A few years ago, on visiting Plymouth, I was asked to call—by a retired Major in the Isle of Wight—upon a brother officer, Colonel Rimmington, who had been two years in bed with a dislocated hip.
After viewing his helpless condition, and introducing myself as a fellow-Christian, I asked him the following question: “As you lie upon this bed in weakness and loneliness, what is the character of the truth ministered to your soul by the Holy Spirit, that affords you the greatest amount of spiritual nourishment?”
Lifting his eyes to heaven, he cried with a loud voice:
“Jesus my Lord! I never can tell,
What it has cost Thee to save me from hell!
“If I say that once, I say it one hundred times a day!”
I told an old woman about Colonel Rimmington, and what he repeated one hundred times a day.... The old lady broke in with the remark “I expect, sir, that he had been a great sinner!”
“Not so great a sinner as I have been,” I replied.
Who, reader, is to determine whether our sins are great or otherwise?
I think it is the party sinned against, and that party is God. If anyone, had injured you very much, ailed another remarked that you had not been injured much, you would think that you would know best, being the party injured!
The Psalmist said when convicted: “I have sinned against the Lord,” and “Against Thee and Thee only have I sinned.”
All sin is an arrow aimed at God.
It would tear God from His throne.
Sin is an infinite evil, because committed against infinite love, infinite goodness, infinite holiness, infinite justice.
As John Bunyan said when dying: “Sin is the dare of His justice, the rape of His mercy, the jeer of His patience, and the contempt of His love.”
“Sin being infinitely evil and odious, it is proper and suitable that God should hate it infinitely, and be an infinite enemy to it. If infinite hatred of sin be suitable to the Divine character, then the expressions of such hatred are also suitable to His character.”
“Sin is the most expensive thing in the universe pardoned or unforgiven. Pardoned, its cost falls on the atoning victim; unforgiven, it must forever rest upon the impenitent soul.”
But, some reader says, do I not remember a verse of an old hymn: ―
“The guilt of twice ten thousand sins
One moment takes away!
And when the fight of faith begins
Our strength is as our day.”
And that verse is sound divinity.
It is blessedly possible by one look of faith to the crucified Saviour to be loosed forever―in one moment of time―from the accumulated life load of sin. Try it, young man! Try it old sinner! Take up the language of a truly contrite and repentant sinner of long ago, who — advancing the very greatness of his sin as a reason why God should forgive him, said: “Pardon mine iniquity, for it is great.”
You will then never tire of saying: ―
“Jesus my Lord, I never can tell
What it has cost Thee to save ME from Hell!”
R. M. Holman.