"On My Heart Imprint Thine Image"

Reading John Owen, I encountered these heart-pricking words:

Many love the world too well and have their minds too much filled with the things of it to entertain desires of speeding through it to a state wherein they may behold the glory of Christ. They are at home and are unwilling to be absent from the body, though to be present with the Lord. They hope, it may be, that such a season will come at one time or another, and then it will be the best they can look for when they can be here no more. But they have but a little sight of the glory of Christ in this world by faith, if any at all, who so little, so faintly desire to have the immediate sight of it above...Goods, lands, possessions, relations, trades, with secular interests in them, are the things whose image is drawn on their minds and whose characters are written on their foreheads, as the titles whereby they may be known. As believers, beholding the glory of Christ in the blessed glass of the gospel, are changed into the same image and likeness by the Spirit of the Lord (II Cor. 3:18); so these persons, beholding the beauty of the world and the things that are in it in the cursed glass of self-love, are in their minds changed into the same image. Hence perplexing fears, vain hopes, empty embraces of perishing things, fruitless desires, earthly, carnal designs, cursed, self-pleasing imaginations, feeding on, and being fed by, the love of the world and self, abide and prevail in them. But we have not so learned Christ Jesus.

I fear that I saw a dreadful amount of myself in these lines. Oh how prone I am to idolatry and to wandering from Jesus' bosom. God remove this cursed inclination from my soul and give me more love for Christ!