1. Conviction of Sin
Archibald Alexander
The called of God have no distinct knowledge of the true nature of conviction of sin prior to their experience of it. There is, no doubt, a great diversity in the exercises and circumstances of souls under conviction. Some are agitated with awful terror, while others are gently led to a view of the aberrations of their hearts and lives from the law of God, but in all that is essential to conviction there is a precise similarity in the experience of all Christians. The end is the same in every case, though the steps by which it is attained may be exceedingly different.
Every man who is brought under the convictions of the Spirit – for all true conviction is His work – is made serious and brought to a solemn consideration of his ways. Serious consideration may therefore always be called the first step in a religious life. The multitude are destroyed for want of this. They cannot be persuaded to lay aside their frivolity and their worldly cares, nor to consider what they are and whither they are going. But the first touch of divine influence on the mind renders the hitherto-careless soul deeply serious. An awakened attention to divine things is experienced. The man begins to hear with other ears, to see with other eyes and to entertain other thoughts and feelings than he was wont to. The past, the present and the future engage his attention. He asks himself, “What am I? Whither am I tending? What have I been doing all my life? And what are my prospects beyond the grave?”
Though accustomed to hear the Word all his life, it now appears like a new thing – like a message from God to himself. And he can hardly be persuaded that the preacher has not undergone a great change or has not learned to preach new doctrines, for he never understood the truths which now rivet his attention, and they made only a momentary impression on his mind before. The awakened soul is often ready to exclaim, Surely I never heard these awfully-solemn and highly-important truths before or I should have been affected by them.
Not only the Word preached, but the Word read, appears new. He takes
1A first extract, slightly edited, from a sermon on Isaiah 42:16: “And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them, and not forsake them”. Alexander was the founding professor of Princeton Seminary, in America. His volume, Thoughts on Religious Experience, is highly recommended (available in paperback from the Free Presbyterian Bookroom for £7.95).
down from the shelf the perhaps-long-neglected Bible, which was kept in the house more for the sake of decency than for use and, shaking off the dust of years, he opens the sacred volume. And whilst he reads, he holds up a faithful mirror which exhibits to him his own moral features. Here he sees the evil of his past life reflected upon his conscience in a clear, strong light. Sometimes the truth is so pungent, and penetrates the mind with so much pain, that he is tempted to lay aside the book. The more the awakened sinner reads, meditates and hears of the truth, the more uneasy he becomes and the more dangerous does his condition appear to be. At first, gross sins or the obvious neglect of duty engage his attention and affect his conscience, and these defects he attempts to reform. But he is soon made to see that not merely a few, but all his actions, have been evil, and only evil, continually from his youth up.
As the light of conviction increases, he becomes conscious that the fountain from which these streams issue is within him and is entirely polluted – that “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked” – and is continually sending forth streams of wicked thoughts and desires. To reform the life, where habits of iniquity have become inveterate, is no easy task; but who can regulate the thoughts, desires and volitions? Who can command the affections to fix with due intensity on their proper objects? Who is found able to purify the inner man and restrain all wanderings of thought and desire? Alas, boasted ability turns out to be a mere illusion of an unenlightened mind, yet the sinner under conviction does not excuse himself on account of his inability. He is deeply conscious that it is his own fault. It is the very core of his iniquity. He knows that he ought to serve God, but his wicked heart refuses. He is convinced that it is his duty to come believably and penitently to Christ for grace and salvation, but his obstinate will is reluctant, and his heart remains callous and ungrateful under all the representations of God’s wonderful love and Christ’s tender compassion, which induced Him to endure the cross and despise the shame.
This conviction of deep-rooted depravity and helplessness is the most distressing state of mind that can well be conceived. The convinced sinner feels as if he could take vengeance on himself for having acted so shamefully, so foolishly, so wickedly. He groans under the burden of his iniquity like a slave under hard bondage, and under the lash of a severe taskmaster. But the sinner thus convinced does not feel tenderly, nor is he conscious of pungent pain. This absence of tender feelings and of a consciousness of heart-breaking is the very thing which gives him most distress. Such a one will often be heard to exclaim, “I have no conviction of sin, no conviction bearing any proportion to my enormous transgressions. Surely a heart so impenetrably
hard never was lodged in any human breast. Nothing moves or softens it in the least. It remains equally unaffected with the joys of paradise and the pains of hell; even the bitter agonies of Christ in the garden and on the cross produce no tender relents.”
Another unexpected conviction which is commonly experienced is that the person is growing worse instead of better. Some have strenuously maintained that this is a fact – concerning which we will not now dispute. What is asserted is that, to the apprehension of the convinced sinner, it seems to be a truth that he is growing worse and worse; but this can be accounted for from the increase of light. Just as a man placed in a dark and loathsome dungeon would see the filth increasing on every side if he should have the light let in gradually, so the heart appears to become more and more vile and abominable when the covering is withdrawn which concealed its depravity.
Now we say to anyone under these convictions: “If you feel nothing, as you say, why do you yet complain? What mean these deep-fetched sighs and these abundant tears? Why are you not contented and at ease as the multitude are and as you once were?” To such questions and expostulations he would reply, “I am distressed because I feel so little distress. I am grieved because I cannot feel grief. My most earnest desire is to fall under deep conviction of sin. O if I could feel my heart tenderly affected, I should be in a comfortable state compared with what I experience!” Now this is real conviction, and it is one of those paths into which the blind are led, of which they knew nothing prior to experience.
Before this they may indeed have formed a conception of the feelings of a convinced sinner. They imagined that conviction of sin would be effected by some flash like lightning by which their souls should be stunned and shaken to the very centre, and melted as the ice by the rapid heat. Very commonly the awakened person strives to produce conviction of this kind by bringing up to view the most frightful images and by reading the most awful and moving descriptions of death, judgement and hell. He frequents that preaching which denounces with the most awful severity the wrath of the Almighty, still hoping and praying to be overwhelmed with such feelings as have been described. But if the convinced sinner could experience all the feelings which he has imagined, and for which he longs and prays, the end of conviction would not be at all answered, for the end of conviction is to lead the sinner out of himself, to destroy all self-confidence and self-complacency, to show him how evil and how helpless his condition is.
But if he could experience such feelings as he wishes, he would think well of himself as being in the frame in which he ought to be. The views and feelings produced by the conviction of the Spirit lead the soul to despair of ever
saving itself. Thus self-righteousness, which is so deeply inherent in every man, is cut up by the root. “I through the law, am dead to the law,” says Paul, “that I might live unto God.” Again, “I was alive without the law once, but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died”. Thus “the law is a schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ”.
It is an unexpected thing, of which the blind could form no practical conception, that the nearer the sinner approaches towards deliverance, the further he recedes from hope and comfort, in his own apprehension. That is therefore found true in spiritual things which has been remarked in natural things: the darkest hour is that which immediately precedes the dawning of the day. When the convinced sinner is brought to the point of fully condemning himself, acknowledging that the sentence which dooms him to misery is perfectly just, then is the time of God’s mercy; so that salvation is found in the moment when it expected nothing but death. Thus the richness and freeness of the grace of the gospel are magnified, and the saved sinner is prepared to give all the glory to God and ever afterwards to confess that he deserved nothing but to be cast off for ever.