The Book of the Intricacies of My Heart

JAMES FRASER, laird of Brea, and minister of Culross, was a very able man in a day of very able men. And his high value to us, and his lasting value to us, lies in this that he laid out all his great ability upon the pursuit of personal holiness and experimental religion. He was a very scholarly man also and a very deeply read man. But his deepest book after his Bible was always the book of his own heart. There were many other able and scholarly and deeply read men in that day in Scotland and in England; but was there another man anywhere who had such an intricate heart as James Fraser had, and who watched and wrote down all the intricacies of his heart, as James Fraser did? If there was another such intricatehearted man and a man with such an intricately written autobiography, I do not know him. James Fraser would have pleased Apollo, whose one injunction to all his worshippers always was to know themselves before they intruded themselves into his holy presence. He would have pleased Solomon also, who so scorned those fools whose eyes are in the ends of the earth. He would have pleased Augustine also, who so reproved the men of his day because they went out to gaze at the heights of the mountains, and at the depths of the seas, and at the orbits of the planets, and at the courses of the comets, but who had no eyes for the heights, and the depths, and the comets, and the meteors of which their own hearts and their own homes were full. But best of all, James Fraser would have pleased, and he did please. Him who had this intricate Scripture written out beforehand for Fraser’s guidance, and direction, and encouragement, this so intricate Scripture that ran in Fraser’s New Testament in these intricate words: ‘ For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.’ Every syllable of that so intricate Scripture was written out for James Fraser beforehand and he did not neglect it nor did he cast it behind his back.

Now to convey to you some idea of this remark¬ able man and of his remarkable autobiography, I will transcribe to you the contents of some of his so amazingly analytical and so amazingly heart¬ searching chapters. Take these then as so many fair specimens: —

‘Four steps toward my conversion,’ ‘Eight evidences of my conversion,’ ‘ Eight marks of that faith which saves the soul,’ ‘Seven cracks in my saving faith,’ ‘ Nineteen marks of growth in grace,’ ‘Twenty-seven evidences of regeneration,’ ‘Eleven characters of a Pharisee,’ ‘ Twenty-five things that have done me good,’ ‘Fourteen things that have done me evil,’ ‘ Five steps towards a sad decay,’ ‘ Nine steps in my recovery from my sad decay,’ ‘ Twenty-two comfortable instructions as to my saving interest in Christ,’ ‘ Ten rules how to follow Christ,’ ‘Twelve rules for the government of my tongue,’ ‘ Fourteen fresh mercies declared,’ ‘Thirteen of Satan’s devices discovered and exposed,’ ‘ Ten intricate errors in the life of faith corrected ’ — but I must stop, for I fear your patience would fail you before I had taken you through the half of all the joints, and all the marrow, and all the thoughts, and all the intents of Fraser’s so intricate and so intricately handled heart.

Now, my brethren, I do not know what you feel and what you say when you are told about such a self-examining saint of God as James Fraser was. For myself, I will tell you the truth about what I feel and what I will say. And it is this. Instead of wearying of him and of his ways with God and with himself, and instead of blaming and correcting him as so many do, I for one, will rather say that to my mind our covenanted fellow-countryman was quite worthy to take his place among those holy creatures in heaven who are so full of eyes within that they cover their feet and their faces with the wings that God has given them for that purpose and then rest not day and night, saying: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty. But, my brethren, I am persuaded better things of you than that you will ever weary of the recorded ways of God with His people and of their recorded ways with Him. You are not Solomon’s fools who have their eyes everywhere but on their own hearts. You do not censure those men who give all diligence to make their own calling and election sure. You do not think that David, or Heman, or Asaph, or Solomon, or Paul, or Luther, or Shepard, or Fraser could give too much attention and too much diligence to the keeping of their own hearts. You see men of science setting up costly observatories wherefrom to watch the motions of the stars, to record the changes and the strength of the winds, and to register the fluctuations of heat and cold in the atmosphere. And again you see business men giving all their thoughts, day and night, to the rises and the falls of the share list and the money market. And you will not think those men mad who gave some real attention to the weather within and to the markets in which their immortal souls are bought and sold. You must all have read these warning words in the Wisdom of Solomon which run thus: ‘ When the whole accounts of this mortal life are at the last day wound up, then shall the righteous man stand in great boldness before the faces of such as have scorned him: and such as have made no account of his great labours. When they see his finished salvation they shall stand amazed at the wonder of it, so far will it be beyond what they had looked for. And, repenting, they shall say within themselves — This is he whom we had, sometime, in derision, and held him up for a problem of reproach. We, fools that we were, accounted his life to be madness, and his end to be without honour. But now, he is numbered among the most chosen of the children of God: and his everlasting lot is high up among the chiefest of the saints of God.’

Now among a thousand special providences that filled Fraser’s spiritual life full and that made his spiritual life sometimes a very strait gate and a very narrow way, take just this one so ‘intricate’ instance. One never-to-be-forgotten day a few censorious and unsympathetic words were spoken to Fraser by a member of his family in his library at Brea. The person who spoke these momentous words immediately and for ever forgot them. But as God would have it Fraser never forgot them. In five minutes after those fateful words fell on Fraser’s ear and heart his whole future was changed. And not his whole future alone, but through that the future of hundreds of men in the Scotland of that day and this day — so intricately was Fraser’s life woven in with so many other men’s lives. Indeed, to the day of his death there was not a single day, scarcely a single hour, that he was not led back to that crisis-morning in his own study at Brea. So intricately did he see all his life to be warped and woven and knotted in with so many other lives. ‘ Fearful! fearful! ’ he would sometimes fall down on his knees and say, ‘ Wonderful! wonderful! ’ he would say. ‘ Who is a God like the God who rules and overrules my life? ’ he would say. And till he preached some of his most memorable and most fruitful sermons on the hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm. And sermons that seemed full of the Holy Ghost to the Culross congregation who heard them.

Now, have you any such intricate providences in your life as that? Did any one ever speak three words to you that altered all your after life and the lives of many more? Yes! the only difference between Fraser’s life and our life is this that he watched and wrote out God’s intricate operations in his heart and his life, whereas we pay no attention. Till the God of our life has nothing left to say about us but this: ‘ The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know: My people doth not consider.’

Among his many crosses also Fraser had one specially intricate and specially secret and specially agonising and specially lifelong cross, that would have driven him absolutely mad hut for a lesson from heaven he got one fearful night. As a matter of fact, so did that constant cross madden him one fearful night that he rose from off his bed and was within an inch of taking his own life. But at that awful moment a Hand from heaven laid hold of him and led him back to his knees and to his bed. And it came to him that midnight like the voice from heaven that it was: it came to him always to take that cross immediately, and directly, and believingly, and dutifully, from Christ’s own hand. What had always so exasperated and maddened Fraser heretofore was that he had taken his cross from the hand of the man who was the occasion and the instrument of it. But ever after that night he set aside and kept out of sight that injurious man, and went up to Christ Himself, and bowed his head before Him. Ever after that night of his agony, Fraser was exactly like Christ Himself in the night of His agony. For our Lord did not take His cross from Pilate’s hand nor from the hand of the high priest. Our Lord lifted His eyes above all mortal men till He saw His Father only and His Father’s holy will alone. And that quieted His agonised heart and kept Him from being beside Himself with the terrors and the horrors of Gethsemane and Calvary. And often when he was crushed to the earth under his lifelong cross Fraser would boldly borrow his Divine Forerunner’s words, and would say with Him: ‘ As the Father gives me commandment, even so I do. Arise, let us go hence.’ Till the old Mansion-House of Brea in the Black Isle was the upper room in Jerusalem over again.

Dear John Donne has one of his great Augustinian sermons on the ‘ Fifty uncleannesses ’ of the Old Testament and the fifty expiations that were provided for those fifty uncleannesses. Now this so intricate New Testament man of ours had his fifty uncleannesses also. Only there was one supreme uncleanness that defiled Fraser almost more than all the other forty-nine. Now what would you think it was? Was it ‘ carding ’? No. Was it ‘ health ing ’ No. Was it any of the sins of the table or of the bed? No. I will tell you what it was, for you would never guess. Fraser had Paul and Luther and the Shorter Catechism by heart, and it was the tenth commandment with what is required and what is forbidden and the Scripture proofs. And with simply naming Fraser’s supreme uncleanness I will leave it. And that because those who are not driven beside them¬ selves with that same so besetting sin will never understand either Paul, or Luther, or the Catechism or Fraser. And those who have that so intricate, and so spiritual, and so diabolical sin in themselves, they do not need to go to Fraser, nor to any other man, for an autobiography of their secret sin, and their secret shame on account of their secret sin.

Now after all that you will be prepared to hear and to believe that this man’s whole autobiography is full, from board to board, of God’s intricate relations with him and with his intricate relations with God. And now — to borrow this word of his from Fraser — do you ever think what an intricate mind and what an intricate heart God’s mind and God’s heart must be? Try to think of a Mind and a Heart that can see and hear and rule and overrule all the intricacies of all the minds and all the hearts of all men! To have seen and to have heard and to have ruled and to have overruled Fraser’s one so intricate mind and heart and life alone — what a Divine Mind and Heart that must have been! But to see and to hear and to rule and to overrule all the minds and all the hearts of all men, past, present, and to come! Oh! the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out. For who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been His counsellor? And yet, past finding out as God’s so intricate ways are with us all, it is our best blessedness in this present life to believe and to be sure that God knows every intricacy of His own heart, as well as of our hearts: and knows all those intricacies as well as if He had no other hearts but yours and mine on His hands. O! think much and think often and think always about God, my brethren. And think far more than you have ever yet done about yourselves. And when you are overwhelmed with yourselves, turn always and more and more to God, and to God in Christ. Walk with God in Christ, my brethren. Look to God in Christ. Lean upon God in Christ. Trust God in Christ. And above all else, love God who is in Christ reconciling the world, with all its intricacies and with all its iniquities, unto Himself.

Now unto the King eternal, immortal, and invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory, for ever and ever. Amen.