"I Did Not Remember the Sins of My Youth; Nay, the Sins of One Day I Forgot the Next Day"

FORGETFUL GREEN was the most {dangerous spot in all the way up to the Celestial City. ‘ Your father, said Greatheart to Samuel, ‘had that sorest battle of his at a place yonder before us in a narrow passage just beside Forgetful Green. And it is always so,’ said the much-experienced guide. ‘For if at any time any man meets with any severe brunt it is when he forgets what favours he has received from God and how utterly unworthy he is of those favours. So far the famous guide to Samuel the son of Christian the pilgrim.

And now first for doctrine, and then after that for application — as the great Puritan preachers were wont to lay down their discourses. Well, the doctrine here is this: Great sins forgiven must never be forgotten. For when any man begins to forget his past sins, as a consequence he soon begins to forget his Saviour and everything else of that kind. And in order that that disastrous state of matters may not come to any of His true people God as a rule works in them a deeply penitential mind: and that not only when their sins are first committed, but He most graciously continues that mind in them, aye and sometimes greatly increases it, long after those past sins of theirs have been confessed and forgiven and forsaken. In the spiritual experience of many a forgiven sinner the old guilt with a new contrition on account of that guilt will on occasion return and that again and again. And Job, as well as many more Bible saints, were often brought in by those masterly experimental preachers as so many proofs of that. As one of the best of those preachers has it: ‘God’s great servant Job, for the sins of his youth, for which, questionless, he had often humbled himself, yet did God, for His own purposes, write bitter things against that saint many years after, and did make him to old age still to possess the sins of his youth.” And he continues: ‘In our stupidity, and in our presumption, we think that the mere lapse of the years somehow wears out both the great guilt of our long past sins, as well as weakens God’s demand on us for a broken heart on account of those sins. We think so. But it is not so. It is very far from being so. Great sins forgiven must never for a single day be forgotten.” So far Thomas Goodwin.

Now if that is sound doctrine, as undeniably it is, then it follows that we must all our life long believe it and practise it. That is to say we must continually revisit our past lives, so as to keep our present minds penitent and our present hearts broken. And in doing so we shall be working together with God who turns all our past life, sins and all, as well as all our present life, sinfulness and all, to our everlasting salvation and to His own everlasting glory. The great preacher from whom I have borrowed above was wont in his own words, ‘to take a turn up and down in his past life’ every Sabbath morning, and that penitential practice of his made him to be the great evangelical preacher he was in Oxford to over eighty years of age. And no man who has any at all of the true teaching and the true leading of God’s Holy Spirit in these personal matters, no such man can look back on his past life without a multitude of heart-breaking things rushing in upon him. Small minds, and coarse minds, and pharisaic minds can think only of gross sins, as they are called. But when God selects and sets apart any great sinner for a great sanctification, there is no end to the humiliations and the contritions that come to that sinful man, and that out of things and out of circumstances that another man would count of no importance at all. And this same way of God’s universal working has given us some of the most precious passages in the prophets, and in the psalmists, and in the apostles, as well as in our best spiritual literature, as every well-read man knows.

There is one far too common sin of the days of our youth that some men, I fear, will not admit to be a sin at all. But by whatever name you call that sin, its wages and its fruits are not seldom death sooner or later, and that sometimes to both parties. The days of our youth are the days of our ‘love-making’ as we call it. And the apostle has a most suggestive expression that comes in most fitly at this point. Paul speaks again and again of ‘love unfeigned.’” Now some young men feign love, and make love, as the saying is, when they do not as yet feel it. They indulge themselves in feigning love till the time comes when they both feel and confess to a true love. They feign love in their looks and in their words and in their actions till others are deceived by all that and think them and take them to be in earnest. ‘It may be sport to you,’ said the ill-used creatures in AMsop, ‘ but it is death to us.” Young men, be men! Be Christian gentlemen! And study to do to other men’s daughters, and to other men’s sisters, and to other men’s future wives as you would have other young men do to your daughters, and to your sisters, and to your future wives. A word is enough to the wise.

And now from that let us go on to look at some of God’s ways of recalling their past sins to such of His people as are under His special sanctification. For when any of his more chosen people begin to forget their past sins He has many ways at His command of bringing back their past to their painful and penitential remembrance: many ways. There are special men of His among ourselves — I could give you some of their names — sorely beset men of His whom He handles in this way, as they will testify to you till you could scarcely believe that they are in their sober senses. If they would but speak out to you and could trust you they would tell you that they never so much as open their letters of a morning, or lift their newspaper, or cross their door-step, or walk along the street, or pass that door and that window, or enter a railway carriage and pass that station and that bridge and that stream and see that far-away farm-house up on the side of that hill, without their sanctification taking another start forward. Some long-past sin, some long-past wrong done or suffered, some long-past cruelty perpetrated or endured, some long-past love not unfeigned, some never-to-be-forgotten trespass against God and man and woman, some print set on the heels of their feet, some old sore set a-running in their conscience. The old-world tragedians were wont on the stage to teach the people that if you take a murderer into the presence of a murdered corpse the cold and closed wounds in that murdered corpse will immediately open again and will begin to run hot blood again, as much as to point to the murderer and say — Thou art the man! And so it is with a sinner’s conscience. Bring his guilty conscience within a thousand miles of the scene of his sin and he will think every bush an officer. Till all the other prisoners will overhear him singing in the night watches, and saying, ‘ Rock of Ages! cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee!’ And till he comes day and night, and all his days on earth, to exclaim with John Bunyan: ‘O Christ! O Christ! O Christ! Thou Saviour so suitable for me!”

‘When my God left me to myself, says Shepard, ‘I forgot the sins of my youth; nay, worse than even that, the sins of one day I forgot the next day.’ With all his fulness in some places Shepard does not dwell at any length upon that in his extant diary. But a far better writer does. You will all remember what the author of the Serious Call did to himself to make himself to remember the sins of every newly past day. You will all remember how he was wont to pray at the third hour of every returning day for the grace of humility, and at the sixth hour of every new day for more and more love in his heart to God and man, and then at the ninth hour of every departing day for immediate and entire resignation to the will of God in everything. And then you will remember how that so able and so sincere and so honest man always sequestered himself at night and took himself over the past day, and especially over the use he had made of the humility and the love and the resignation he had so pointedly prayed for. And that so punctual and so searching self-examination of his led him sometimes to a great sacrifice of praise the last thing that night. But sometimes and not seldom he was compelled to offer that other sacrifice that we are assured so greatly pleases God — a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart. And then the next morning he wakened himself up early by saying: ‘When I awake I am still with Thee!’ And then both the successes and the defeats of yesterday made him both watch and pray and obey all the better every new day. Now in that same way take your own yesterday yourselves. Well, what sort of a day was yesterday with you? Was it a good day or was it an undeniably bad day? It was so I have good reason to know with one of you. But our very worst days are sometimes turned into our best days, as it was with some of us yesterday. And indeed it is always so with all those men among us who are truly under the grace and under the Spirit of God. The worse their day is the more they take out of it before they sleep; the more repentance they take out of it, the more humility, the more resignation, the more despair of themselves, the more true prayer, and the more true faith in their Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ: in His blood to cleanse, in His righteousness to justify, and in His Spirit to sanctify. And all that not in idle words, as is the case with most men among us, but all that to an experimental reality that quiets the most exasperated conscience and heals the most broken heart. F

Now before you go down from God’s house to your own house I have a golden word from God to all of you who constantly bewail and bemoan your bad past and refuse to be comforted concerning it. A thousand of the most honoured saints of God in Holy Scripture and in the Church of Christ down to our own day, all rise up around you and claim a right and indeed have a divine commission to comfort you. And they will all tell you that never, no never, were a penitent man’s past sins permitted to prejudice either his future saintliness or his future service. The biographies and the autobiographies and the spiritual experiences of God’s greatest saints were not written for their sakes alone, but for your sake also, if only you will read them aright and enough. Read aright then about Noah, and about Jacob, and about Moses, and about David, and about Isaiah, and about Peter, and about Paul, and indeed about all the men whose names are most dear to the Church of Christ. And if you read about them aright and enough; that is to say, so as to take heart of faith and hope out of them for yourselves; then one day your names also will be added to that long and shining Roll. As you have imitated those men so well in your life of sin, go on now and henceforth to imitate them in your life of repentance and faith and true Gospel holiness, and your names also will yet be found written in heaven in the golden Roll of God’s elect and Christ’s redeemed. Believe it and you shall certainly see it. Believe it boldly and with full assurance of faith and it shall certainly be to you according to your faith. For your faith is to you, in this matter also, the substance of the things you hope for, and it is the evidence to you of things not seen by you as yet. Therefore, continually repent of your past and continually believe the Gospel. Live and die believing the Gospel.