Daily Devotionals

Mornings and Evenings with Jesus

Devotional: April 11th

My sin is ever before me. - Psalms 51:3.

SIN was to the Psalmist a more plentiful source of grief than all his suffering from other causes. Not only his great sin in his fall, but his daily, hourly failures. “Who,” says he, “can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults.” He does not mean faults secret from others and known to himself; this would be hypocrisy; but faults unknown to himself, which he yet knew were in existence, and with which he wished to become acquainted. Paul was preserved from falling into many vices after his conversion; it is a mercy to be preserved so far; but we find him even then saying, “I find a law, that when I would do good evil is present with me. To will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good I find not.” And then he exclaims, “Oh, wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

Can a Christian now help seeing his imperfections and his remaining corruptions whenever he compares himself (and he ought to compare himself) with his obligations, or his professions, or his privileges? and can he see these and not be affected by them? He will not, indeed, give up his hope: this has another foundation; he is not required to abandon this: but surely will give up his pride and his self-righteousness. Surely after such views he will “rejoice only in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.” Surely, not only the thought of God as a gracious and forgiving but as a holy and pure God will lead him to say, with Job, “Behold, I am vile: what shall I answer thee? Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” And David wept for the sins of others as well as his own. “I beheld the transgressors,” says he, “and was grieved.” “Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because men keep not thy law.”

A Christian can never be a stranger to this; he knows that in every sin there is something exceedingly sinful, that it is an “abominable thing, which God hates.” He knows that whenever sin is committed there is a soul destroyed, a God dishonoured, a Saviour opposed and set at naught. Can he help feeling? Is he a citizen? He is also a patriot: he will love his country, and therefore he will mourn for the abominations that are done in the midst of the land. Is he a member of a Christian community? he will be “sorrowful for the solemn assembly, and the reproach of it will be a burden.” Has he irreligious relations? he will say, with Esther, “How can I endure to see the destruction of my kindred?” Has he ungodly children walking the downward road? Like David, he will with a broken heart exclaim, “O Absalom, my son, would to God I had died for thee!” and, like Abraham, his prayer will be, “Oh that Ishmael may live before thee!” yes, and, with Paul, their heart’s desire and prayer to God for these beloved ones will be “that they may be saved.”

So is the kingdom of heaven, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. - Mark 4:26-27.

NATURAL influences operate mysteriously, and thus also is it in the spiritual economy. Those individuals who say that they will not believe any more than they can comprehend, must have either very large understandings or very little creeds, for what do we know or what can we comprehend? we do not even understand ourselves. “Oh, what a miracle,” says Young, “is man to man!” Who can explain the human frame, the causes of vital heat or the colour of blood, and a thousand other things? We should do, therefore, in reference to Spiritual things, what we do in all such cases as those to which reference is here made. In all these instances we are satisfied with the results, if we are ignorant of the processes; we are satisfied of the effect though reason may fail, and perfectly fail, as to the causation and the mode by which the effects have been produced.

As we know not how the bones of the unborn infant do grow, nor “what is the way of the Spirit;” “even so,” says the Royal Preacher, “thou knowest not the works of God, who maketh all.” “The wind,” says our Saviour, “bloweth where it listeth” -and what philosopher can explain the first rise and final issue, and numberless other things pertaining to it-“yet thou hearest the sound thereof;” and you feel its currents: you see the clouds course along; you see the waving of the corn in the field; and you see trees torn up by the roots. “Thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” Or apply it more immediately to the imagery here employed by our Lord of the corn which the husbandman sows, and “which springs up he knoweth not how.” In vain, therefore, as Paul says, do any ask, “How are the dead raised, and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.”

Here we see life and death; we see decay and growth at once, equally inexplicable and undeniable; so is the spiritual life.