True Soul's Rest

Evangelista, the wise, gospel-sane Christian in the great Puritan work The Marrow of Modern Divinity:

'Come unto me,' says Christ, 'all ye that labor, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest' (Matt. 11:28). 

Truly, my neighbors and friends, believe it, we shall never find a heart's happiness, and true soul's rest, until we find it here.

For howsoever a man may think, if he had this man's wit, and that man's wealth, this man's honor and that man's pleasure, this wife, or that husband, such children, his heart would be satisfied, and his soul would be contented; yet which of us hath not, by our own experience, found the contrary?

For, not long after that we have obtained the thing we did so much desire, and wherein we promised ourselves so much happiness, rest, and content, we have found nothing but vanity and emptiness in it. Let a man deal plainly with his own heart, and he shall find that, notwithstanding he hath many things, yet there is ever one thing wanting: for indeed man's soul cannot be satgisfied with any creature, no, not with a world of creatures.

And the reason is, because the desires of a man's soul are infinite, according to that infinite goodness which it once lost in losing God. 

The healing alternative:

But when a man once comes to believe, that all his sins both past, present, and to come, are freely and fully pardoned, and God in Christ graciously reconciled unto him, the Lord doth thereupon so reveal his fatherly face unto him in Christ, and so make known that incredible union betwixt him and the believing soul, that his heart becomes quietly contented in God.

 --Edward Fisher, The Marrow of Modern Divinity (Christian Focus, 2009), 261

Dane Ortlund