Sin
Sin is photographed in high heaven; the deed when it was done was photographed upon the sky.
It is war to the knife with my sins; not one of them will I willingly keep, but down with them, down with them; Canaanite, Hittite, Jebusite, they shall all be driven out.
The possession of a bad nature is my fault as well as my terrible calamity. It is a sin that will always be charged on man; when they will not come unto Christ it is sin that keeps them away.
It is sin that has brought you into the condition that you will not come to Christ. If you had not fallen, you would come to Christ the moment he was preached to you; but you do not come because of your sinfulness and crime.
Once mount into sin there is no stopping. Take heed, if yon would not become the worst of characters, of little sins, which, mounting one upon another, may at last heave you from the summit and destroy your soul for ever. There is a great danger in secret sins.
If you commit one sin, it is like the melting of the lower glacier upon the Alps; the others must follow in time.
Do not measure sin by what other people say of it; but measure sin by what God says of it, and what your own conscience says of it.
Like Sisera, sinner, thou art sleeping in the tent of the destroyer; thou mayest have eaten butter and honey out of a lordly dish; but thou art sleeping on the door-step of helL Even now the enemy is lifting up the hammer and the nail to smite thee through thy temples and fasten thee to the earth, that there thou mayest lie for ever in the death of everlasting torment — if it may be called a death!!
A pious mind will know how to improve the very sight of sin to its own sanctification. It will learn humility when it remembers that restraining grace alone prevents a similar fault in itself; it will gather subjects for gratitude and admiration from the fact that grace alone has made it to differ.
Christian, beware! when thou thinkest lightly of sin, then thou hast become presumptuous. Take heed, lest thou shouldst falL Sin a little thing! Is it not poison? Who knows its deadliness? Sin a little thing! Do not the little foxes spoil the grapes? Sin a little thing! Doth not the tiny coral insect build a rock that wrecks a navy? Do not little strokes fell lofty oaks? Will not continual droppings wear away stones %
When sin was atoned for by Christ, he left his raiment behind him in the tomb. Garments are the badges of guilt; if we had not been guilty we should never have needed them.
Sin girded his head with thorns that now is crowned with glory. Is it a little thing? It made him suffer anguish, bitterness, and woe, till he endured “all that incarnate God could bear, with strength enough, and none to spare.” Is it not a little thing, sirs! Gould ye weigh it in the scales of eternity, you would fly from it as from a serpent, and abhor the least appearance of evil.
The men who work in those huge vessels, the hammering of which causes immense noise, cannot at first sleep for the continual din in their ears; but by and by, when they are used to it, they think nothing of it So with sin. First, a little sin doth startle us. Soon we say,” Is it not a little one V as Lot did of Zoar. Theo there comes another, larger, and then another, until by degrees we begin to regard it as but a little ill; and then comes unholy presumption.
We shall never put off sin entirely but with our winding-sheet; but, unless men show the fruits of conversion in their lives, they need converting again. Let it never be said that grace leads to licentiousness. It does not. Christ saves his people, not in their sins, but from them.
The heart, though it be deceitful, is positively deceit; it is evil in the concrete, sin in the essence; it is the distillation, the quintessence of all things that are vile; it is not envious against God, it is envy; it is not at enmity, it is actual enmity.
Where are your hearts, that ye can still despise God f Oh I diabolical crime! Oh! satanic enormity! Oh! iniquity for which words fail in description! To hate the all-lovely — to despise the essentially good — to abhor the constantly merciful — to spurn the ever-beneficent — to scorn the kind, the gracious one — above all, to hate the God who sent his Son to die for man!
All men, in every land, have consciences, and therefore all men can sin!
—■! * Though your sins are many, mercy hath many pardons. Though they excel the stars, the sands, the drops of dew, in their number, one act of remission can cancel all. Your iniquity, though a mountain, shall be cast into the midst of the sea. Your blackness shall be washed out by the cleansing flood of the Redeemer’s gore. If you are now a law-condemned sinner, I know you to be a vessel of mercy by that very sign. O hellish sinners, abandoned profligates, offcasts of society, outcasts from the company of sinners themselves, if ye acknowledge your iniquity, there is mercy, broad, ample, free, immense, infinite mercy.
In the thought, that “the carnal mind is enmity against God,’ 1 there is something which may make us shake; for it is a terrible sin to be at enmity with God.
Sin was in the world long before God sent the law. God gave his law that the offence might be seen to be an offence, and that the offence might abound exceedingly more than it could have done without its coming. There was sin long before Sinai smoked; long ere the mountain trembled beneath the weight of Deity, and the dread trumpet sounded exceeding loud and long, there had been transgression.
When once God the Holy Ghost applies the law to the conscience, secret sins are dragged to light, little sins are magnified to their true size, and things apparently harmless become exceedingly sinful. Before that dread searcher of hearts and trier of the reins makes his entrance into the soul, it appears righteous, just, lovely, and holy; but, when he reveals the hidden evils, the scene is changed.
Though men cannot sin against the law which they have never seen, yet they can rebel against the light of nature, against the dictates of conscience, and against that traditional remembrance of right and wrong which has followed mankind from the place where God created them.
“The carnal mind,” Paul says, “is enmity against God.” He uses a noun, and not an adjective. He does not say it is opposed to God merely, but it is positive enmity. It is not black, but blackness; it is not at enmity, but enmity itself; it is not corrupt, but corruption; it is not rebellious, it is rebellion; it iB not wicked, it is wickedness itself.
As long as I am out of hell, I have no right to grumble; and if I were in hell I should have no right to complain, for I feel, when convinced of sin, that never creature deserved to go there more than I do.