IN giving yourselves wholly to the Lord your walk will be comfortable and happy, a way of pleasantness. But how deceitful is the heart and desperately wicked! Our lusts come upon us, and they may be lawful things on which they are set, things not in themselves sinful, obtaining the praise of men, even of good men. They are lawful, and you like them, but it is not God’s will that you should do them. You won’t give up your god nor your self-will. You won’t consent to give the whole heart, nor quit His service altogether; you begin to serve two masters, convictions are stifled, prayer is restrained, and an evil conscience tells you that you are mocking God, that your God is a necessity, that He has become to you a necessary evil. What are you doing then? You are reversing your religion, mocking your God instead of adoring Him and serving Him.
If we be His, it comes to this, that He will endure no longer, and He brings us that we can endure no longer. Being intolerable to Him, He makes our way intolerable to ourselves. Oh! I can’t endure to hate God any longer. It’s shameful treatment of the Holy One. I’m seeing sin as sin, wherefore I abhor myself and repent.
“My soul expects to hear only the voice of pardon as it says ‘I will return,’ but the Lord meets it with the voice of rebuke and reproof: ‘I will reprove thee, and set thy ways in order before thine eyes—consider this, ye that forget God, lest I tear in pieces, and there be none to deliver.’ I have often been brought to consider this text so far as a promise. He doesn’t say absolutely, I will tear in pieces, but consider this lest I do it. It’s great forgiveness He bestows, and He’ll have us know this by setting the greatness of our sins before us.
And now my position is this: He is ordering my ways before me, and I ask your prayers that my faith fail not. God’s gracious dealings with me in the past are aggravations of my sin. Don’t make use of past evidences of grace against present charges of sin. To the mercy of God and the Blood of Sprinkling! Evidences are good in their own place, but shall a man palliate his guilt by pleading how gracious God has been to him.”