I came across a book recently by the Puritan Oliver Heywood. In the preface written in his closing years he sets out some 10 hints for sinners to follow.
1. Thoroughly study your lost and lapsed state by your birth-sin; you are estranged from God, and so continuing must be for ever banished from him at death. You must be changed or damned.
2. Search the Scriptures, there you find the way to heaven opened, the character of the saved, the black traits of the lost, with their promises, precepts and threatenings; lean not on your own fancies, but divine oracles.
3. Examine your consciences; enter into the secrets of your hearts, commune with them, bring your hearts to the rule and touchstone, spend some time alone upon it, be faithful and impartial, tremble at hazarding a mistake.
4. Accuse and condemn yourselves, you will find great reason; your sins are obvious to God and conscience, if you hide them, they will undermine you; there are hopes that God will clear you, if you censure yourselves.
5. Renounce every sin; it is sin that separates betwixt God and you, that is dragging you to hell, that is provoking the Most High against you; crucify the flesh with its affections and lusts.
6. Enter into a covenant with God; solemnly renew your baptismal covenant; take God as your God, and give up yourselves to him, defer not one day, tell the Lord you are his by many obligations.
7. Put no confidence in yourselves, or in any thing of your own; judge yourselves most unworthy of the high favour of covenant relationship; you may and must account yourselves even as dead dogs before God.
8. Join with God's people; stand not at a distance from those that God owns; renounce vain persons whom God rejects, sit not with them but love and choose the society of saints for whom Christ pleads.
9. Be much in prayer; plead with God for a spirit of grace: Christ is God's gift, be thankful for him, beg of God that through him you may have pardon, peace and heaven, without money and without price; will you not ask?
10. Rest not satisfied without saving faith which gives interest in Christ; remember all men have not faith; some have a faith but not sincere; yet it is absolutely necessary, there is no living, no dying without faith.
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