I Find Advantages from My Sins

IN the text Paul is discovering to his readers in Rome the several Divine economies of sin and grace, of law and gospel, that succeeded one another in the Old Testament Church. Whereas, John Fox and James F’raser are dis¬ closing to us their own personal experiences of sin and grace in their own souls. The apostle is working his historical way on towards his own personal experiences also. But like the greatest of our Bible teachers that he is, he begins at the beginning and he pursues his great theme consecutively down to the end. He begins with Adam, and Abraham, and Moses, and he does not stop till he has shown us, incontestably, how they all end in Christ. But just as Paul in his so experimental and so personal seventh chapter, when he comes to it, carries all that down into the depths of his own soul, so do Fox and Fraser in the soul-searching text that I have taken from them this Sabbath evening. PauFs economical and dispensational text, and Fox and Fraser’s personal and experimental text exactly agree: they fit, exactly, into one another. Fox and Fraser are just Paul’s great dispensational passage taken personally, and individually, and experimentally. All which will come out clearly as we proceed with them, and with some other saintly men, who were deeply exercised both in sin and in grace, like them.

Well, to begin with, both the English puritan and the Scottish presbyterian testify to us that their great sinfulness was of the very greatest advantage to them in reading and understanding their Bible. John Fox and James Fraser were both first-rate scholars. They could read their Hebrew Bible and their Greek New Testament without the aid of a grammar or a dictionary or a commentary. But they could not read either their Old Testament or their New Testament with¬ out the aid of their great sinfulness. Without their great sinfulness their Bible would have been a seven-sealed book to them. Not all parts of their Bible, however. For, like John Bunyan, John Fox and James FTaser could read and enjoy all that is written concerning Samson’s gigantic strength, and young David’s astonishing skill with his sling. But as for Paul’s Epistles they could not away with them. But when, as years went on with them, and as the holy law of God more and more entered and more laid open their evil hearts, then their sin so abounded that they could never have enough of Paul. In fact by the time he lay in his prison on the Bass Rock Fraser of Brea had Paul’s Epistles so worked into his heart that without a grammar or a dictionary he rendered the Romans and the Galatians over again into his own Scottish and covenanting dialect. Paul’s appointed part of the Bible, and indeed every part of the Bible, was written for sinful men to read and for sinful men only. But for our sinfulness we men and women of Adam’s race would never have needed the Bible. Without our sinfulness not one chapter of the Bible would ever have been written. Other classical books, such as Homer, and Plato, and Shakespeare, might have been written, but not the Holy Bible. And thus it follows that the more sinfulness any reader brings to his Bible, the better he will understand his Bible, and the better he will enjoy his Bible. ‘ I was driven,’ says John Bunyan, ‘ to a far deeper search into the Scriptures: and I was, in that way, not only enlightened into their meaning: but I was greatly confirmed and comforted. And, besides all that, the guilt of my sin did help me much: both to understand my Bible, and, continually, to close with Christ.’

And, then, as to the advantages that our preaching takes from our sinfulness. As to that, listen to Thomas Halyburton, that great St. Andrews scholar and saint, when he was on his deathbed. To his students, who had come to receive his parting blessing, their old divinity professor said:

‘ Be diligent in composing your sermons. But above all be diligent in scanning your own evil hearts. And then make use of the awful discoveries you make there to enable you to dive down into the evil hearts and evil consciences of your hearers. I more and more preached in that way when I was in the pulpit,’ said the dying man. ‘ And since I lay down here I have not repented that part of my preaching. By the abounding of my own sinfulness the Lord taught me how to value the Remedy He has provided for my sinfulness in His own blood and righteousness. And by my experience both of the deadly disease and the Divine Remedy, I came to understand both better, and to speak better about both.’ ‘ No,’ says Luther also. ‘ No. I did not learn to preach Christ all at once. No: nor for a long time. It was my deep, and ever deepening, corruption of heart that best prepared me for my pulpit. The devil, indeed, to tell the truth, was my best professor in the chair of apologetical, and exegetical, and experimental, and dogmatical divinity. Before that great schoolmaster took me in hand I was a sucking child. It was my temptations, and my corruptions, and my transgressions that ultimately made me at all a true minister of the New Testament. And, without incessant combat, and pain, and sweat, and tears, and blood, no stripling of a student ever yet became a great preacher.’ So says the greatest preacher that ever spoke from the Pauline pulpit, after Paul was translated out of it.

And as it is with the pulpit so is it with the pastorate. Even myself, I could not visit my people with any authority, or with any assurance, or with any power, without my own sinfulness. And outside my own people, it is the very same. I constantly get letters, some signed, and some unsigned, that I could not answer, had I not some share of Fox and Fraser’s advantages and preparations for my pastorate. I have one correspondent on my hands at the present moment who dates his letters from his bed in hell. And it has taken all my own experience of that bed, and all Paul’s experience of it, and all Fox and Fraser’s experience of it, and all Brodie and Bunyan’s experience of it, to convince my correspondent that they have all escaped as bad a bed as his. And with all that I am not quite sure that I have even yet heard the last agonised cry of my despairing correspondent. ‘ For my pastorate also,’ says Fraser, ‘ I find great advantages from my own great sinfulness.’

But not only in reading their Bible, and not only in their preaching and in their pastorate did those so Paul-like men take great advantages from their great sinfulness, but in their prayers and in their praises also. No man ever prayed without ceasing, as Paul expects all his readers to do; no man, who did not first sin without ceasing. Luther, again, who was Paul over again, was wont to say that since he was always sinning so he was always confessing his sin, and was always washing himself clean in Christ’s blood, and was always putting on Christ’s righteousness. Many men among ourselves have prayed without ceasing for this passing thing and that at certain epochs of their lives. But there are other men among us whose great sinfulness makes them pray without ceasing at every epoch of their lives. And more and more and day and night the longer they live. And so is it with their singing of God’s praises. Such sinful men praise God not on Sabbath oidy but Sabbath and Saturday. They praise Him for His great salvation every night they lie down, and every morning they rise up, and in every office and every workshop, and on every street and every square of the city. And they thank God every day for the prayers and the psalms and the spiritual songs He has had prepared in such abundance for the chief of sinners. Just let me hear for a single Sabbath the psalms and hymns that a minister selects and gives out to be sung in church and I will soon see whether or no the holy law of God has again entered and laid open his heart during the past week, or, indeed, ever at all. There was a time when both Paul, and Fox, and Fraser read only the historical and the heroical parts of their Bible, and sang only the historical and processional psalms. But when the law entered their so sinful hearts they could never be torn away from the 32nd Psalm, and the 51st, and the 103rd, and the 130th. Just as you — some of you — cannot be torn away from the same psalms: nor from the Newton, and Cowper, and Wesley, and Bonar, and suchlike evangelical hyms. Only, in the hands of weak, and one-sided, and ill-balanced men, even the most scriptural and spiritual and experimental prayers and praises are apt to become far too frequent, and far too exclusive, in the pulpit and at the family altar. As was the case with the saintly James Guthrie of Stirling, till his beadle took him and gave him a never-to-be-forgotten lesson about the selfishness and the one-sidedness of his family worship. At the same time, when the holy law of God is plunged deeper and deeper every day into a minister’s sinful heart, who can wonder that he is sorely tempted to take up John Newton’s prayer and to say and sing continually, in public and in private:

‘ With my burden I begin.

Lord, remove this load of sin!

Let Thy blood for sinners spilt.

Set my conscience free from guilt!

Lord! I come to Thee for rest.

Take possession of my breast.

There Thy blood-bought right maintain.

And without a rival reign.’

Now will you wait with me for a few moments more till I show to the divinity students present how deep in their best books and how widespread in their best books is the truth of the text? Our best students of divinity are so absorbed with their apologetic and exegetic and doctrinal and historical studies all the week that they have not time, as yet, for the great experimental books; the books they must master also before they can be acceptable and profitable preachers to the true saints in their future congregations. And since great names go such a great way with all good students, I have collected a short catena of such names, wherewith to wind up to them the sermon of this evening. As thus: summing up one of his lectures on Augustine in the Latin Chapel of Oxford, Canon Mozley says:

‘ Augustine clearly saw the sanctifying effects of the sense of sin upon the Christian character. And that because the sense of sin creates a humility which compensates for the source of it, and for the occasion of it, and founds a character, which is a sort of perfection based upon imperfection.’ And John Calvin, the soberest of men, supports Augustine, the most impulsive of men, in saying the same thing. ‘ All things,’ says that great reformer, ‘ all things which happen to the saints are so over¬ ruled by God that what the world regards as only evil, the issue shows to be only good. For,’ says Calvin, ‘ what Augustine says is true, that even the sins of the saints are, through the exceeding grace of God, so far from doing them harm, that, on the contrary, their sins serve to advance their salvation.’ And Richard Hooker, a theologian, if possible, still more judicious and still more sober-minded than even John Calvin, says on this same subject, and in support of the same Latin Father: ‘ I am not afraid to affirm it boldly with St. Augustine, that puffed-up men receive a benefit at the hands of God, when they are permitted, and, that, grievously, to transgress. Ask the very soul of Peter,’ says the greatest theologian in the English Church, ‘and it shall undoubtedly make you this answer: My eager protestations, made in the glory of my ghostly strength, I am now ashamed of; but those garden tears, wherewith my sin and my weakness were bewailed, have procured my endless joy; my strength was my ruin, but my fall has been my stay.’ And our own Samuel Rutherford is not likely to be left far behind by the best of them when the grace of God is to be magnified. ‘ Had our sins never been,’ he writes, ‘ we should for ever have wanted the mysterious Emmanuel, the Beloved of the Father, the Chief among ten thousand, Jesus Christ, the God-Man and the Saviour of sinners. For, no sick sinner, no soul-Physician; no captive, no Redeemer. Mary Magdalene with her seven devils; Paul with his hands smoking with the blood of the saints; and all the rest of the Fountainwashed company: think of them all! O what a depth of unsearchable wisdom! Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound!’ And, the always pungent Thomas Shepard of New England has this testimony on this same subject: ‘ You shall find that there is not a passage of God’s providences toward thee but He will get a name to Himself by means of it. Doth not thy weakness strengthen thee, like Paul Doth not thy blind¬ ness make thee cry for light? And, like David, when thou hast very venom in thy heart against thy brother hast thou not loathed thyself on that account and fled to the City of Refuge? Thy falls into sin have made thee weary of sin, and have made thee to watch against it, and to long to get rid of it. And thus, thy God hath made thy poison thy food; thy death thy life; and thy damnation thy salvation. And hence,’ he adds, ‘ holy Mr. Fox said that he thanked God more for his sins than for his good works.’ And hear Halyburton again: ‘ The Lord did let me see that there was a great deal more wickedness hid in my heart than I had ever suspected. He hereby instructed me that this is not my rest. And this made me value and dwell on the prospect of Heaven far more than otherwise I would have done. Thus was I made a gainer by my losses: and all to the praise of His glorious grace.’ ‘In one sense,’ says John Newton in his Cardiphonia, ‘ we are excellently well suited to answer God’s eternal purpose. For, if we were not vile and worthless beyond all expression, the exceeding riches of His grace would not have been so gloriously displayed in us. God’s glory shines far more in redeeming one sinner like you and me than in preserving and upholding a thousand sinless angels like

Gabriel and Michael themselves.’ And, give a student’s ear to Jonathan Edwards, who has been truly called one of the greatest of the sons of men; ‘ Our sin and our misery,’ says that matchless master in our puritan Israel, ‘ by this contrivance of redemption are made the occasion of our greater blessedness. By our sin we had deserved everlasting misery, but by the divine wisdom and grace our sin and our misery are made the occasion of our being everlastingly blessed. The saved sinner shall be far more holy and far more blessed than he would have been if he had never sinned at all. For does not the apostle say that where sin abounded, grace did much more abound; that, as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord?’

And to conclude the inexhaustible catena with the greatest English preacher of the past generation whose name will be read by all students in his style: ‘ The deep confession of sin enters into the highest holiness of all true saints. The pattern saints of God cherish in their hearts the everlasting memory that they are but redeemed sinners, and they carry into heaven that rapturous avowal on their lips. That rapturous avowal, which is the triumphal song sounding from the heavenly harps of the blessed before the throne, who sing for ever to their Divine Redeemer, as they serve Him day and night in His Temple, and say, “Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood, out of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation, and hast made us kings and priests to God, to whom be our praise everlasting!

‘ Comfort ye, comfort ye My people, saith your God.’