Beware of the first beginnings of neglecting secret prayer: watch against temptations to it: take heed how you begin to allow excuses. Be watchful to keep up the duty in the height of it; let it not so much as begin to sink. For when you give way, though it be but little, it is like giving way to an enemy in the field of battle:

Obs. 1. The first proper fruit of faith's discovery of forgiveness in God, unto a sin-distressed soul, is waiting in patience and expectation. Obs. 2. The proper object of a sin-distressed soul's waiting and expecting is God himself, as reconciled in Christ: "I have waited for Jehovah." Obs. 3. The word of promise is the soul's great supportment in waiting for God: "In thy word do I hope." Obs. 4. Sin-distressed souls wait for God with earnest intension of mind, diligence, and expectation,

The absence of God from the soul, by his departure, withdrawing, or hiding himself from it, is that which principally casts the soul into its depths. "Woe unto them," saith the Lord, "when I depart from them!" Hos. 9:12. And this woe, this sorrow, doth not attend only a universal, a total departure of God from any; but that also which is gradual or partial, in some things, in some seasons.

Written at the age of 33 in 1827 - Highly praised by C H Spurgeon.

How may a deserted believer discover the particular sin or sins by which he has grieved the Spirit of God? He hides himself on the right hand, so that I cannot see him," Job 23.8-9. This becomes a matter of sad complaint, and the believer wants to know the reason why it is this way with him. Feeling that the Spirit is withdrawn, he sees the greatest reason to suspect that the Spirit has been grieved by him. When he comes to search, so far as he knows himself, he is perhaps conscious that he has been kept from gross immoralities and enormities. For this reason he cannot be certain what the particular sins are for which he is thus visited.

Chapter 7 A proper understanding of the infinite purity, the glorious essential holiness of God's nature, his absolute eternal righteousness as the Lord and judge of all, will teach people what views they should have of anything done in them or by them. "Our God is a consuming fire," Hebrews 12:29; "a God of purer eyes than to behold evil," Habakkuk 1:13; "who will by no means clear the guilty," Exodus 34:7; "whose judgment it is, that those who commit sin are worthy of death," Romans 1:32; "a holy God, a jealous God, who will not forgive transgressions and sins," Joshua 24:19. While the dread and terror of the excellence of his holiness and righteousness is before people, they will not easily rely on their own righteousness.

Chapter 3 As the foundation of this apostasy lay in the uncured folly and vanity of their minds (as we shall see later is the case in all similar situations), the strange and perhaps universal nature of the event led the apostle to wonder if there was some unusual fascination or spiritual witchcraft at play. We have witnessed individuals among us who, within a day or two, have renounced all the principles of truth they have been taught and embraced a set of notions diametrically opposed to them, leading some to believe there has been a genuine diabolical fascination involved. This apostasy of the Galatians was so severe that the apostle definitively declared that Christ and all the benefits of his death were renounced in the process.