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##### Advice: Follow Your Trade Better than You Have Done Previously

{Since the Heavenly Trade Is the Best Trade…

Exhortation to Those Who Began the Heavenly Trade But Have Backslidden

Advice: Follow Your Trade Better than You Have Done Previously}

Follow your trade better than you have done previously. Remember how your former carelessness, formality, sloth, and hypocrisy have undone you; therefore, mend your ways. The slothful soul is as the door on its hinges (Proverbs 26:14).1346 The sluggard never makes any progress in Christianity or comes to any excellence in grace. “No Christian,” said Mr. Sedgwick, “is so able in the habits of grace as he who is conscientiously frequent in the practice or exercise of grace” (Christ’s Counsel to His Languishing Church of Sardis). If you want to recover your state and come to any eminence in godliness, then make Christianity your business. That c asualness of spirit in the way of God that damaged you at first will never recover you. “The recovery of a faint soul,” said Sedgwick, “will never be effected by faint working. You fell into your decayed state by carelessness. Do you think that that which was not able to keep your graces from sinking can now quicken and raise them up from the bottom of the sea?” (Christ’s Counsel to His Languishing Church of Sardis, p. 148).1347 If negligence threw you back, diligence must help to recover you. Take more pains with your hearts and follow your work of godliness every day and in every place. Be early and late in your shops of duty and in the warehouse of your hearts. Beware of spiritual sloth and losses to your souls. Take heed of unfaithfulness to God, conscience, or others. Keep in touch with your Creditor. Be conscientious concerning your vows to God and people. Do not be a spendthrift; do not live above your condition. Do not waste precious time, abilities, and grace in vain, but walk strictly in the whole course of your life. Keep yourselves from inequity and in the love of God. “Keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life” (Jude 21 NASB), “looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13 NKJV).

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1346“As a door turns on its hinges, so does a sluggard on his bed” (Proverbs 26:14 ESV).

1347These two redundant references to Sedgwick’s book are in the original.

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