Little Forgiveness, Little Love

Luke vii. 47

“To whom little ia forgiven, the same loveth little.” — LUKS til 4T.

THAT was a strangely-assorted trio which met in the Pharisee’s house, consisting of our Lord, Simon, and this nameless woman. The host had been barely com*- teous to his invited guest, and he was evidently much scandalised at the intrusion of a very undesirable addition to his company, in the person of the “woman that was a sinner,” and not a little disgusted both with her vehement tokens of love and Christ’s acceptance of them. So, our Lord addressed to him that lovely little parable of the two debtors, forgiven respectively fifty pence and five hundred; and loving proportionally. It was His defence of the woman for giving, and of Himself for receiving, her tearfal kiss and anointing; and it drove a sharp arrow right into the conscience of Simon. It laid down two principles: that forgiveness precedes and is the cause of love; and that the measure of forgiveness is the measure of love.

That being the force of the parable, it is clear that the words preceding my text cannot have the significance which has sometimes been attached to them. “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, ybr she loved much,” cannot mean that her love was the reason for forgiveness, else it would go dead in the teeth of the preceding

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parable. The ambiguity lies in the doable ase of that word “for,” which may sometimes stand as introducing the evidence of a thing, and sometimes as bringing forward its cause. For instance, we may say, “a man lives, for he moves.” His motion is the token, the evidence, the proof of his living. Or we may turn the sentence about the other way, and say “he moves, for he lives.” His life is the cause of his motion. And so here: — “she hath much forgiven,” as is evident from the fact that she loves much; and the love has flowed from the forgiveness. Only so can that clause be brought into harmony with the clause which I have taken for my text, which is but the same principle set forth in regard to small sins, “To whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little”; forgiveness is the cause and the measure of love.

Now, if we thus understand the words of my text, they present to us two or three rather remarkable views. We have here Christ speaking about little sins, little forgiveness, and little love. Let me look at these three.”

I. First, here we have the acknowledgment of little sins.

Our Lord fully recognises the real distinction between the respectable Simon and the profligate woman. The one owed five hundred pence, and the other only owed fifty. Li one aspect there was a true superiority in the man who all his life had kept his passions under control, and had sought to order his life in conformity with the laws of propriety and morality, over this wretched woman, all defaced and scarred by her own lusts and the deeds that flowed from these. Much harm has been done by the exaggeration which earnest Christians have sometimes indnlged in, as to the absolute equality, In the sight of God, of all the varieties of human conduct which have not in them the saving leaven of faith in Jesus Christ and obedience to Him. It is net the same, either in the view of common morality and common sense or in the view of Christianity, which is only the perfection of both, whether a man drives a coach and six through all the prescriptions of common morality and propriety, or whether he keeps himself within those limits. We have to take distinctly into our account the difference between great and little sins; and the parable of my text has no meaning, unless it lays deep and broad the confirmation of the principle which the common-sense of the world recognises, and has sometimes been offended by Christian teachers* exaggerations that seem to contradict it. There are great and there are little sins.

But that is not alL “Little” here applies not only to the distinction between the magnitude of the transgressions, considered in themselves, but also to the difference between men’s estimates of the magnitude of their own transgressions. If I might venture to use a somewhat abstract word, there is an objective distinction in the sins themselves, as the parable declares; and there is a subjective distinction in men’s consciousness of the sins. To both of these our Lord here applies this designation.

It may further clear the thought, if I remind you that the measure of a sin is by no means determined by taking its superficial dimensions. We weigh conduct in rude scales, like those that they weigh hay in. The Lord, who is “a Gbd of Knowledge, and by whom actions are weighed,” has an infinitely finer balance than that;

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such as chemists use in their laboratories. And many an act which, measnred by the rnde measnring-lines that men apply, stands ont as a great sin is in reality less tainted with the poison of self-will and sin than are some of the respectable acts of reputable and highlyesteemed men. Perhaps Simon was a worse man than the woman was a woman. If we bring into view opportunities of ignorance or of knowledge; if we try to take into account and miravel the tangled skein of motives which are spun and woven into the web of action; if we regard not the outside but the inside of the deed, we shall pause before we allocate it, by our rough discrimination, into the category of “great” or of “small” sins. Many criminals that have died on the scaffold were perhaps less sinners than some of you complacent people that are sitting in these pews this morning. Great sins and small ones there are, bat you cannot get at their difference in magnitude by looking at their outside.

And there is another thing to be remembered, which limits the distinction in my text, in so far as it is taken to apply to the actual magnitude of the deed in itself. It is that, properly speaking, there are no small sins, iaasmuch as nothing which affects wrongly our relation to God can be regarded as a little thing. An inch-long snake is a snake; a baby crocodile just hatched out of the egg will snap with its ugly jaws. It is quality, not quantity, by which we have to arrange men and acts. A little deed may be a great sin, and nothing which affects my relation to God, and involves the lifting up of my will against Him, can be estimated as being a ■mall matter.

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And 80 we come to this, that, whilst the distinction Detween sins as in themselves great and small can only be sustained with much hmitation and with many explanations, the fancy that many of us have that our sins are small is utterly incapable of being sustained at all. We measure ourselves by ourselves, and compare ourselves with ourselves; and when we see this, that, or the other outrageous transgression of the commonest laws of morality, we gather our skirts together with Pharisaical self-complacency, and we say, “I thank Thee that I am not as other men are.” Ah! brethren, we have only to go a little down below the surface, to find that our clean respectability may cover far darker things than does the tattered, spotted profligacy of the publicans and harlots.

Now, that is all threadbare commonplace, but, like BO many other commonplaces, it is so familiar to us that we never realise it. For there is nothing that has less power over a man than a universally-admitted truth, which he has never vivified by bringing into contact with his own experience. Have you been down into the cellars of your own hearts? Have you made acquaintance with the combustibles that are stored there? Have you seen the creeping things in embryo, that want but warmth and favourable circumstances to bring them out to buzz, and crawl, and sting? I believe that no man who has seen himself as he is will ever remain contented with that superficitd view, that he comes into the category of the little sinners.

I read lately of a man that saw a shadowgraph of his own skull, taken by the ROntgen rays; and the sight was such a shock to him that it upset his nervous syitem

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for dajB. I know that if yon and I saw ourselves — the hidden man that lies beneath all this fair mask of flesh and blood, as God sees us, and as we shall one day see ourselves, there would be a long good-bye to the delusion that we belong to the class of respectable, little sinners.

II. And now, secondly, we have here the principle — if little sin then little forgiveness.

That strikes one as strange, but I think the story fairly bears it out. Simon was a sort of disciple. Our Lord’s parable implies that he had received forgiveness. He was the debtor that owed fifty pence, and, in comparison with the woman’s long score, he did owe but fifty. What he knew himself to have done wrong he had repented of, and what he had repented of he had been forgiven. So the parable implies; and we have no right to traverse our Lord’s estimate of the man’s condition and relation to sin and to God. On the one hand his moral respectability, on the other hand his Pharisaical spirit of self-righteousness, had hindered him from going to the bottom of his own nature. He did not know how much he required to be pardoned. He owned to fifty pence; and because he owned to so much debt he had it forgiven. What about all the great score that was not in his books, but was in God’s? Well! that was not forgiven. And so he had but a partial, a superficial, a little forgiveness.

My brother I that is the type of hosts of shallow, nominal Christians who never have come to a sight of their own true condition, but have had a partial, shallow, half-and-half repentance, and, I venture to say, have therefore been capable of receiving only a partial, shallow, half-and-half forgiveness. There are doubtless some Bucli among my present hearers who — God forbid that I should deny it I — may have had this surface work, but who know very little of the great depths which lie in their hearts craving for healing and for cleansing, and 80 have received but little of the power that cleanses and forgives.

Dear brethren, whether we get that pardon, which we all need, in scanty drops or in a full flood depends upon ourselves, and is settled by the measure of our recognition of our own sinfulness and the measure of our true repentance. A great many Christian teachers, in the earnestness of their urging faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, forget to urge with equal earnestness, and with equal prominence the other thing which, in the Apostolic preaching, was never divorced from it, and that is, repentance towards God. Just as a little faith brings a little of Christ, and much faith brings much of Him, a little repentance brings a little pardon, and a deep, profound consciousness and hatred of my own sinfulness brings the full flood of forgiving grace. To whom his sin was little the same had forgiveness to match.

III. Lastly, if little forgiveness then little love.

Our Lord here seems to limit real, answering love of heart to God, to men who have experienced pardon. And I, for my part, believe that whilst there are many other aspects of the Divine nature, and many other phases of the Divine dealings which may, and do, lead to a certain partial recognition of His goodness and answering love, there is nothing that does so overmaster a soul, and bring it to a continual self-surrendering attitude of love to Gk)d, as is the experience of pardon.

We must begin there, brethren, if we are ever to

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get into the depths of a joyfal devotion to Him. Other things, the greatness of His gifts to us, as scattered in Nature, as poured upon us in our daily experience — all the other things that may kindle some form and degree of love to God, are partial in their effects; like the sun pouring down its heat upon the glaciers in the Himalayas, and melting the surfiace into water for an hour or two in the middle of the day, but when night comes the grip of the frost-demon hushes the little trickling streams again, and all is icebound once more. There is only one thing that will melt a human heart down into perennial and warm devotion of love, and that is the experience of God’s pardoning mercy. The iceberg floats southwards to the tropical sea, and there it melts into the warm ocean that has melted it. So love comes from pardon, and in its perfection it comes from nothing else.

But not only does our Lord here lay down that principle, but the further one, that the measure of forgiveness experienced is the measure of love returned I have tJready drawn the distinction between the objective and the subjective greatness and littleness of men’s sins. And in resrard to both it is true that to whom little is forgiven the same loveth little. The principle may be a dangerous one, and capable of abuse, but it seems to me to be a sound one, and one taught us in many places in Scripture, and confirmed by much experience, that, as a rule, the men who have been dragged out of the foulest mire of grossest sin are the men who, in their Christian lives, are the most signal examples of fervent love. I do not say the greater the sinner the greater the saint; and I quite feel that there are many exceptions and limitations to the principle. Eut for all that

I think it is trae that such a man generally makes a more earnest, a more fervent, a more humble, a more loving Christian, than people who, with a less revolutionary experience, have been kept innocent of much transgression before they were converted, and who walk with Christ, peacefully, perhaps, but with less of the sense of contrast, than such a man has. Clean, dry sand bears no weeds, but it will not bear any flowers. A bed of fertile soil, nntilled and uncultivated, will be abundant in weeds, but it will be abundant in wheat crops, too. Though we must be careful as to how far we push the principle, I think the principle is a true one, that the greatest sinners, judged from the external point of view, do often make the most fervent saints.

But however we may think that to be questionable, the other aspect of this principle is unquestionable. And that is that the measure of a man’s sense of forgiveness is the measure of his love. That is the key to the impotence and tepidity of all the forms of Christianity which make light of sin, and do not give a prominent place to Christ’s work of redemption. Because they have failed to apprehend the greatness, the foulness, and universality of the fact of sin, you find them impotent to help and heal. And wherever you get a type of Christian that pooh-poohs the depth, the miiversality, the fatalness of human transgression, and stammers in its utterance of the great truth of Divine redemption, there you get a form of Christianity that has as much as it can do to keep its poor, cold limbs alive, and will never effect anything for the world.

Here, too, you get the explanation of the coldness

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of many nominal Christians. A cool, sober itandard of feeling in matters of religion is much vaunted by some people nowadays. It seems to me that the last thing we want is this cool Christianity. A cool Christian is a monstrosity; for if there be any truth in the things that he says he believes, and any reality in the blessings that he says he possesses, they ought to fire his whole heari; into a rapture of love and a perfection of self-surrender.

Brethren, enthusiasm should be the mark of every Christian soul. And the only way to get it is to realise my own guilt, and Christ’s great redemption. Let me beseech you to think of yourselves, not measuring yourselves by the common standards of worldly morality, nor by comparison with the men round you, nor by reference only to the acts that you do or abstain from, but with careful investigation of motives and testing yourselves by that solemn law which is the minimum of man’s duty, and every falling beneath which is man’s sin, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind.” Have I done that? If I have not, a long farewell to all self-complacent nonsense about my little sins.

And then, let us come to Him, and recognise the price which has been paid for our forgiveness, the completeness with which it is rendered, and the great gifts which follow it, and are bestowed upon us bankrupts. And when we have learnt that He “frankly forgives” the five-hundred-pence debtor as the fifty-pence debtor, then we shall have our hearts touched into a passion of love altogether unattainable by any other means.

Better to be like the sinfol woman in her penitence and her gratitude than like the self-complacent Simon, with his superficial view of his own sin and need, who, having but little sense of his guilt, was capable of receiving but a shrunken flow of pardon; and therefore, like some imperfectly watered garden, was able to produce but half-developed and scentless flowers. For us the one place to take is the place of the penitent: “Pardon mine iniquity, for it is very great.” He that has little consciousness of sin will have little consciousness of pardon; and he that has little sense of forgiveness for which to be grateM will baye little glow of leva to gladden his heart and to fire his life.