The Spirit Convincing of Sin

Gus last thoughts were given to the work

of the Holy Spirit as He effects the New Birth. We considered Him as He deals with Eph.ii.r. man “dead’in trespasses and sins,” and brings him into that wonderful ‘“newness Rom, vis 4 of life,” in= which “Shenceforth mene Rom. vill. 15. ig to “walk by the Spirit,” possessing “the Spirit of adoption, in whom we

Clyne Dba, ater

“Our quicken’d souls awake and rise
From the long sleep of death;
On heavenly things we fix our eyes,
And praise employs our breath.”

In the present chapter I ask my reader to take a step in some sense backward. In studying the work of Regeneration we also studied, by reason of the spiritual connexion of the two things, some of the phenomena of

Conversion; that wonderful turning about of the inward man which corresponds as nearly as possible in its idea to the great Scripture word Repentance. For let it never be forgotten that Repentance means more, very much more, than regret, or even remorse, or even “godly sorrow.” 2 It is a deep, decisive alteration in the attitude of the soul towards God, and His glory, and His claim, and His salvation. ‘The sinner that repenteth” is the sinner Luke xv. 710.

that is converted, turned back, brought back from loss to salvation, from the wilderness to the fold, from the far-off land to the Father’s home..

This however is by the way. I was recalling the fact that we have already considered some of the main phenomena of that blessed change which is as to its divine secret and agency New Birth, and as to its human experience Conversion. ) And thus we take in some sort a step backward to consider now the great initial step of that work as wrought by the

1 Meradvoua. 2 See 2 Cor. vii. 10 for clear proof of this, in a passage full of jnstruction on the matter.

ai VENI CREATOR.

Spirit, whether for the world or the soul, that step which is called Conviction of Sin. ‘This

line of inquiry, however, will not be retrograde in any unreasonable way. Not seldom a great subject is best studied first by a brief view of its whole, and then by closer attention to its parts. In this chapter and in some subsequent pages we will deal thus with the decisive work of our blessed Life-Giver, looking for His merciful light.

The Scripture which puts prominently forward the convincing work of the Holy Spirit is, I hardly need say, John xvi. 8-11; part of that divine Discourse to which we owe, as we have remembered already, our central revelations about the blessed Spirit’s Personality, and about very much of His work. The wording of this particular passage calls of course for most careful study. And so I would not fail to notice two leading features of it; first, that

it speaks of the Spirit’s convincing work as

done in and on “the world,” distinguished from the disciples of Jesus; secondly, that it connects that work in the closest way with the Lord

Jesus Christ Himself: — “because they believe not on Me;” “because I go to My Father.’ Nor do I forget that “conviction of szz” is only one of three convictions spoken of in the passage; I do not lose sight of the “righteousness” and the “judgment.” But on this latter point it will appear, I think, as we go on that so close is the relation of the two latter con- victions to the first, and that they are in some respects so subordinated to the first, that we may venture lawfully to group the whole work under the title of Conviction of Sin.

Now first a few words on the reference o this great work to “¢he world,” that is to the mass of unregenerate humanity. It has been thought by some interpreters that this mentiun of the world excludes from the. passage a distinct reference to the Spirit’s saving operation in individual souls. And so the point and bearing of the Saviour’s sentences here has been supposed to be directed towards what I may call Audlic human opinion about Christ’s character and work, and about the momentous awfulness of szz, as the great contradiction to righteousness (now glorified in Christ), and as the sure subject of coming judgnient to be exercised by Christ, who has already given earnest of His final exercise of judgeship in His victory over the world’s Prince. In this view we are to look for the fulfilment and explanation of the words in such great phenomena as, for instance, the awe which fel] upon the Jews as a nation when the Pentecostal effusion came and the Gospel work began; an awe indicated in one way or another all through the Acts. Or again, to take a yet larger example, we may look for the fulfilment in that greatly deepened sense (for such it is) of the shame of wrong, and the glory of righteousness, and the depth and solemnity of coming retribution, which has pervaded mankind as a mass wherever Christianity has been, even inadequately, proclaimed. And certainly this is one of the greatest facts of human history, however it is explained. And to the believer no explanation of it will be adequate which does not connect it with the work of the Holy Spirit upon the human conscience, as He makes the human soul able to interpret to itself, however dimly, the moral and spiritual significance of the Person, Character, and Sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And it is perfectly true that such public, general, universal conviction — may, and alas continually does, fall quite short in individuals of the conviction which “‘worketh repentance unto salvation;” and that therefore it may be studied as a work which moves outside the inner circles of the Spirit’s saving action upon souls; as a work emphatically in “the world.”

But all this says only, at most, that the words of our Master in John xvi. do, or may, refer to a so to speak indefinite and diffused operation of the Spirit, but it does not say that they do not also, and in a special and central degree, refer to His inner circles of effectual blessing. For surely wherever that effectual blessing takes place, wherever a soul in its mysterious individual personality is awakened from the sleep of sin and born of the Spirit, it is a case in which a member of ‘the world” has been dealt with, in the world, to be brought out of the world. It is a case in which the blessed Agent, like Him whom He glorifies, has gone into the outer wilderness.

and has led from it a rescued wanderer, lately dead in sins, blinded by the god of this world, Eph.ii.2, “‘ walking according to its course.” In this new convert, whether from open heathenism, or heresy, or infidelity, or from a profession of the blessed Faith which is in name only, we find just the general facts of “the world” individualized. Just that which, in a sense less definite and intense, is done by the Spirit for the world as world, is done by the same Spirit in a sense most definite, most effectual, for this member of the world as individual will and soul. He has brought the man to “conviction of sin, righteousness, and judgment,” in the light of Christ.

And it is manifest, by the way, that the large, wide, work of conviction in the sphere of general opinion is done in no small measure through these isolated occurrences, these deep, individual convictions of sin. So it has been from the beginning. The thousands of definite convictions, repentances, and baptisms at Pentecost, were a mighty means for diffusing through the Jewish public mind an impression about Christ and the Gospel far short indeed in itself of regeneration and salvation, yet incalculably precious and important. And so it is to this day. Nothing can more powerfully contribute to keep up, and to raise up, ‘‘the world’s” public consciousness of sin, righteousness, and judgment than the presence in it, as salt-grains in the mass, of individuals intensely and savingly convinced of those three things for themselves, in the light of immediate dealings for themselves with God in Christ. And nothing would so fatally lower “the world’s” public moral and quasi-Christian consciousness as that such individual convictions, such personally convinced ones, should become few and fewer, till religion itself should be dissociated in common opinion from the very ideas conveyed by the words, “JZ have: sinned against the Lord;” ‘What must J do to be saved a So without misgiving I take these words of the Lord Jesus, and see in them His assurance that the Holy Spirit, in the Gospel Age, and as the divine Messenger to souls, and Illuminator of souls, about Himself the Saviour, should convince the individual unregenerate heart, in merciful speciality, of sin, and righteousness, and go VE IVINC Rae Oa

judgment. He should ‘‘open” it to “attend to”

Actsxvi.r4. itS unspeakable zeed of Christ; and to the szz against the love of God, and against itself, of indifference or refusal in presence of a manifested Christ; and to the awful glory of vzghteousness, the eternal antithesis to all trangression of the law, a glory now transcendently displayed in the exaltation of the crucified Christ Jesus to the heavens; and to the ineffable rightness, certainty, and eternity of the zudiczal ruin of sin and all that sides with sin — a ruin already in effect accomplished by the personal triumph of the Son of God over His mysterious personal Antagonist, the world’s prince and god. So, according to this passage, should the Spirit of truth, holiness, and love, deal with the individual. Such should be the personal conviction of sin, righteousness, and judgment, under His operating hand. In a way that should make use of cll the moral faculties of the man, and yet should work from infinitely above them, and penetrate if it be possible beneath them, He should bring the inner eyes to see something of the realities

of this great matter, so that the man should LS THIS THE READER’S EXPERIENCE? QI

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say with the voice of his inmost bemoan al have sinned against the Lord and His glorious Christ; what must I do?”

May I make bold to turn to my reader, and laying aside the tone of mere enquiry and discussion, speak to him as to a brother man reat venture to ask you, does this brief, fragmentary indication of the Spirit’s sin-convincing work correspond in any degree to your consciousness, to your experience? Ah, surely it does. For indeed such things have been taking place in souls ever since the day when at the great Effusion, azd as tts very first result, three thousand human individuals “were pricked in their heart, and said, Men and brethren, what shall’’we do?”. Paul was convinced. actett. 37. of sin, and so was the Philippian. Jailer, and so was Augustine, and so was Luther, and so were Hooker, and Pascal, and Bunyan, and Brainerd, and Wesley, and Simeon, and Chalmers, — strange collocation of names, men in almost every respect dissimilar, but alike in this com- -mon characteristic of conviction of sin. And who shall count the examples of the same work, here and now, in our time, in our land, in every land where the Gospel of the Son of God has found its way? No law of sex, or age, or temperament, or circumstances, can be traced in the matter; no law but that “of the Spirit of life in Rom. vii. 2. Christ Jesus.” This convicting whisper and unveiling finds its way to the youngest and to the most aged conscience, to the miserable and to the happy in external conditions, to the savage and to the scholar, to the profligate and to the man who on every standard short of that of God in Christ is, as Saul of Tarsus was, sincerely moral. So I count it altogether likely that my reader is one who can “‘set to his seal” that the doctrine of individual conviction of sin by the Holy Spirit is true, is true for him. I do not know, I cannot guess, how it has come to him; the manner, and method, and occasion. Perhaps, as a matter of biography, it has come not in the first pages of his Christian experience, but later. So Zinzendorf, whose conversion came in the first phase of it through an overpowering insight into the love and loveliness of his Redeemer,’ was taught not till later

t See further below, p. 112.

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the depths of his need of that Redeemer’s sacrifice. Perhaps it has come, not as one great critical occasion, one narrow while intense cloud to be passed through, but rather stage by stage, in intervals and developments of self-discovery. Or perhaps — and indeed such cases do take place- — it was really the decisive jrs¢ handling of your soul, so far as you can estimate such facts, by the great Regenerator. In some course of open or hidden rebellion against the light, or just in the midst of dull or complacent indifference; in the house of God, in the mission-hall, amidst many awakened ones, or quite as likely in the walk on the hill-side or in the street, or in your own room at college, or at home; lo, the Spirit touched you into an insight you had not even imagined before ot sin, and righteousness, and judgment; of the necessity and the reality of Christ. And as in that conviction, soon or slowly, you were led by the same blessed Worker up to the point ot simplest acceptance of your crucified Lord for your Saviour and your King, you know how the whole colour and texture of subsequent faith was affected through and through by the initial conviction. Everything took results from it. Your insight into the wonder, glory, and virtue of the Propitiation; your submission Rom.iis to the revealed ‘indignation and wrath” of the righteous Judge, and your rejection for ever of the ‘vain words” which try to say that that wrath is not actually Eph.v.6. “coming upon the children of disobedience;” your pity and love for souls as yet entranced in the sleep from which you have been awakened; all became what they could not be, could not possibly be, without some genuine personal experience of the Spirit’s convincing power,

You understood now, in the moral sense of understanding, what is meant by the remark that “Christianity este: be proved except to a bad conscience.” For “bad” you read “awakened;” (The Gospel is a message not for man in the abstract, but for man a sinner.) Till you saw yourself to be this latter, under the Spirit’s convictions, the Gospel was a something for which you seemed to find in yourself no true receptacle, a key which did but rattle, so to

and it is indeed true for you.)

speak, in a lock not made exactly for it. Now the Spirit has spoken to your soul of sin; and with a blessed intuition you behold, and believe, the divine provision for your release alike from its guilt and from its power. “Rock of Ages” is a new hymn to the man who is convinced by the Paraclete of sin, righteousness, and judgment. And wonderfully now does the Bible open itself to that man, and fall into order and relation before him, and disclose its inner harmonies in his sight. The Protevan- Gen. iii. 1s.

gelium of Genesis is no myth to him now, nor are the sacrifices of the Mosaic altar an invention of man. Every type and prophecy is lighted up by its relation to the Cross, and in turn lights up the convinced man’s apprehension of the Cross in the holy details of its ever-blessed significance. And precious indeed to him now is every trace of apostolic doctrine which unfolds the treasures of the accomplished mystery of Calvary. The third chapter of the Romans, and of the Galatians, and the whole teaching of the Hebrews, culminating in xill. 20, 21, are dear to him now with a sense of personal companionship and intimacy. So Jesus Crucified,

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like the celestial bow upon the cloud, is manifested as God’s Antithesis to the manifestation of the guilt of sin. And so is Jesus Risen manifested, as He had not been, as He could not be before, in all the glory of His finished work, and His indwelling and sin-subduing Presence (by the same Spirit who has thus convinced the soul), and in all the warmth and tPet.ii3. radiance of that “living hope” to which the man is now personally and individually “begotten again.” And as this richly blessed penitent looks forward to the now dear and happy prospect of the life to come, in the peace and strength of an evidence of its reality as real as it is internal, what is his anticipation? He looks for a world, a life, a work, of sinless bliss, of entire and positive holiness in everlasting personal joy; but he looks to live, love, and serve there as one who will for ever rejoice (wonderful paradox) to remember that “when Rom.v.8. we were sinners, Christ died for us,’ and to praise the blessed Name not of an abstract Deity but. of “‘God and of THE Rev. vii. 0. [JAMB.”

Was it too bold of the medieval believers to say, ‘‘O deata culpa, gue talem meruistt Redemptorem,” ‘Blessed guilt, which hast won such a Redeemer”?

We need conviction for ourselves as indi- viduals, if our personal religion is to strike voot downward, and so to bear fruit upward. The man who knows little of conviction of sin, as a genuine element in personal experience, may be many good things, but I do not think he can be a deep Christian.

And greatly do we pastors need this for our ministry. A full, strong current of opinion in the professing Church of Christ runs at the present day directly against a grave, thorough-going, doctrine of sin, and its correlative truths of eternal judgment, and of the unspeakable need of the atoning blood, and of living personal faith in the Crucified and Risen One, “according to the Scriptures.” One would think that some even earnest teachers had learned, by some other path surely than that of the Word of God, to look with temperate eyes upon sin, as a phenomenon sure at last to disappear under long processes of divine Order; a discord awaiting only its musical resolution; a ‘fall upward,” perhaps, on to some higher level of enriched consciousness.

Let no man deceive us with vain words, And let us pray that our lips may never pass them on. And to that intent may the Holy Spirit of Promise evermore teach us, close to the Cross and to the open Grave, His lessons of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment.

Even so. But from every other aspect of the matter we must say, we must cry, the very opposite of “O deata culpa.’ And we who believe, and who have been convinced of sin, righteousness, and judgment, must humbly and persistently look to the same holy Convincer who began the work that He may deepen it and develop it throughout our whole lives, and (let me add to my ministerial brethren) throughout our whole miristry. If in. one aspect the conviction of sin is the great initial work of the Spirit, from another aspect it is a work which we can never dare to wish Him to wind up here below. Has the believer ever reached the real end of self-discovery? Has he ever really seen with ultimate adequacy how truly his happiest actual obedience “cannot feet Aa Sha eel a a Mal ei a ta endure the severity of the divine judgment” ?y

Has he ever quite fully realized his need of “Christ for him”? No, he has not. So now, and to-morrow, and always, we will ask the Convincer to carry on in the blessed home o: Grace the lesson He mercifully began upon the desert sands; to keep us alive and awake, tenderly, humbly, and evermore, to sin, and righteousness, and judgment, in the light, in the blissful light, of Christ.

‘Article XII. See below, p. 188.