Oh! For More Feeling!

What language is more common among awakened sinners than this: “I can not feel that I am a sinner. And yet I know that I have broken God’s holy law. I acknowledge that I am justly condemned. I am deeply distressed at times with the thought that I must surely perish. But my great burden is that I can not feel this. I have no deep sense of my own sinfulness. My constant and agonizing prayer has been for months, ’ 0 Lord! break this hard unfeeling heart!’”

There are unhappy souls, we must admit, whom God has deserted, who do not and can not feel their lost condition; and who are designated by the Apostle as “past feeling.” Do you, afflicted reader, class yourself among these? You know that you can not. You are in distress; and what distresses you? That you are calm and unmoved in the midst

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of your sins? That the awfal position of your soul is unnoticed by you? That you have no desire to return to God?

“Ko, this is not my condition,” you instantly answer. “I do feel; yet it is not because I am a sinner, but because my heart is so hard and unfeeling.”

Now suppose you transfer this experience from your soul to your body, and see how unfounded are your troubles. You are afflicted with a deep-seated malady; it is invisible, it gives no pain; and yet its effects are apparent, in the wasting of your body. Suppose you were to argue thus: “I know that there is a deadly disease preying upon my vitals, and I desire to be cured; but I feel no pain — I do not see the loathsome seat of evil. If I could only feel and see this, I would call for the physician.”

You do know that the disease is there, and you do know that you are a sinner. The Spirit and the law of God have been working this conviction, and your deceitful heart is only shrinking into this refuge of lies in order to delay its flight to the city of refuge.^

1 Heb. 6: 13,

The word of God gives us no intimation as to the precise amount of feeling which we are to have before we approach Christ for healing. Bartimeus knew that he was blind. This was enough to lead him to the waj-side, where Jesus was to pass. There is no evidence that he thought of searching into the nature or origin of his blindness. He knew that he was blind, and that was enough to force from him the crj, “Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me I” The Israelites, who were bitten bj the fiery serpents, were not required to trace the effects of the subtle poison as it entered the circulation, or to mark the symptoms of its deadly progress, before they looked at the brazen serpent for healing. The moment they felt the venomous fang they might look and be healed. Since it was so with th types of the sinner and the cross, is it not equally so with the antitypes?

Where has God said. Produce so much conviction, feel so and so, in regard to your sin, humble your soul to that particular point of anguish and grief, and then you may have Christ and his free grace? Nay; on such a plan no inquiring soul could ever know his warrant to believe, because he could never as- 105 certain whether his conviction, grief, and anguish were enough.

“Let not conscience make you linger;
Nor of fitness fondly dream:
AU the fitness he requireth
Is to feel your need of him.”

It was truly said by President Edwards, “that those who are partly convinced of sin are not apt to think themselves greatly convinced; and the reason is this: men judge of the degree of their own convictions of sin by two things jointly considered, namely, the degree of sense which they have of guilt and pollution, and the degree of cause they have for such a sense, in the degree of their real sinfalness. It is really no argument of any great conviction of sin for some men to think themselves to be very sinful, be/ond most others in the world; because they are so indeed very plainly and notoriously. And therefore a far less conviction of sin may inchne such a one to think so than another; he must be very blind indeed, not to be sensible of it. But he that is truly under great conviction of sin, naturally thinks this to be his case. It appears to him that the cause he has lOG to be sensible of guilt and pollution is greater than others have, and therefore he ascribes his sensibleness of this to the greatness of his sin, and not to the greatness of his sensibility.”

This difficulty as to a want of feeling arises wholly from a wrong view of what salvation is. We fail to see in it a perfect gratuity to sinners. To sinners I say, for the whole effort of the soul, in all its struggles, is to make some preparation, to be in some peculiar state of mind, before it can receive the free gift. But Christ came to call not the righteous, but sinners; the invitations of the Gospel are to SINNERS. No one, indeed, will come to the physician who has not a sense of want; but there is no merit, nor any proper preparation, in such sense of want. It is only hungering and thirsting. If you hunger after salvation, come; if you are athirst, come; if you are heavy laden because you can not feel your sins, come.

Let us, however, suppose this difficulty to be removed. You are satisfied that certain convictions of sin are not prescribed as necessary to your acceptance of Christ. Satan and your own deceitful heart have not yet 107 exhausted their subterfuges. You now are troubled because jou feel no love, nor joy; and the soul often complains that it has even no desire for salvation. It seems to be your determined purpose to obstruct the way by every possible impediment. Can you conceive of a drowning man refusing to seize the rope which is thrown to him, because he doubts whether he feels gratitude enough to the friend who has thrown it; or because he is not certain whether he rightly -wishes to be saved? Surely Satan has blinded the minds of them that believe not, when he can thus prevent them from simply accepting eternal life.

There are two grand errors upon which all these difficulties of the inquiring soul rest. The first is that there is some work, preparation, or experience demanded previous to a surrender of the heart to Christ. The second is, that salvation is an emotion, or a feeling, or a series of these, instead of a new life besrun in faith. All the thoughts, emotions, or acts of the soul, before it rests upon Christ, are utterly worthless in the sight of God. ^’ Lord, I BELIEVE,” is the first utterance of the new-born soul. Preceding exercises, if they

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have any value, only lead the soul to this confession, and then the feelings are the fruits of that new life derived at the cross.

You may have been weeks or months waiting for these feelings to come — wrestling with God in prayer that he would send them — and deeply disturbed because the prayer was not answered. Did you ever go to the Word of God, and put your finger upon the command that you must have this feeling or that feeling, before you could believe on Christ? Did our Lord tell Mcodemus to go home and wait until his heart was broken, and then come again and receive life? No, He told him to believe. Did the apostles tell the thousands who were awakened by Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost, to wait for farther light or further conviction? No, the command was, repent. It was an act to be performed then; and among the three thousand who did receive Christ there, must there not have been an infinite variety of experience? Some felt as you feel — perhaps some delayed as you delay — but the three thousand, without waiting, received the proffered salvation. Did Paul advise the trembling jailer to wait until he was better prepared to come? No, but out 100 of the very jaws of suicide to believe in that Saviour who received him. A young man came to the writer of these pages a few weeks ago under great concern, asking what he must do to be saved. He was directed to the Cross and its Divine Victim, and to a simple receiving of the Lord Jesus Christ as the only Way of life. A few days after he came rejoicing in hope, saying: “I did not know how easy a thing conversion was. I thought there would be some great and wonderful change in my feelings before I came to the Cross.” This is but the old story of Naaman, or rather of the human heart, refusing to receive a free salvation; looking at its own corruptions and its amendment, instead of the great object of faith which is so prominently set before us in the Word of God.

Let the reader look at the sum of these errors and disheartening delays. You are unwilling to be saved by grace. You do not confess it, but your posture proves it; you are waiting, waiting, waiting, months or even years, to be borne away into some griefs or raptures, which, it may be, God has no purpose of bestowing upon you. The effect is preposterously put before the cause, feeling before faith. If you oh! for more feeling I ll

could only feel hope, grief, terror, love, you would believe. God’s declaration of mercy would then be true -to you. Ah I sinner, it is true to you now, whether you feel or not. Feeling becomes self-righteousness, if it takes the place of the righteousness of Christ. “Would you feel now? Only believe. It is at the Cross (that is, believing) that the burden falls from the back, and tears of genuine feeling from the eyes.

The Lord will happiness divine

On contrite hearts bestow;

Then tell me, gracious God, is mine
A contrite heart or no?

I hear, but seem to hear in vain,

Insensible as steel;
If aught is felt, ’tis only pain

To find I can not feel

I sometimes think myself inclined

To love thee if I could;
But often feel another mind

Averse to all that’s good.

ily best desires are faint and few — I fain would strive for more;

But when I cry, “My strength renew,” Seem weaker than before. Ill

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Thy saints are comforted, I know,
And love thy house of prayer;

I therefore go where others go,
But find no comfort there.

Oh 1 make this heart rejoice or ache, Decide this doubt for me;

And if it be not broken, break,
And heal it if it be.