Prize God in Himself

I have been meditating on the fact of God being our supreme cause of contentment. Thus, the following excerpt spoke to me...

Take heed of confining thy welfare to outward means, as if thou couldst not be happy without such an estate, without so many hundreds in the world; beware of binding up thy life and contentment with the creature, for when we come to part with it, we can as soon part with our lives. The children of God resolve, 'Though the fig-tree do not blossom, and the labour of the olive fail, yet to rejoice in the Lord,' Hab. 3.17, 18. This should be a Christian's resolution, not to trust to the creatures, but in God, though all these things are gone. This is a holy independency, when our hearts are taken off from the creature. The men of the world have only a candle which is soon blown out, an estate that may easily be blasted: but the children of God have the sun, which can stead them without a candle. The Lord saith, Hosea 2.11,12, 'I will cause their mirth to cease,' speaking of the carnal Jews. Why? 'I will destroy her vines and her fig-trees.' All the wicked man's happiness is bound up with the vine and fig-tree, with his estate. Consider, your happiness doth not lie within yourselves, nor in any other creature, but in God alone. God in himself is much better than God in the creature; now carnal men, they prize God in the creature, but not God in himself. And therefore the first thing we must depend upon is that God is an all-sufficient God in himself; not God in friends, not God in wealth, but God in himself. We cannot see how it can be well without friends, and wealth, and liberty, therefore our hearts are glued to them. Oh, take heed of this. All these things are but several pipes to deliver and convey to us the influence of the supreme cause; therefore still prize God in himself before God in the creature.

Thomas Manton - A Treatise of Self-Denial