the Fourth Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Golden Treasury
Take heed to your spirit. Malachi 2:16. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it? Jeremiah 17:9.
Even believers feel this wickedness of their hearts, Psalms 30:7-8. For the heart, as John Bunyan observes, has many secret ways and private loop-holes, in which the diabolists, that is, sinful lusts, can hide themselves so well, that they seem to be quite overcome; but upon occasion, especially when we are careless, they spring up again, though sometimes under other and perhaps quite spiritual names. Therefore we ought always to be jealous of ourselves. For the flesh is never more fleshly and dangerous, than when it has the most spiritual appearance, and covers its lusts with the holiness and spirituality of angels.
Sin has a thousand treacherous arts
To practice on the mind;
With flattering looks she tempts our hearts
But leaves a sting behind.
With names of virtue, she deceives
The aged and the young;
And while the heedless wretch believes,
She makes his fetters strong.
She pleads for all the joys she brings,
And gives a fair pretence;
But cheats the soul of heavenly things,
And chains it down to sense.
So on a tree divinely fair.
Grew the forbidden food;
Our mother took the poison there?
And tainted all her blood.
