Jonathan Edwards on his post-conversion interest in God

Ideas in the below quote:

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<li>pray without ceasing (1 Thess 5.17)   </li>

<li>fix one's mind on things above (Col 3.1-2)</li>

</ul>

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Brought to faith in Christ at age seventeen Jonathan Edwards described his subsequent interest in and focus on God,

"My mind was greatly fixed on divine things; almost perpetually in the contemplation of them. I spent most of my time in thinking of divine things, year after year; often walking alone in the woods, and solitary places, for meditation, soliloquy, and prayer, and converse with God; and it was always my manner, at such times, to sing forth my contemplations. I was almost constantly in ejaculatory prayer, wherever I was. Prayer seemed to be natural to me, as the breath by which the inward burnings of my heart had vent. The delights which I now felt in those things of religion, were of an exceedingly different kind from those before mentioned, that I had when a boy; and what then I had no more notion of, than one born blind has of pleasant and beautiful colours. They were of a more inward, pure, soul-animating and refreshing nature. Those former delights never reached the heart; and did not arise from any sight of the divine excellency of the things of God; or any taste of the soul-satisfying and life-giving good there is in them. (Memoirs of Jonathan Edwards, lv. In vol. 1 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, edited by Edward Hickman [London: Henry G. Bohn, 1865], 10th ed.)