Be Thorough
The bravest man of his time in Jerusalem stood up in the temple gateway, on a public occasion, and delivered a very short but a very searching sermon. It was a model of plain, pungent preaching. He did not utter any message evolved from his own brain; he gave them God’s message. It ran on this wise:” All ye people of Judah, if ye will thoroughly amend your ways and your doings, then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers. n The moral condition of the people had become deplorable. The command to them is, thorough reform of character and conduct. A rich promise is made to them if they obey; if they remain wedded to their sins, their temple and their homes would be left to them desolate.
Jeremiah’s pithy address to his countrymen is a capital text for our times. Wherever churches are following the “Week of Prayer” with special religious services for the conversion of souls, pastors cannot go amiss in using it. President Finney, in the days of his greatest power, used to take such passages as this to drive them like a plough beam-deep through the consciences of his auditors. So he broke up the fallow ground and got it ready for the seed of the gospel. He believed in thorough work, in a thorough exposure of the wickedness of human hearts, in a thorough conviction of sin, in a thorough reformation of character under the mighty workings of the renewing Holy Spirit.
The fatal mistake of many people is that they seek for a cheap religion. Some preachers and teachers, in their desire to recommend the glorious freeness of the gospel and the simplicity of faith, hold out the idea that it is the “easiest thing in the world to become a Christian.” They hold up very attractively summer-religion, which is all clear weather and sunshine, and Christianity as a sort of close-covered carriage, in which one can ride for nothing and be safely landed, without too many jolts, at the gateway of heaven. Very little allowance is made by these rose-water teachers for the stubborn depravity of the human heart, for the tremendous power of the adversary, and for the poisonous atmosphere through which one must fight his way to the “prize of the high calling.” Grand old Samuel Rutherford, in his nervous, incisive way, says, “Many people only play with Christianity, and take Christ for almost nothing. I pray you to make your soul sure of salvation, and make the seeking of heaven your daily work. If ye never had a sick night and a pained soul for sin, ye have not yet lighted upon Christ. Look to the right marks; if ye love him better than the world, and would quit all the world for him, then that proveth that the zuork is sound.” Probably no writer has ever combined the richest, sweetest ecstasies of devotion with a more pungent exhibition of the plainest rules of every-day morality.
The first step towards a genuine, abiding Christian character is repentance of sin. John
Baptist made this the keynote of his ministry, which was a preparatory work for the Messiah, just at the door. Jesus himself struck the same note. Matthew tells us that “from that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent!” When the apostle Peter delivered that Pentecostal discourse which pricked into three thousand hearts, and they cried out, ’ c What shall we do ?n his prompt answer was, “Repent!” There is a logical necessity in this; for no man can cleave to his sins and lay hold of Christ with the same hand. No man can turn to the Lord until he has turned his back upon his evil practices and is willing to thoroughly amend his ways and his doings. Our beloved brother Moody, indeed, once declared that he had had far more success when he has preached Christ’s goodness than when he has preached upon repentance; and this reveals the only weak point we have ever discovered in the methods of this most popular and powerful preacher of the Word. An immediate and temporary ( ( success 5! may be gained by inducing a person to rise up and declare that he believes in so lovable a being as Christ Jesus, and yet that same person may soon drift back under the dominion of the sins which he had never intelligently abandoned. We doubt whether any person ever lays thorough hold on the Saviour until he feels the need of one who can save him from his sins. Certainly no one in that death-trap of a hotel in Milwaukee even dreamed of flying to the fire-escapes until he was aroused to the dangers from the crackling flames. Why should any man betake himself to a Saviour, if he does not realize that he needs one, and that there is an abominable and deadly evil in his own heart and life that he must be saved from?
When David’s eyes had been opened to behold the loathsome depravity of his own conduct, he asks for no compromise, but cries out, “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity.” He was ready to be thrown, like a filthy garment, into the caustic alkalies, to be rubbed and mauled and beaten until the black spots were cleansed away from the fabric. Such an abhorrence of sin it is the office of the Holy Spirit to produce; therefore should we pray for the Spirit. Such a view of his guilt it is the office of the minister to bring before every unconverted man; therefore should the minister hold up the exceeding sinfulness of sin. The clearer the view of sin, the more thorough is likely to be the repentance. ’ i Ye must be born again, n said the Master to his anxious inquirer, Nicodemus. But the new birth, or regeneration, is the production of a new principle in us, which is antagonistic to sin as well as obedient to God.
The only evidence of repentance is thorough reformation. This takes hold both upon character and conduct; character as what we are, and conduct as what we do. This amendment must be thorough and go to the roots, or it will be as evanescent as the morning dew. The shallow 1 ( conversions” that are so often trumpeted as the result of shallow, sensational preaching, end in very shallow and short-lived religion. That dark and dismal fount-head of the heart is not purified by the Spirit, and pretty soon the foul streams begin to trickle out again into the daily conduct. Bad habits are not pulled up. The sharp practices are soon resumed in business transactions, or the young man soon drifts back into his convivial haunts; the unconquered bad temper begins to take fire and explode again; the covetous spirit gets hold again with a fresh grip; in short, the new emotion passes away, but it does not leave a new man. Christ has no hand in such conversions. They are a delusion, often an unmeasured curse. When Jesus is presented and pressed upon a sinner’s acceptance, he must be presented as not only infinitely beautiful, tender, compassionate, and lovable, but as so infinitely holy that his eyes flash flame through everything wrong. The very bitterness of his sacrificial sufferings for us on the cross arose from the bitterness of the sin he died to atone.
One thought more. Genuine conversion demands thorough amendment of conduct, and no exception must be made for what we call little sins. It is not every one who is sunk, like the u City of Brussels,” by one tremendous hole stoveh through in an instant; small leaks, left unstopped, are equally fatal. Maclaren well says that c the worst and most fatal are often those small continuous vices which root underneath and honeycomb the soul. Many a man who thinks himself a Christian is in more danger from the daily commission, for example, of small pieces of sharp practice in his business, than ever King David was at his worst. White ants pick a carcass clean sooner than a lion will.”
There is a transcendent promise that accompanies such thorough amendment of character and life. “I will let you dwell in this place.” This bespeaks peace and permanence under the benignant smile of God. This means room to root and to grow. A soul that is rooted into Christ will thrive like a tree planted by the rivers of water; the leaves shall never wither, and death will be only a transplanting into glory.