Dear hearers, have you all done this? Have you all repented of sin? I am glad that so many are willing to spend a week-evening in listening to the gospel, and I always have hope that there is some religious sense about you that leads you to this mid-week service; but still, permit this personal question,—Has religion been to you only a family matter? Are you what you are because your mother was so or your father was so? Are you of this religion or that because it is the national faith,—because your pedigree has brought down with it your creed? This will not do. Remember, you have to be born alone, you will have to die alone, you will have to be judged alone, and you must be born again alone; and therefore, there must be for yourself a personal sense of sin, a personal seeking to Christ, a personal acceptance of pardon through the precious blood. Is it so with you all? Our days are running swiftly away; we are all getting older, and coming nearer to the end of life. If you have never confessed sin, I entreat you to do it now. If you have never been delivered from its terrible curse, seek to be delivered now; ere you close your eyes in what may be the last sleep you shall ever know, confess your sin, and trust in Jesus. O God, help us each one separately thus to come to thee! It is with this plea that I close my discourse, let us make personal, complete, and searching investigation into our own case before God; let us go before him with our own personal acknowledgments, with nothing borrowed from others; let us not make a masquerade of religion, but let us go before God as we are, and confess our sinful state, and seek pardon for the sake of him who died, the Just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God.
And then, dear friend, if you have really made this confession, and have found peace with God, then go forth, and try to bring others. Having lighted your own torch, let it not burn in your private chamber only, but go through the street with it; go into the darkest place, and let that light flame forth; but take care that it is not dimmed by any repetition of the sin you acknowledge. It is no use pretending to mourn for sin, and then to keep on in it.
“Repentance is to leave
The sin we loved before,
And show that we in earnest grieve
By doing so no more.”
May true holiness spring out of your repentance, and may this go side by side with an earnest endeavour, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to bring others to repent apart as we have done, through him whose cross is the sole hope of sinners, who himself, living and pleading for sinners at the Father’s right hand, is the one lone star that makes glad the midnight of our guilt. Oh, look ye away from self to Christ! If your confession of sin is offered without thought of him, away with your confession of sin. Repentance is nothing apart from Christ. Look to him through your tears, through your depression of spirit, and say, “Just as I am, I cast myself at those dear feet that bled out life for me, and look up to the riven side which is the one cleft of the rock where the sinner may hide himself away from the tempests of eternal wrath.”
God bless you, beloved! May we meet in heaven to sing together, though on earth we must mourn apart, for Christ’s sake! Amen.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
