace that he has in his own conscience. If he lacks melody in the world, he has a bird within him that sings the most melodious songs in the world, and the most delightful. And then does he lack honor? He has his own conscience witnessing for him, that is as a thousand witnesses.

There is a Heaven within the souls of the saints-that is a certain truth; no soul shall ever come to Heaven, but the soul which has Heaven come to it first. When you die, you hope you will go to Heaven; but if you will go to Heaven when you die, Heaven will come to you before you die. Now this is a great mystery, to have the Kingdom of Heaven in the soul; no man can know this but that soul which has it.

Know that this is the excellence of grace in a Christian, to be fitted for any condition; not only to say, if it were this or that, but if it were any.

It is contrary to the worship that is in contentedness.

Here lies the bottom and root of all contentment, when there is an evenness and proportion between our hearts and our circumstances.

Every Christian should say: 'Have I wealth now? I should prepare for poverty. Have I health now? I should prepare for sickness.

contentment is an inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit-the whole soul, judgment, thoughts, will, affections and all are satisfied and quiet.

It is but one side of a Christian to endeavor to do what pleases God; you must as well endeavor to be pleased with what God does, and so you will come to be a complete Christian when you can do both, and that is the first thing in the excellence of this grace of contentment.

that the strong beams of the sun of prosperity upon many men make them to be leprous.

There is a compound of grace in contentment: there is faith, and there is humility, and love, and there is patience, and there is wisdom, and there is hope; almost all graces are compounded. [...] In one action that you do you may exercise one grace especially, but in contentment you exercise a great many graces at once.

And the truth is, I know nothing more effective for quieting a Christian soul and getting contentment than this, setting your heart to work in the duties of the immediate circumstances that you are now in, and taking heed of your thoughts about other conditions as a mere temptation.

do not let your happiness depend upon the fancies of other men

For if all the men in the world looked upon you as more happy than themselves, then you would be contented. Oh, do not let your happiness depend upon the fancies of other men.

Without me you can do nothing.

Psalm 106:24, 25: 'Yea, they despised the pleasant land, they believed not his word; but murmured in their tents, and hearkened not unto the voice of the Lord. Therefore he lifted up his hand against them to overthrow them in the wilderness.

a chief way and help to keep comfort and contentment in our hearts, is to make good interpretations of Gods dealing towards us.

You do not find one godly man who came out of an affliction worse than when he went into it; though for a while he was shaken, yet at last he was better for an affliction. But a great many godly men, you find, have been worse for their prosperity.

But godliness with contentment is great gain' (v.6)—there is the glory and excellence of it; as if to suggest that godliness were not gain except contentment be with it.

There is no condition that a godly man or woman can be in, but there is some promise or other in the Scripture to help him in that condition. And that is the way of his contentment, to go to the promises, and get from the promise, that which may supply. This is but a dry business to a carnal heart; but it is the most real thing in the world to a gracious heart: when he finds lack of contentment he repairs to the promise, and the Covenant, and falls to pleading the promises that God has made.

Christian contentment is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God's wide and fatherly disposition in every condition.