I. It is to this important matter that I now call your attention, and in doing so our first point will be, THE INDIVIDUALIZING EFFECT OF SORROW FOR SIN.
Let me remind you, first, that this individualizing is seen even when the mourning is universal. Read the text again: “The land shall mourn, every family apart.” If there should ever come such a blessed visitation of grace to England that all men should repent of sin, and mourn over it, yet each man would repent of sin, and mourn over it as much as if he were the only penitent in the entire country. This point is worth noticing, because there are some who fancy that, if there should come a great revival, they would get converted. Perhaps some of you think that, in such a case, you would get into the swim, and be carried onward by it, as people are sometimes borne along in a great crowd. Let me tell you that, if you were thus swept along by the stream, and had not exercised individual repentance of sin, and personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, it would be of no value to you. It would be a false religion that you would receive in that way, and it is better for you to recollect and know of a surety that you cannot enter the strait and narrow gate in a crowd, borne in by others, but you must come in separately and distinctly yourself. Why should not that be the case with you even now? When there shall be times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord, the brightest days that ever shone in Christendom, yet, even then, every true conversion must be an individual one. All true faith that shall ever come to you must be a looking with your own eye; and all drawing near to God in repentance must be the act of your own spirit, under the drawings of the Holy Spirit. Whatever is done by others, even by multitudes of genuine converts, will be of no avail for you; if it is to bring blessing to you, it must be the work of the Spirit of God upon you individually.
Do notice that foundation fact, and let none of us ever forget it; but let this day of mourning for sin, throughout the whole Church of God, be as much a time of mourning for sin, for me and for you, as if you and I were the only persons in the world who were aware of that sin, or who had felt at all the evil and the wickedness of it. Otherwise, we shall lose all true repentance in the idea of a national repentance, we shall lose all sense of sin in the notion that everybody has a sense of sin, that everybody is humbled in penitence before God, and that everybody is seeking the Lord.
Notice next, that while this apartness is seen when holy mourning becomes universal, it also is manifest when there are some few households humbling themselves before God. Even then, when there are only a few repenting households, the separation of one family from another will be seen. The whole of the penitents are separate from the ungodly around them, they are distinguished as those who are mourning before God; yet even then, each individual family will be separated the one from the other. If it should come to pass that the families of this church should begin unitedly to mourn by reason of the great sin of the times,—and I heartily hope that it may be the case,—yet even then, if it is true sorrow for sin, there will be a distinctness between one family and another family; there will be a sort of idiosyncrasy around the mourning for sin in this house, or in that house, which will distinguish the mourners there from all others. You can manufacture man-made things by the gross; but God’s creations are made one by one, he puts his seal of variety upon all that he creates. Painters can make replicas of their great works, and you may see here and there copies of paintings that are, stroke for stroke, the same, but God does not repeat himself. There is a distinctness about the face of every man and every woman; you may mistake one man for another, but it is from casual observation, or from partial knowledge; but a man’s own wife does not make a mistake about who is her husband; his child knows which is his father, and does not mistake another man for him. So, whatever resemblance there may be, there is a difference which is readily discernible; and if it is so in the natural face of a man, much more is it so in spiritual features. One man differs from another, and one family differs from another, and, consequently, in the mourning even when it becomes general throughout all the families of Christ, yet each family still keeps itself somewhat apart from the rest, and differs from every other.
This individualizing is further seen in the distinction between family and family when both fear the Lord. In our text, we have quite a little list of families given in order to make this truth clear. Each family has its peculiar sin, and a specialty must be made in confessing it.
There is, first, the family of the house of David, that is, the royal household; and the house of David was, as kings went in those days, a superior household. Kings’ households have not often been of much account; but David’s, though it was a long way off being perfect, was better than the best of the ungodly royal houses in those days. Yet there was something for the house of David, and all the kings of the house of David, to mourn over; for the sins of royalty are royal sins, and those are sins indeed which come from those who wear crowns, and are leaders among the sons of men. Hence, the family of the house of David must mourn apart.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
