Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: July 13th

"I HAVE SINNED"

Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight. - Psalms 51:4

Do not let us lose ourselves in generalities. All means each, and each means me. We all know how hard it is to bring general truths to bear with all their weight upon ourselves. That is an old common phase. "All men think all men mortal but themselves"; and we are quite comfortable when this indictment is kept in the general terms of universality - " all have sinned." Suppose I sharpen the point a little - God grant that the point may get to some indurated conscience! - suppose, instead of reading " All have sinned," I beseech each one of my readers to strike out the general word, and put in the individual one, and to say, " have sinned." You have to do with this indictment just as we have to do with the promises and offers of the Gospel - wherever there is a "whosoever, " put your pen through it, and write your own name over it. The blank cheque is given to us in regard of the promises and offers, and we have to fill in our own names. The charge is handed to us in regard to this indictment, and if we are wise we shall write our own names there, too. I leave this on your conscience, and I will venture to ask that you would put to yourself the question, " Is it I?" And sure I am that, if you do, you will see a finger pointing out of the darkness, and hear a voice sterner than that of Nathan saying, " Thou art the man."

The people in one crowd that gathered about Christ were not all diseased. Some of them He taught; some of them He cured; but that crowd, where healthy men mingled with cripples, is no type of the condition of humanity. Rather, we are to find it in that Pool of Bethesda, with its five porches, wherein lay a multitude of impotent folk, tortured with varieties of sickness, and none of them sound. Blessed be God! we are in Bethesda, which means " house of mercy," and the Fountain that can heal is perpetually springing up beside us all. There is a disease which affects and infects all mankind - sin. Sin is universal, and it is personal - " have sinned."

I ask you to go into the depths of your own heart, and to be honest in recalling your own experience, and to say if, notwithstanding all the gladness of a godless life, there does not lie, grim and silent for the most part, but there, and felt to be there all the same, a great yearning and consciousness of unrest. Every good has in it some fatal flaw and incompleteness. There is always a break in the circle; always a stone missing out of the bracelet. There is always one unlighted window in the Aladdin’s palace. There is always a Mordecai sitting dark as a thunder-cloud and nonparticipant of the common emotion, who makes Haman say, "All this availeth nothing." There is always disappointment in earthly fruition. The fish never proves so big when it is lying panting on the grass as it did in the water, when the fisher was struggling with it. The chase is always better than the capture. In all earthly good there is a fatal disproportion between it and the heart that seeks to solace itself with it; so that after all satisfactions, there is the old cry of the heart, "I hunger still." And, above all, there is the certainty which pushes itself in- like the skeleton at the feasts of the Egyptian kings, or the mocking slave that walked behind the conqueror in his triumph as he went up the steps of the capitol - the certainty that we have to leave them all behind us. And what is the naked soul going to do when it "flares forth into the dark? "