"The More I Do the Worse I Am"

WHEN Dr. Chalmers was at Skirling

on one occasion he went to the village school and gave the children an elementary lesson in optical science. Taking the black-board and a piece of chalk he drew a long diameter on the board and then he ran a large circumference around the diameter. And then in his own imaginative and dramatic way turning to the children he said to them, ‘ You must all see that the longer the diameter of light the larger is the surrounding circumference of darkness. And in like manner the shorter the diameter of light the smaller is the circumference of the surrounding darkness.’ Now all we have to do this evening is to carry over that striking illustration from the region of mathematical and optical things to the region of moral and spiritual things and we shall have Thomas Shepard’s religious experience set before us in a way we shall never forget. The more that Shepard does, that is to say, the longer his diameter of duty done the larger is the circumference of duty he has still to do. And the holier his heart becomes: the more sinful the remaining corruption of his. heart becomes to him, till he cries out like the holiest of men, O wretched man that I am!

Our best way will be to go to Thomas Shepard himself for an outstanding instance of this painful experience of his and this remorseful admission of his. And perhaps the best instance of all his. instances is his lifelong experience of the exceeding sinfulness of his Sabbath days. Never did the most conscientious preacher do more than Shepard did to prepare himself every new week for a fruitful and a happy Sabbath, both to his. people and to himself. Shepard was a hard worker both in his pastoral visitations and in his. study. He took the very greatest pains in the preparation of his sermons. He had an intellectual and a spiritual people, he respected and revered his people, and he worked hard for them. It was his rule to work hard early in the week and as a rule he had his sermons ready by two o’clock on Saturday afternoon. And then he gave up the whole of the Saturday evening and Sabbath morning to prepare his own mind and heart for his pulpit duties on the coming day. ‘These are Shepard’s own severe words on this subject: ‘God will surely curse that minister who lumbers up and down the world all the week and then thinks to prepare for his pulpit by a hurried hour or two on Saturday night and Sabbath morning. Whereas, God knows, Saturday night and Sabbath morning were little enough time in which to weep:

and to pray and to get his sinful soul into a fit frame for the approaching day.’ And when some young ministers came to see Shepard on his deathbed he said to them: ‘Your work, remember, is a great work; and it demands great seriousness of mind on your part. For my own part, he went on, ‘I always sought to get good to my own soul in composing my sermons. And I always went to the pulpit as if it were my last sermon before I went to give an account of my ministry to God.’ Now after all that, you would have felt sure that Shepard would always have had the best ministerial conscience in all New England, and the happiest and the sweetest of Sabbath days and Sabbath nights. But as a matter of fact it was the very opposite of that. In all autobiography I have never come across such sad reading as are Shepard’s Sabbath night entries in his secret journal. Entry after entry is made with the sweat of an agonised conscience and with the blood of a broken heart, till I shall not attempt to tell you his terrible self-accusations all the Sabbath day and all the Sabbath night. How his first and last thought all Sabbath was himself, and not God nor God’s people. How he was puffed up, like a born fool, if he thought he had got on well in his prayers and in his sermons, and then how he was like Heman himself in his misery if he had not had enough eloquence and impressiveness that day in his pulpit. How he fished for his people’s praise after a successful sermon, and how his heart was like dust and ashes all night if no one had flattered him. ‘Vile! vile! vile!’ he cries a thousand times in his Sabbath night papers. His abominable self-seeking, his miserable thought of his own glory in all he did, made Shepard gnash his teeth at himself as if he were in hell. In his own words, he was ‘in the deepest hell’ on many a Sabbath night. Samuel Rutherford, like Thomas Shepard, was a born preacher. But his indwelling sin, in his case also, poisoned all his Sabbaths and made his Anwoth pulpit the greatest temptation of his much-tempted life. There is a proverb to the effect that, when the best things become corrupt, there you have corruption indeed. And so both Shepard and Rutherford experienced it to be in the matter of their pulpit work. Do what they would they could not keep the thought of themselves out of their minds even in their most sanctified services. And that corrupted and polluted the pulpit to those two saints of God in a way and to a degree that only a saintly and at the same time a self-seeking preacher will ever understand and believe. Rutherford often wondered, in his own passionate way, that he had not been eaten up of worms in his pulpit, as Herod was on his throne, and for the very same reason. The more that Shepard and Rutherford did to prepare for their preaching, and the more they sought God’s glory while they were engaged in their preaching, the more they felt themselves to be the vilest of all men. And there was a third minister in that day of that same mind about himself. ‘One of my best friends,’ writes Shepard, ‘ and one of the best men now living on the earth, has said to me that if the Lord, out of His grace, does not save him, he is undone for ever. For his heart and his whole nature are against God; and the more he does of God’s command and will, the worse he discovers his heart and whole nature within him to be.’ Those were three very wretched ministers: four, counting the Apostle Paul. For, as Dr. Chalmers would have said, the longer their diameter of preparation and prayer for their pulpits the more did those four devoted ministers cry out every Sabbath day, Who is sufficient for these things! And the more their innermost hearts were cleansed clear of themselves and their self-seeking, the more did every remaining drop of

themselves make them to lie on their faces before God all Sabbath night sobbing and saying: O wretched men that we are! Who shall deliver us from this body of death? Many more instances of this same thing crowd in upon me till I have no room for them. Take this one more instance, and this time out of our own Thomas Boston. ‘My Sabbath day duties were enough of themselves to damn me: my Sabbath day duties must all be washed along with myself in the sin-atoning Blood. The first impression on my spirit after I came down from the pulpit was. my utter inability to escape from my sinfulness. of heart. I saw that it was as possible for a rock to lift itself up to heaven as it was for me to raise my heart to true holiness.’ So says the truly holy Thomas Boston about himself; ‘ that truly great Scottish divine, says Jonathan Edwards. But my brethren, all this time an ounce of your own experience is better than a ton of testimony from other men. Now among so many now present there must surely be some of you who know in yourselves the terrible truth of what Shepard says. There was a time, was there not? when you did not feel any sin, or any guilt, or any shame, or any remorse, whatever you said or did. As Paul has it in his great journal of his own experience, the law of true spiritual holiness had not yet entered your evil heart. But ever since that holy law has entered your evil heart, as the Apostle says about himself, you, like him, have died. That is to say, the more you now do to fulfil that law of true holiness the more you have-to do that you can never hope to do. Nowadays, as spiritually-minded Thomas Boston has it, the best thing you ever do would be enough to damn you, were judgment laid to the line and righteousness to the plummet. There is so much of yourself in the best things you do and so little of God and His glory. Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Shepard’s spiritual scholar, has drawn your spiritual portrait to perfection as you now are. ‘The more,’ says Edwards, ‘a true saint loves God with a truly gracious love, the more he desires to love Him, and the more miserable he is at his want of love to Him. The more he hates sin, the more he desires to hate it. The more he mourns for sin, the more he longs to mourn for it. The more his heart is broken for sin, the more he prays that it may be far more broken. The more he hungers and thirsts after God, the more he faints and fails in seeking after God. Forgetting those things that are behind, he ever reaches forth to those things that are still before. He ever presses toward the far-off mark. To take a familiar instance out of your own experience. You will take up your secret cross for weeks and months and that without a frown or a murmur or even a sigh that any mortal ear hears. But after a long season of the sweetest submission and the most spontaneous and spiritual obedience some day, and most unaccountably to you, something happens to you and to your cross, and, in a moment, a great outbreak of rebellion and bitterness fills your heart. All you have suffered in the past, all you have attained to of submission and resignation in the past, seems to you to have been lost in a moment. So it often seemed to Paul also, and to Shepard, and to Rutherford, and to Boston, and to Chalmers. But it is not so. The truth is, it is. because you have borne your cross so bravely, and have suffered under it so nobly, that the remaining dregs of your rebellion are so bitter to your sanctified heart. It is because the blessed law of resignation and submission has gone so deep into your renewed heart that the spots of sin still remaining there are so black and so bitter to you to bear. The diameter D of your holy obedience has been so long and so beautiful that the darkness that still hangs around it is so dark and dense to you.

Or again, is your besetting sinfulness not so much your rebellion at your daily cross, as, say, Asaph’s besetting sin of envying and grieving at the prosperity of some neighbouring man? Or is it a heart as dark as hell with ill-will at some neighbouring man? Or is it a revengeful and an unforgiving heart at some such man? ‘Then here also the Apostle’s great principle comes in, the law enters and consequently the sinfulness of your heart abounds. And here also Dr. Chalmers’ blackboard illustration comes in, and in this way. The more honest delight you try to have in another man’s prosperity, and the less and less ill-will you try to feel toward your enemy, and the more you are able to forgive your enemy even to seventy times seven, the more you are tortured with the secret remainders of envy and malice and revenge in your heart; the longer the diameter of love the larger the circumference of the evil feeling still remaining in your unsanctified heart. You are under that most blessed law which so orders the spiritual life that as long as any dregs of secret sinfulness still dwell in your heart you feel as if there was nothing but a hopeless sinfulness in your heart. Like Bishop Andrewes, you feel as if you were actually ‘ made of sin, and as if not one atom of true holiness had ever entered into your composition at all.. That is your deepest feeling about yourself; whereas the real truth is no man will ever taste what true holiness of heart is but by passing through the same experience of sin as your experience, which was the experience of Paul also, and Shepard, and Rutherford, and Boston, and Chalmers. In the experience of all such men the holy law of God enters deeper and deeper and deeper every day, till the remaining sinfulness of their heart abounds every day. But then when such remaining sinfulness abounds, grace much more abounds, that as your sinfulness hath reigned unto your death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto your eternal life by Jesus Christ your Lord.

‘Truly to see and to feel indwelling sin is the torture of all tortures,’ said Luther, who knew that torture by a lifelong experience of it. And yet neither Luther nor any other spiritually-minded man would for one moment exchange that fearful torture, no not for a bed of roses. The truly spiritual man lies down on his lifelong rack, and actually loves it, because he believes that to him perfect and everlasting holiness of heart lies beyond it. Bear up, then, O sin-tortured soul! For it is but for a moment. Bear up, because it will assuredly work in you and for you an exceeding and an eternal weight of glory. Your never-to-be-told sufferings because of your remaining sinfulness are a sure token to you that you are far on in the way that leadeth, and that alone leadeth, to everlasting life. Keep up your heart then amid all your agony of heart, for eye hath not seen nor ear heard what God hath prepared for sufferers like you. Life-long agony and all, you have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption. The Spirit also bearing witness with your spirit that you are the children of God. And if children, then heirs: heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ: if so be that you suffer with Him, that you may be also glorified together.

I ask’d the Lord that I might grow
In faith, and love, and every grace:
Might more of His salvation know,
And seek more earnestly His face.

I hoped that in some favour’d hour
At once He’d answer my request,
And, by His love’s constraining power,
Subdue my sins and give me rest.

Instead of that, He made me feel
The hidden evils of my heart,
And let the angry powers of hell

Assault my soul in every part.

‘ Lord, why is this?’ I trembling cried, ‘ Wilt thou pursue a worm to death?’

‘Tis in this way,’ the Lord replied,

‘T answer prayer for grace and faith.

These inward trials I employ
From self and sin to set thee free:
To break thy scheme of earthly joy
That thou mayst seek thy all in Me.’