II. Now, secondly, HOW DOES THE INDIVIDUALITY GENERALLY SHOW ITSELF?
Well, in many ways. So truly is mourning for sin a personal thing, that each individual sees most his own sin, and feels himself to be alone as to character. That man who has truly repented of sin believes that, under some aspects, he is the greatest of all sinners. He is not so absurd as to charge himself with certain sins which he never committed, which probably he never had the opportunity to commit; but he is wise enough to see that our guiltiness before God not only depends upon the act committed, but upon the will to commit it, and upon the spirit, and very much upon the light against which a man has sinned, and upon the peculiar circumstances of favour and mercy which the man himself may have forgotten, but which prove him to have been most ungrateful in the commission of sin. I do not know about your sin, dear brother; you may be worse than I am, but I do know my own sin so far as to feel that I hope you are not worse than I am, and to believe that I myself must take no other place than among the guiltiest, and cry, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” Hence, each man’s confession is necessary apart, because there is a different character in it.
Generally, mourning for sin is separate as to place. When a man is under a sense of sin, he likes to get quite alone. I knew one who, in his soul-trouble, resorted to a saw-pit; many have hidden behind a haystack, some have gone into the barn. Into all manner of queer nooks and corners we go when we are mourning for sin, but solitude has wonderful charms to a bleeding heart. You feel above all things that, even if it be the open street, you must get into some sort of solitude,—if necessary, even the awful solitude of being lost in a crowd. Thus, man recognizes the individuality of his sin by wishing to get apart even as to place.
And I am sure that it is so as to time. True mourning for sin is not a matter of hours and days. You cannot say, “Now it is time for me to mourn over my sin, and I must keep on so many minutes, and then have done.” Ah, no, dear friends! When a man is ill, when he is consumptive, or has a bad cough, if he comes to chapel, you think to yourself that you would like him to cough during the pauses in the service, and not at other times; but, poor soul, he cannot help himself, he must cough when he must cough. And when a man has a groan in his soul, he cannot groan according to the position of the sun. He cannot take down a book of prayers, and say, “Now is the time for the confession of sin; and now is the time for this, and now is the time for that.” He cannot follows the rules that may have been best in somebody else’s case. All the time some are praising God, he will be still mourning; and when others are lamenting with broken hearts, he is smiting his heart to think that it will not lament, and will not break. The things of eternal life cannot be set according to carnal time; they will come according to their own way; and thus, every man and every woman must mourn for sin apart, and there is no regulating them by the movements of the clock.
Not only are they separate as to place and time, but they get apart as to manner. Some can weep over their sin; but others could not shed a tear if they were offered the world for it. Some are silent in their agony; others cry aloud. One man feels that his heart is broken; anothers envies him, and wishes that his hard heart would break. One person is full of misery on account of sin, another says,—
“If aught is felt, ’tis only pain,
To find I cannot feel.”
There is a separate form of mourning about each true penitent, and let no one say of himself, “I have not mourned for sin because I have not mourned as somebody else has done.” Perhaps, if you had been exactly like somebody else, there might be a suspicion that you were a mere copyist, and not an original work of the grace of God. So, true mourning differs in its manner.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
