you Sin meets his eye wherever he
turns. William Bacon Stevens, The Parables,
1857. The very fact that we have been
renewed in the temper and disposition of our minds, that we have been
born again of the Holy Spirit, that old things have passed away
and that all things have become new, only makes us realize more
vividly our sad condition, to be thus dwellers in an ungodly
world, and to be thus of necessity so mixed up with sin and corruption
and unbelief in all the walks of daily life. The true Christian
finds everything around him antagonistic to his thoughts and feelings.
He loves Christ supremely. The world hates him supremely. He delights to do God's will.
The world revels in its disobedience. His heart is set on heavenly
and divine things. The heart of man is fully set
to do evil. He is daily pained at the manifestations
of sin and unbelief. He mourns at the spiritual destitution
of his fellow men, and at the rampant evils which rear themselves
unbridled and devour the vitals of society with rapacity. Sin
meets his eye wherever he turns. In the church, he sees hypocrisy,
formality, self-righteousness, censoriousness, lukewarmness,
and backsliding. In the family, he finds peevishness,
ill-temper, discord, variance, strifes, evil surmisings, and
positive hatred. In the state, he perceives crimes
of every sort and hue, and the decalogue broken in each one
of its commandments. In business, he is made to witness
fraud, greed, deceptions, lying. We are ever made to feel that
we are in an enemy's country, that here, as the patriarchs
confessed, we have no abiding city, but we seek one to come,
that we who are in tabernacles of flesh do groan, being burdened,
burdened with the remaining corruption of our own hearts, burdened with
our daily shortcomings and omissions of duty, burdened with our positive
transgressions, burdened with our frequent infirmities, and
burdened with seeing and hearing the ungodliness which surrounds
us and which is ever crying to heaven for vengeance. We long
for a release from the place where our soul, like that of
righteous lot, is daily vexed with the filthy lives of the
wicked, so that, look where we will, we are constrained to say
with a psalmist, Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live
among the tents of Kedar. Psalm 120.5