SIN IS AN AWFUL REALITY. It is one of the most stupendous facts in the universe. It has been stalking about this world for the past six thousand years, cursing, blighting, withering, blasting, damning all that it comes in contact with.
Wherever it travels it brings poison in its breath. Whatever it touches it inflicts a sting more deadly that the most venomous reptile. It has put the whole world out of joint, and turned it into a moral chaos.
Its devastating effects are seen in the various forms of misery around us today. Its awful curse is witnessed in the drunkenness and immorality, lying and deceit, practiced both in town and country.
The workhouses, asylums, and graveyards tell the ghastly tale of sorrow and suffering it has brought in its train. No one has escaped its poisonous venom. The king and the peasant, the learned and the illiterate, are alike affected by it. No circle of society can claim exemption from the evil. The sad-havoc it has wrought no plummet can fathom, no understanding can grasp. It baffles all description and beggars all language to explain. It is only known to God, and will not be fully manifested until the judgment throne is set.
THE RESULT OF ONE SIN.
One sin drove the brightest cherub out of heaven. For one sin the angels that kept not their first estate are reserved in chains under darkness until the judgment of the great day. One sin-drove our first parents out of Paradise. For one sin the earth opened and swallowed Korah and all his company. One sin hindered Moses from entering the promised land. For one sin Achan was stoned to death. One sin brought down the judgment of God on King Uzziah, and he was smitten with leprosy. For one sin Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt. One sin caused the death of Ananias and Sapphira. The results of one sin (Adam’s) brought the blessed Holy Son of God from heaven’s brightest glory to Calvary’s cross of shame, where He was made sin, and went right into all the darkness that sin involved, that He might put it away forever, and liberate those who were under its power.
YOUR SINS WILL MEET YOU ONE DAY.
Honest reader, have you ever felt sin on your conscience? Have you repented of your sins? Do you now know the forgiveness of them? “Plain questions,” you may answer. But you will admit, my reader, that they are of the utmost moment. Your everlasting weal or woe hangs on how you stand in reference to them. Sinned against God you have, “for all have sinned.” If you die and meet God in your sins, you will be banished from His holy presence forever. You may not care to be told the truth, but “be sure your sin will find you out.”
You may ask, What is sin? Let the sacred page answer: “The thought of foolishness is sin.” Have you ever had a foolish thought? “All unrighteousness is sin.” Have you always done right, and never done wrong? “Sin is lawlessness” (R.V.), which is simply doing your own will. Have you always done God’s will or your own?
Do not think, my reader, sin is a light thing in the eyes of unsullied purity and divine holiness. You may roll it as a sweet morsel under your tongue, but the day will come when it will be more bitter than gall or wormwood to you. Think not that you can evade looking at your sins, however unpleasant the task may be, or that a holy God will forget one of them. A faithful register of them is kept in heaven, and if not forgiven, YOUR SINS WILL MEET YOU ONE DAY.
Remember, “God is, not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” History furnishes ample evidence of the truth of this statement of Holy Writ. The wreck of nations and of individuals ought to act as a warning beacon to you. You must either honestly face your sins now in the light of God’s pardoning grace or in the light of His judgment throne. If you face them now honestly in this day of abounding grace, and own, “I have sinned,” you will hear Him say to you, “Thy sins are forgiven thee, go in peace.” If not, you will have them bound on you for all eternity, in the anguish of dark despair, where hope shall never come.
SIN AND HOLINESS CANNOT DWELL together. Holiness abhors sin, and righteousness must judge it. My past history of guilt God cannot overlook. If He took no notice of it, He would not be a righteous God. To admit me into heaven in my sins would be to deny His holy character and utterly defile that blessed place. The unholy, the profane, the unclean, the immoral, the drunkard, the swearer, the liar, the cheat, the hypocrite, would only defile. To admit such into heaven is altogether repugnant to the thought of what heaven is.
How then can God righteously clear me from my sins and make me fit to dwell in that holy place? These are questions that should be of the utmost importance to all, especially to every awakened sin-burdened conscience, and to the soul that feels its own pollution through sin’s defilement.
Only one way was open, and that was that One should be found who could bear the penalty of sin in such a way as would meet the righteous requirements of God’s righteous throne. This, in mercy, God gave His own Son to accomplish. He proved His love to us (who deserved it not) in so doing. Christ came to express the love of God to us and to bear the judgment that lay upon us. God’s grace is now going out to all through a righteous channel.
When visiting one day in the workhouse at L— I repeated in the ears of a Roman Catholic inmate who was confined to bed, these beautiful and most eloquent lines: ―
“Could I with ink the ocean fill,
Were every blade of grass a quill,
Were the whole sky of parchment made,
And every man a scribe by trade—
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry,
Nor could the scroll contain the whole
Though stretched from sky to sky.”
On the next bed lay a woman with her eyes closed, suffering, I was told, from paralysis. Though her eyes were closed, yet her ears were open to the sweet but simple story of God’s love, as expressed in the foregoing beautiful lines. As she opened her dark and most brilliant eyes upon me, she exclaimed what I can never forget, and have often told, “Ah, sir, no parent would give her child for her friend, but God gave His Son for His enemies.”
What a powerful sermon in few words. If God has allowed sin to come into this world to His own dishonor, and the ruin of His creature, and the triumph of Satan, yet He has found the way in His own heart of love, to meet it to His own everlasting praise and glory.
Sin, then, has only been the occasion for God to display His love to man, the sinning rebel. Men may talk about what they cannot understand, or cavil at certain things that appear contrary to God’s government, but who can cavil at such love?
It is a great and fatal mistake to think that Christ had to intervene to make God love us. He came from God to reach us in all our sins. In the love of His heart He went to the depth of our misery. Let anyone honestly gaze upon Him, and there read God’s love, and see if, after such a wondrous sight, they cannot but admire and praise and adore. All caviling flies in view of that wondrous cross, with the mighty Maker of heaven and earth upon it, bearing it meekly and patiently, that He might show out the heart of God to sinful man.
“How shall we celebrate the day
When God appeared in mortal clay,
The mark of worldly scorn;
When the archangel’s heavenly lays
Attempted the Redeemer’s praise
And hailed salvation’s morn?”
All this was needed to take away our sins, and make us fit to dwell forever in God’s holy presence. Now the person who believes in Christ and rests on PROCRASTINATION is the thief of souls as well as of time, and the plunder can never be recovered.
His atoning work, is as fit for heaven as that work can make him. The thief on the cross had no natural fitness in himself. His heart was touched by divine power, his conscience was convicted of his deep need as a sinner. He confessed his guilt saying, “We indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds.” He appeals to the Lord Jesus Christ who was there beside Him. In virtue of the finished work of Christ that man goes from off the gibbet on Calvary’s hill a fit companion for God’s blessed Son. At once he was snatched from the deepest hell and lifted into the highest heaven. What grace!
“Who was delivered for our offenses, and was raised again for our justification.” “And by him all that believe are justified from all things.” These scriptures drive all uncertainty from my mind. I rest upon them, and would rather have them than an angel’s voice. I know I am justified because God says “all that believe” are so.
Salvation is all of grace. Those who know themselves will be most ready to confess it. Grace at the bottom, grace at the top, and grace all the way between. God takes sinners up to exhibit His rich grace in them even now. In the ages to come He will show what is the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness towards us by Christ Jesus.
P. W.
Procrastination is the thief of souls as well as of time, and the plunder can never be recovered.