Contrition

“For thy name’s sake, O Lord, pardon mine iniquity; for it is greats — Psalm xxv. ii.

THIS striking prayer is hemmed in, as it were, between two promises. It looks like a fossil embedded in a mass of stone. What means it there? Why is it put in such a peculiar position? The Psalmist is both praising and preaching. How is it he turns to praying? Beloved, I think it was to teach us that prayer is never out of place. When the Apostle Paul was writing the most doctrinal of the Epistles, he sometimes paused in the midst of them to offer a supplication, as when he said — “For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” When engaged in any holy duties you may even refrain from praise for a moment to present a prayer. Nor would it be amiss for us sometimes to break the thread of a sermon, that the people might pause and join with the preacher in asking God’s blessing upon the message of mercy, and upon all that hear it. Certainly, my dear friends, you will never find any time inopportune for prayer, if your heart be true and your faith in full force. The Mahometans have their hour for prayer, and when they hear the signal from the minaret of thd mosque, wherever they may be, in the street or in the market-place, they bow their heads to Allah, and repeat their form of prayer. Without their ostentation, you may “pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands without wrath and doubting.” We need not be confined to special seasons when a summons is given, but at all times, and in every place, we may continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving. When your hands are measuring out your goods, when they are pushing the plane, or driving the nail, when you are driving the plow, or threshing the corn, if you are speeding along the iron way, or walking among the corn fields, your heart may have fellowship with

him

“Who is within no walls confined,
But habiteth the humble mind,”

who counts all places holy where men are holy, and all spots places for prayer, when the heart is in a prayerful frame. My soul, wait thou upon God in thy daily calling, and think not that thou canst ever approach him at any unreasonable hour, or lift up thy cry to him when he is otherwise engaged, so that he cannot attend to thy petition.

Were.it necessary to my present purpose to explain the connection of this prayer with the scope of the psalm it would not be difficult. The promise that the Psalmist had just recited is “to such as keep his covenant.” It was the besetting sin of

Israel to break the covenant. Do you not see now that the tinge of a condition would shut the door of hope in our face? Therefore, the greatness of the promise often stirs up our deepest anxieties, lest any of us should seem to come short of it. Depend upon it, brethren, that the prayer for pardon, which is never unfitting at any time, can never be more fitting than when our hearts are lifted up with the loftiest apprehensions of God’s covenant. My principal aim, however, to-night, is to bring my hearers, myself, all of us, to feel with David, that our iniquity is great — for this I shall labor. When I have this done, I shall very briefly try to show how the very greatness of our iniquity may become a plea with God: “Pardon mine iniquity, for it is great.” And I shall close with some earnest entreaties to those who have never sought pardon of sin to seek it now.

I. Well then, first, David declared that his iniquity was great. The word used in the original conveys the idea of quantity as well as of quality. Not simply was his sin great in its atrocity, but there was very much of it; any one sin was great, but it was not one but ten thousand times ten thousand in multitudes. His sin was as great in the bulk as it was black in its heinousness. Now, I do not know, although David made one very terrible fall, that any humble-minded person here would consider himself to be superior to David. He was a man after God’s own heart, and notwithstanding a great blot upon his sun, we would not hesitate to say he is a sun for all that. For David presents a character so admirable, so all but matchless in the harmony of the different graces, that we think he certainly approaches very near to his great Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Certainly, if David felt his iniquity to be great, it would be very foul presumption in any of us to think ours to be little. At any rate, we have to come out and say, “I reckon mvself to be a better man than David was,” or else we ought to subscribe heartily with our hand to the truth, that our iniquity must be great too if David’s was.

But leaving David out of the question, not comparing ourselves with others, we will draw some few pictures by which the greatness of our iniquity may be seen. Our sin is great when we consider against whom it is committed. In an army, if a soldier shall strike his comrade, it is, of course, a misdemeanor, but if he should have smitten some petty officer it is considered to be a more grievous offence, and if he should have struck the commander-in-chief it would become so heavy a crime» that I know not what penalty short of death might be awarded it. Now, in the world of morals as God sees it, there is much difference in sin when we consider the difference in the person against whom it is committed. You and I think it is the worst sin that hurts us the most. We have heard, I dare say, the story of the lawyer who was waited upon by a farmer, to ask him what would be the penalty for a man whose horse was always getting into his neighbor’s field and eating his corn, whether it would be heavy; he had warned him several times, and he always would do it, and it was his fence, and he ought to have mended it. The lawyer said of course there would be a considerable fine, no doubt, and so on. “Well,” said he, “sir, it is your horse that has done this.” “Oh! “said our friend the solicitor, “that is quite a diff*erent question; I did not know it was my horse before 1 gave my opinion.” So it is, generally, with regard to anything that is done amiss, if it hurts you, or if it hurts me, we always feel very indignant about it, but if it only offends the Majesty of heaven we make light of it. What fools we are! If it shall off’end such puny, insignificant creatures as we, then there is something in it; but if the Divine Majesty be itself insulted, we pass it by as though it were a mere trifle. There really is a difference in the sin according to the person against whom it is committed. I will put it thus. A man has just now been striking another, striking him with an intent to do him hurt. “That is bad,” say you. “Yes, but it was his own father that he struck.” “Ay,” now you say, “that is far worse for him, to have injured the man whom he ought to have loved and honored.” So since God is our Creator, any attack that is made upon his government, any willful violation of his law, is aggravated by the fact that we owe to him such unbounded allegiance. “It is he that made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” Sinners, did you ever think of it? You have offended against him that made you, in whose hand your breath is, and under whose control are all your ways. When you have used profane words, it has been against the High and Lofty One, against Jehovah, who rides the sky, and launches abroad his thunderbolts, and shakes heaven and earth with his terrible voice; against him, before whom the bright archangels veil their faces and humbly bow themselves, unworthy to lick the dust of his feet; against God thou hast offended! Sinner, thou thinkest it is little, but I tell thee this it is that makes thine iniquity great.

Yet further, sin derives some degree of its sinfulness from the fact that it is an offence against a most just and equitable law. We sometimes read in the newspapers, that persons are severely punished for offences against the game laws. Well, I suppose it is a very wicked thing to shoot another person’s hares and pheasants and partridges. Were I a preserver of game I daresay I should consider the offence of the tenant farmer to be very aggravated who shot a bird that was feeding on his corn. As I am not, I do not particularly see its flagrant character. No doubt it is wrong, though it looks to me more like a misdemeanor than a felony. When a law is proved to be harsh and severe, there always will be some mitigation in our judgment of the culpabiUty of breaking it. If we consider such and such a law hard and tyrannical, not suited to the times, and out of keeping with the age, then we say when a person breaks it, “Well, he had better not have done it; it is an ofience against statute law and he ought not to have committed it; “still we do not think it to be so black as when the offence is against a just, equitable, proper, and righteous law, which harmonizes with strict, unvarying equity. Now, such is the law of God. What can be more fitting than the law of the Ten Commandments? Infidelity itself has turned pale before those Ten Commandments. We have heard of men who have attempted to improve the law of God by a new commandment and have found themselves unable to do it, for they perceived it to be so complete that it embraced all forms of criminality. Those who have abhorred other parts of Scripture have said, as they read the ten precepts, “These are just and righteous.’’ They are, indeed, the fundamental stones of natural m,orality; they are such as even nature itself would approve to be right and proper for the government of the world. Well then, sirs, if you have broken these good commandments, if you have run your neck against these holy, just and righteous precepts, your iniquity is great. If we could turn to any law of God and say, “This is harsh, this is tyrannical,” there were some excuse for you, but those commandments were made for your good; if you keep them they have their own reward, if you break them they bring their own penalty into your body and into your mind. Wherefore then have you been so foolish as to violate them? Assuredly, in so doing, thine iniquity has become heavy as the millstone, and if it be about thy neck when thou comest to die, it will sink thee in the floods forever.

But, dear friends, we ought each one of us to re- member that our sin is all the greater because it has been committed by us, for sometimes an oiFence is all the worse because of the person who committed it. When the noble Caesar saw Brutus stab him, he said, “And thou, Brutus!” There was force in his dying words, for Brutus was his dear friend, one who owed him no little. And surely the Lord might say to us, when we sin, “And you too; and you! You whom I have fed day by day; you who are clothed by my charity, and nourished by my bounty! You! living in this fair province of the universe which is called the world, this beautiful fair round green earth! You — partakers of such innumerable favors — you sin against me!” Ah, Christians, you that are heaven’s favorites, you that are allowed to enter into his cabinet counsels, and to understand the secrets of his covenant, you who are Christ’s own spouse, the bride of the Prince of heaven, your sin is blacker because of that light of his countenance in which it has been your privilege to walk.

But to hasten on, as I throw off these hints to be worked out in your own minds rather than to be dwelt upon in our discourse, let me remind you again that our sin is certainly very great, because of the amount of it. Innumerable times we have transgressed. It is not as though we had done wrong once and then washed our hands of it. Who can count his errors? What man shall tell the number of the small dust of his transgressions? As for the drops of dew twinkling in the morning light, as for the drops of the ocean making that vast flood, as for the stars of heaven, and the sand of the seashore, — the incalculable number of all these sink into insignificance when compared with the infinite host of our transgressions against thee, •O God of heaven and earth! This very day have there not been more sins than moments, more transgressions than heart-beats, more ofiences than pulses 1 God only knows the sin of man. Only his infinite mind can reckon the iniquity that crops forth from the polluted soil, and wells up from the deep spring of depravity that is hidden in the very cere of our corrupt nature. Count your sins if you can, 0 ye children of God, and then fall on your knees, bow your heads, cover your faces, and say, “Our iniquity indeed is great!”

Nor is this all; we ought to remember that we have sinned and offended without any provocation. When a poor wretch, pinched with hunger, snatches a loaf from a baker’s shop, and eats it ravenously in the street, what magistrate could forbear to treat him leniently? But when a rascal does a wanton mischief without cause, or commits a willful robbery without conscience, what defence can he set up? With such utter defiance of law and order we have no patience. Let the full punishment, we say, fall upon his guilty head. And this is what you and I have done; we have sinned for fiinning’s sake. When we spent our money in sin it was for that which is not bread, and our labor of iniquity was for that which did not profit us. You and I have not been gainers by all we have done amiss. There may have been times when you had the excuse of getting something by sin, but not always. For instance, what excuse is there for swearing? Lust may plead a pleasure, wine may ease a pain, avarice has an eye to gain, but the cheap swearer, from his open sluice, lets his soul run out in sorry curses, losing all the patience he possesses for the mere sake of venting forth black and ugly words that have no meaning. This is infamous; what if I say it is infernal! — to sin for the mere sake of sinning. We heard of one the other day who said, when reproved for cursing, that he would continue to swear; yea, if he had an angel on each shoulder he would go on cursing still. There seem to be some of this sort who, for the mere sake of dabbling in the mire, will do it; and, in truth, we have all in our time sinned in open defiance of the Almighty, and, therefore, our iniquity is heavy. Sons of men, I put it to you, as one of yourselves, and, therefore willing to be your advocate — but I must rather take up the cause of him against whom we hare offended — what has he ever done to us that we should hate him? He has made us, fed us, clothed us-; for which of these good works do we forget him? He has sent his Son to redeem his people; is this a cause why we should despise him? He follows us day after day with invitations of mercy, stirs up our consciences, hedges up the road to hell as though he would not let us perish; for which of these things do we requite him with evil? What hath the Most High done to provoke you? Let him answer; do ye first lay your accusation, however. Has he ever done you a displeas-ure? In what respect has he thwarted you? What pleasure that is a real pleasure has he denied you? Is his yoke heavy? Is his burden intolerable? Are his commandments like the whips of Solomon? or his laws like the scorpions of Rehoboam? Hath he made his little finger thicker than the wires of human law? Do ye not know that men in superstition wdll make laws ten times harder than God’s laws ever were, and will keep theui too? It cannot, therefore, be that God hath thus offended you. 0, wherefore, then, sons of men, do we spurn our Father? Why do we despise our God? What can there be so good in sin that we will have it, and God’s anger with it? What can there be so sweet in hell that we choose it, and despise the glories of heaven? Yerily, in this arrant folly, this flagrant malice, this frantic madness, our iniquity is great indeed.

Yet further, what if I should say that we have gone on in sin after we have, some of us, known and felt the evil of it! I speak advisedly when I appeal to almost all of you now present, must not your iniquity be great, because it was not done in ignorance? How many here were trained up in the lap of godliness — your sins, therefore, are ten tim«s heavier than other men’s. The lamp of the sanctuary lit us to our cradles. The hush of lullaby had the name of Jesus mingled with it. Perhaps the first song we learned to sing was concerning the children’s best friend. The first book that we began to read contained his sweet name, and many were the times when we were pressed by godly ones to think of Jesus, and to give our young hearts to him. But we put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter, darkness for light, and light for darkness, and knowing the good from the evil we did willfully choose that which is wrong. Ah, for this thing, when we have sinned against light and knowledge, does not our transgression become greater than that of Tyre and Sidon that perished in their sin? And then, I say, when we had learned by experience, as well as by education, that sin was bitter, we went on in it still. There is a young man yonder that went astray once, and smarted for it, and he thought he would never be such a fool again. But it hath happened to him according to the true proverb. The dog is turned to his own vomit, and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire. Some men seem only to get out of one ditch to roll into another. There are plenty of persons who when they put their fingers in the fire and burn them, run and get them bound up and healed, only to go to the next fire and thrust, not their lingers in this time, but their arms up to the elbow. Take care, one of these days, man, you don’t find body and soul consumed in that fire. How foolish some are who have been on the spendthrift line! After they have emptied their pockets and found themselves beggars, they have gone to their friends who used to take a glass with them — such jolly boon companions, such dear friends they were, but they do not know them now. “0 no,” they say, and give them the cold shoulder, now that their clothes begin to look a little out at elbows. I have seen these people get employment again, and throw themselves out of it by their ill character. I have seen them get a respectable situation perhaps two or three times, and then go and ruin themselves over again, and expect their friends to set them up once more; set them up on purpose that they may have the pleasure of tumbling down. When men do this so many times, certainly their iniquity becomes heavy.

1 have put the case strongly concerning one or two delinquents; they are, however, only representatives of us all, for when we have smarted for an offence, we have committed it again. Burnt children are afraid of the fire, but burnt sinners are not; they will go to the fire again, like the moth which gets to the candle, singes her wings, flies orfF a little, but she must needs go again, and if you lift her out of the melted grease around the light, she will fly back again the first opportunity, as if she thought it her ambition, and her life’s best glory, to be consumed in the fire. Oh I iniquity is great when it is against experience. Men run upon the pikes of damnation. They destroy their own souls by a sort of spiritual suicide.

At times men’s offences to their fellow-men lose some of their guiltiness by an apology. Why, I knoAV sometimes, when we have been aggrieved by some little offence, and a proper apology has been promptly made, we could have wished we never had taken notice of it, for we did not like to see the good man so sorry about it: we freely forgave him, and felt as if we did not want him even to feel he had done wrong, because he took it too much to heart: so we passed over the offence because of the repentance. But how great is that man’s sin who, having sinned, refuses to repent! And is not this ex?ictly the case of many here present, sinning from your cradles, but repenting never? Repentance is hid from your eyes; ye go on from bad to worse, from dark to deeper stains. The Ethiopian has not changed his skin, nor the leopard his spots. Ye have sought to no physician for your healing. Ye have let the deadly gangrene grow yet more putrid, until the whole head is sick and the whole heart faint. Careless sinner I I would to-night I could play the part of Mr. John Bunyan’s Captain Boanerges, and run up the red colors before your eye, bearing as the escutcheon the flaming thunderbolts of God’s justice. Ye who will not repent must incur the fierce wrath of God. Lo! he hath bent his bow, and made it ready, he hath fitted his arrow to the string, he takes his mark to-night at thee, the arrow shall soon fly and reach thy heart. 0 that thou hadst grace to repent! 0 Spirit of God, break the sinner’s heart!

0 take thou hold of thy great hammer, with which thou dost cleave mountains, and dash that heart in pieces, that the sinner may cry out, “Pardon mine iniquity, for it is great.”

With some men their iniquity becomes all the greater, because they have sinned against promises which they have made, vows which have been registered in heaven, and covenants which they had signed with the Most High. You know who

1 mean. You were ill with the fever some few years ago, you were given up, you turned your face to the wall, and you remember how, in the bitterness of your soul, you said, “0! God, if thou wilt spare me, mine shall be another and a better life.” You were spared, and your life has been rather worse than better. You remember, too, when the cholera was abroad, and there were many falling on the right hand and on the left, you were terrified and alarmed, and you sought God after a sort, and you told him that if he would but spare your life, that life should be spent in his service. What have you been doing since? It is true you sometimes go to the house of God, but it is in the evening; when you have made your money in the morning, you do not mind giving

God the fag end of the Sunday. The first two or three weeks after you got better the shutters were up; there was no rioting, no swearing, no loose conversation: your neighbors said, “What has come over the fellow? he is quite a different man.” Yes, you had another heart for the time, but not a new heart, and now you are as reckless as ever. Do you think God has forgotten your promises? Do you think that registered covenant of yours has been blotted out? No, sinner, no; it stands fast against thee to make thy guilt more infamous, and thy transgressions more heavy! Take heed! take heed! take heed! when God shall hold it up against thee at the last tremendous day, thou wilt read thy doom in that broken promise, in that lie which had been uttered against a God of grace and goodness. Such having been the case with some of us, most of us at some time or other having sinned thus against resolutions and promises, our iniquities are heavy. 0 dear friends! I have a task too hard for me. When I talk of the glories of the love of Christ I feel at home; when I speak of the matchless grace of the everlasting covenant, my heart is well at ease; but 0! to prove man’s sin heavy is a task too hard for me. Not that it is hard in itself The evidence is clear, but to procure a conviction is the difficulty. The jury is not impartial. Your conscience is like an unjust judge. Oh how hard it is to make any man believe himself to be so bad as the Word of God says he is! None but the Spirit of God can make a man call himself a sinner and mean it. Nothing but the irresistible influence of the Holy Spirit can ever bring a man as low as the Word of God would have him. If thou canst feel in thy soul to-night that thine iniquity is great, that it deserves God’s wrath, displeasure, and punishment, I have hope of thee that the first sparks of the Divine light have fallen into thy soul, never to be quenched, but to blaze out in the brightness of salvation forever. “0 Lord, pardon thou mine iniquity, for it is great!”

II. I shall now turn very briefly to the second part, to show how there is a plea in the very greatness of our sins. Is not this a very strange text, think you? Look at it again; one needs to read it over twenty times. Is it so written? Can you believe your own eyes? “Pardon mine iniquity, for it is great! “Imagine a prisoner at the Old Bailey pleading with the judge that he would kindly let him off”, because he was a great off’ender; we should think that it would be a very legitimate reason why he should not be pardoned. The pith, however, of the whole text lies in those words which we forget to quote — “For thy name’s sake.” That alters it. It is an argument now; it was not before. “For thy name’s sake, pardon mine iniquity; for it is great.” Now let us show that there is a plea here. If salvation were by merit, then supposing all men to have fallen, and none of them to have any merit, yet it would be a rule that the man who was the least offender should have the first turn at being saved. If the choice of God depended in any way upon roan’s condition, we should naturally expect that the man who had the least sin would be forgiven first; for putting all on an equality in all other respects, the choice, if made at all, with reference to the man, would naturally be the choice of the man who had committed the least iniquity. But, dear friends, please to remember that in the covenant of Christ, and the way of salvation, the choice is made upon reverse principles, not according to man’s merit, but according to God’s glory. The aim, end, and object of God, in salvation, is to glorify his own character; hence, if his choice may be said to be guided by any principles which we can at all understand, that choice would be guided to select those who would the most magnify his grace and glorify his own name. Well now, if God would do that great work of pardoning sin in such a way as to glorify his own name, the most “fitting persons to be saved are the biggest sinners. Let us put it thus. There is a number of persons; they are all sick: here is a physician, he intends to get to himself a name, he is full of benevolence and kindness, but at the same time, one part of his object is to get a name. Now, you will perceive that, in the selection of his patients, he will not pick out a man there who has got a sore finger, for it will never tell very much to his credit, that he healed a man who had a sore finger; but there will be, perhaps, a few cases among the sick of a very extraordinary sort; some of them will have an affliction, a disease, quite unknown hitherto to the faculty. Medicines have been tried, but the cases have been so stubborn that the best doctors have given them up as hopeless. Now, the physician says,” These are the cases that I will select.” Granting that he is able to cure whomsoever he wills, you can see that if the object be his own glory, he had rather take those in which there is the most room for the display of the healing art, than those who have the least sickness, and might be the most readily cured. Yet again; suppose a man would have a character for generosity, and there are a number of debtors asseml)led, and he is determined to discharge their liabilities. There is a man there who owes a sixpence, another owes a pound. Well now, if he pays their debts, he will never have much credit for liberality there; but another comes in, a thumping debtor, one who is over head and ears in debt. What is the sum there? Fifty thousand pounds; let us say a hundred thousand pounds, let as say half a million. Well, now, here is the opportunity for the liberal man to display his liberality, because here there is room for it. So is it in grace. You proud Pharisees, you come to God and say,” Lord, I thank thee that I am not

as other men;” and he replies, “Then there is no room in you for my grace to work.” Yon poor publican dares not lift so much as his eyes towards heaven — smites upon his breast. “There is a case for me,” saith sovereign mercy, and the pardon comes. Mark, when I speak of sinners, I do not mean merely those who have been great sinners, or those who have been in comparison with others, little sinners, but I mean those who feel themselves great sinners. 1 say, the more we feel our guilt the more fit we are for mercy; the more broken down we are with hopelessness, on account of our own lost estate, the more room there is for the triumphs of Christ. Now, there is many a moral man here to-night, who never offended against the laws of his land, or the laws of outward propriety, and yet he feels himself to be as black as hell. Well then, there is room in him for grace to glorify itself We have noticed that men of the worst character are often the most self-righteous. There is many a Pharisee whose morals would not pass muster, though he vaunts his piety as a harlot flaunts her broidery; and many a scamp, who would be a disgrace to the meanest society if his character were known, brazens it out as though he never had offended against a single law of God. Again I say, ye chief of sinners, and ye that feel it, ye who groan and mourn on account of sin, be not silenced at the mercy-seat because of the greatness of your guilt, but rather, with the inimitable skill of the Syro-Phenician woman, turn the very desperateness of your case into a reason why he should hear and answer you. Now to-night, upon your knees, wrestle with the angel of mercy, and say, “Pardon ( me, for my transgression is great; and my hell will ( be great. But if thou save me thine honor will 1 be great; if thou redeem me, the power of thy blood will be great; if thou give me a new heart, the transforming power of thy Spirit will be great. God, save me; be merciful to me a sinner.” This is, as Luther says, to cut off the devil’s head with his own sword. When the devil says to you, “You are a sinner,” say to him, “I am, and Christ died to save sinners.” And when he says, ‘* But you are a big sinner,” answer him, ‘* Lord, have mercy upon me, for mine iniquity is great.” “But,” says he, “You are a Jerusalem sinner, a bigger sinner than any other.” Say, “Yes, it is true; but Jesus said, ’ beginning at Jerusalem.’”

0! 1 have tried, and I am trying, to preach a. wide gospel; I do not like to have a net with such big meshes that the fish get through. I think I may catch you all if the Lord wills. If the vilest are not shut out, then you are not shut out, friends; and if thou believest in Christ with all thy heart, thou shalt be saved. But 0! what if you should say, “I care not for forgiveness; I do not want pardon, I will not seek it; I will not have it; I love my sins; I love myself!” O, sinner! then by that death-bed of thine, where thou shalt see sins in another light; by that resurrection of thine, where thou shalt see eternity to be no trifle; by that doom of thine; by the last dread thunders; by the awful sentence, “Depart, ye cursed,” of the Judge, I beseech you, do me but this one favor. Own that you had an invitation to-night, and that it was affectionately pressed upon you. I have told you, in God’s name, that your sin is not a trifle with God — that it is not a matter to be laughed at or to be whistled over. I have told you that the greatness f your sin need not shut you out. What is wanted is that the Spirit of God should teach you these things in your heart. But do remember, if your ears refuse these truths, and if you reject them, we are a sweet savor unto Christ as well in them that perish as in them that are saved. But woe unto you — woe unto you, who, with the gospel ringing in your ears, go down to the pit! “Verily, verily, I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for you.” May God save you, for Jesus’ sake. Amen!