I Believe … in the Forgiveness of Sins
Tuts clause in the Creed is ever memorable for the comfort it brought to the heart of Martin Luther, when he was passing through an agony of conviction, and it reminds us of Psalm cxxx., which begins with De Profundis and ends with Plenteous Redemption.
Four of the greatest saints of the Church have left on record their love for that Psalm, which contains the comforting and inspiring assurance, “There is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.” Luther set it to one of his grandest songs, and it was sung around his bier, as his body was carried to its last resting-place. John Owen, the great Puritan commentator, tells us that in a time of great depression the verse just quoted was the key to his prison-house. John Wesley tells us that on the eve of his memorable visit to Germany, a sermon on the same text was the means of a great revival in his soul. And Jonathan Edwards, when he lay a-dying, noticing
how the watches in his sick-chamber went 206 repeatedly to see if the morning were breaking, recalled this Psalm, and spoke of it as having been the great solace of his life. It is remarkable what different stages of experience are met by the same words. Christian life is a spiral staircase; we go round and round, always coming back to the same view from another level. As saints grow in the likeness of God,.they come back and back again on the fundamental principles of forgiveness and redemption and peace through the mediation of Christ. When I stood at Serampore, beside the grave of William Carey, it brought a mist of tears to my eyes, as I spelt out the verse that he himself selected:
A guilty, weak, and helpless worm,
On thy kind arms I fall,
Be thou my strength and righteousness,
My Saviour and my All.
Dr. Draper, the great scientist, has invented an instrument of such delicacy, that he is able to photograph constellations which cannot be detected by the eye; another has invented an instrument which will register the pulse of an insect. As civilization advances, we become quicker to appreciate shades of expression and harmony which would have escaped less sensitive ages. Similarly the growth of the soul is diagnosed by the delicacy and quickness with which it discriminates right and wrong. Our Christian life is not a deepening one unless we are becoming more and more sensitive of shades of selfishness, envy, jealousy, and uncharitableness, which fill us with shame, and make us cry out for forgiveness. To the end of life the greatest saints will call themselves the chief of sinners, and confess that their only hope is in Him who came by water and blood, not by water only, but by water and blood.
It is Forgiveness that we need! That we should forget is not enough. In one of his books, Mr. Edward Bellamy refers to the hypothesis that memory may consist of an infinite number of very minute fibres, each of which represents the recollection of one fact; and he goes on to suggest that if somehow any one fibre, which records some daring sin could be dissolved, the remorseful recollection of that sin would be obliterated. He depicts the case of a woman who had committed one terrible sin, and was mesmerized, so to speak, by its perpetual presence. She dared not enter society or face recognition, but lived under a spell. After submitting herself to this imaginary process, somehow the fibre of memory which held the record of her sin was discovered and dissolved, and she came out of the trance with great lightness of soul. But that is a mean way of getting away from the past. It is like a woman murdering her child, and then taking laudanum to drown the memory of her crime.
Sir Arthur Helps suggests that the best way to escape the memory of our sin is to buy a bottle of “sleep-medicine,” by taking draughts of which memory is drugged. Some people seem to invest heavily in this sleep-medicine, rushing from continent to continent, from society to society, from one amusement to another, never daring to be alone, always drugging their memory with opiates.
No, none of these remedies will really avail. - They would not have availed Augustine, or Luther, or Bunyan. When we are in the depths of conviction, there is only one star shining far above the pit’s mouth which has power to raise us from the depth to the height, from the depth in which we cry, as though we alone were the sinner of sinners, ‘‘ God be merciful to me, the sinner,” to the height, where in the ecstasy of assured acceptance, we cry, “Being justified by faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Chnist.”