The Monster Dragged to Light by Charles Spurgeon

In order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful. Romans chapter 7 verse 13

First, too many men. Sin does not appear to be utterly sinful. Yes, and in all men in their natural blindness, there is an ignorance of what sin is. It needs the power of the divine omnipotence, the voice of that same majesty. which said, Let there be light. And there was light to illuminate the human mind, or else it will remain in darkness as to much of its own actual sin, and the deep and deadly evil which belongs to it.

Man, with wretched perverseness of misconception, abides content in a wrong idea of sin. His deeds are evil, and he will not come to the light lest he should know more concerning that evil than he wishes to know. Moreover, such is the power of self-esteem, that though sin abounds in the sinner, he will not readily be brought to feel or confess its existence. There are men in this world steeped up to the throat in iniquity, who never dream that they have committed anything worse than minor faults. There are those whose souls are saturated with sin until they are like the wool that has been lying in the scarlet dye, and yet they conceive themselves to be white as snow.

This is due in part to that dullness of conscience which is the result of the fall. Though I have heard ten thousand times that conscience is the vice-regent of God in the soul of man, I have never been able to subscribe to that dogma. It is no such thing. In many people conscience is perverted, in others only a fragment of it remains, and in all it is fallible and subject to aberrations. Conscience is a thing of degrees in all men, dependent upon education, example, and previous character. Conscience is an eye of the soul, but it is frequently blind and weak, and always needs light from above, or else it does but mock the soul.

Conscience is a faculty of the mind, which, like every other, has suffered serious damage through our natural depravity, and it is by no means perfect. Conscience is the understanding acting upon moral subjects, and upon such matters. It often puts bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter, darkness for light, and light for darkness. Hence it is that men's sins do not appear to them to be sin. In all probability there is not one, even among renewed men, who fully knows the evil of sin. Nor will there be until we shall be perfect in heaven. And then, when we shall see the perfection of divine holiness, we shall understand how heinous a thing was sin.

Men who have lived underground all their lives do not know how dark the mine is, nor can they know it until they stand in the blaze of a summer's noon. In a great measure, our inability to see sin as sin arises from the exceeding deceitfulness both of sin and of the human heart.

Sin assumes the brightest forms, even as Satan attires himself as an angel of light. Like Jezebel, sin adorns its head and paints its face. Indeed, the heart loves to have it so and is eager to be deceived. We will, if we can, extenuate our faults. We are all very quick-sighted to perceive something, which, if it does not quite excuse our sin, at all events prevents its being placed in the first class of atrocities.

Sometimes we will not understand the commandment. We are willing not to knew its force and stringency. It is too keen and sharp, and we try to blunt its edge. And if we can find a milder meaning for it, we are glad to do so. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, hence it invents a thousand falsehoods.

As the deceivableness of sin is very great, so that it adorns itself with the colors of righteousness, and makes men believe that they are pleasing God, when they are in fact offending Him, so is man himself an eager self-deceiver. Like the fool in Solomon's Proverbs, he readily follows the flatterer.

Sin. In most men, their not seeing sin to be sin arises from their ignorance of the spirituality of the law. Men read the Ten Commandments, and they suppose them to mean nothing more than the superficial sense. If they read, for instance, you shall not murder, immediately they say, I have never broken that law. But they forget that he who hates his brother is a murderer, and that unrighteous anger is a distinct violation of the command. If I willfully do anything which tends to destroy or shorten life, either my own or my neighbor's, then I am breaking the command.

A man finds it written, You shall not commit adultery. Well, well, says he, I am clear there. Immediately, he plumes himself upon the supposition that he is chastity itself. But if he understands that the command touches the heart, and that a licentious look is adultery, and that even a desire to do that which is evil condemns the soul, then immediately he sees things in a very different light, and sees that to be sin which had never troubled him before.

commonly, yes, universally, until the Spirit of God comes into the soul, there is a total ignorance as to what the law means. And men say, with a light heart, Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep your law. Whereas, if they did but know the extent of God's law, they would say, Lord, have mercy upon us, and cleanse us of our innumerable infractions of a law which we cannot keep, and which must forever condemn us as long as we abide under its power.

Thus you see a few of the reasons why sin does not appear in its true light to the unconverted, but deceives impenitent and self-righteous minds. This is one of the most deplorable results of sin. It injures us most by taking from us the capacity to know how much we are injured. It undermines the man's constitution and yet leads him to boast of unfailing health. It beggars him and tells him that he is rich. It strips him and makes him boast in his imagined robes.

In this it resembles slavery, which, by degrees, eats into the soul and makes a man contented in his chains. Bondage at length degrades a man, so that at last he forgets the misery of slavery and the dignity of freedom, and is unable to strike the blow when a happy hour offers him the chance of liberation.

Sin, like the deadly frost of the northern regions, benumbs its victim before it slays him. Man is so diseased that he imagines his disease to be health, and judges healthy men to be under wild delusions. He loves the enemy which destroys him. He warms at his bosom, the viper whose fangs cause his death.

The worst thing that can happen to a man is for him to be sinful, and to judge his sinfulness to be righteousness. The papist advances to his altar and bows before a piece of bread, but he does not feel that he is committing idolatry. Nay, he believes that he is acting in a praiseworthy manner. The persecutor hounded his fellow creature to prison and to death, but he thought he truly did service to God.

You and I can see the idolatry of the papist and the murder committed by the persecutor, but the guilty people do not see it themselves. The angry man imagines himself to be rightly indignant. The greedy man is proud of his own prudence. The unbeliever rejoices in his independence of mind. These are the aspects under which iniquity presents itself to the spiritually blind.

The harm of sin is that it throws out of gear the balances by which the soul discerns between good and evil. What horrible beings must those have been, who could run down a vessel crowded with living souls, and then, while hearing them shriek and cry for help, could go steaming away from them, leaving them all to perish in the overwhelming waters? To what a state of inhumanity must they have sunk, to be able to do such a thing? The wreck of the vessel is hardly more dreadful than the wreck of all moral sense and common humanity in those who left the hundreds to die, when they might have saved them.

To be able to stab a man would be horrible, but to be so wicked that after stabbing him you felt no sense of wrongdoing would be far worse. Yet with every act of sin, there goes a measure of heart-hardening, so that he who is capable of great crimes is usually incapable of knowing them to be such. With the ungodly, this pestilential influence is very powerful, leading them to cry peace, peace, where there is no peace, and to rebel against the Most Holy God without fear or remorse.

Alas, since even in the saints there remains the old nature, they are not altogether free from the darkening power of sin. For I do not hesitate to say that we all unwittingly allow ourselves in practices which clearer light would show to be sins. Even the best of men have done this in the past. For instance, John Newton, in his trading for slaves in his early days, never seemed to have felt that there was any wrong in it. And George Whitefield, in using slaves in his orphanage in Georgia, never raised or dreamed of raising the question as to whether slavery was in itself sinful.

Perhaps advancing light will show that many of the habits and customs of our present civilization are essentially bad, and our grandsons will wonder how we could have acted as wickedly as we did. It may need centuries before the national conscience, or even the common Christian conscience, will be enlightened up to the true standard of right, and the individual man may need many a chastisement and rebuke from the Lord before he is fully discerned between good and evil.

O you demon, sin, you are proved to be sin with a vengeance, by thus deluding us. You do not only poison us, but make us imagine our poison to be medicine. You defile us and make us think ourselves the more beautiful. You slay us and make us dream that we are enjoying life.

My brethren, before we can be restored to the holy image of Christ, which is the ultimatum of every Christian, we must be taught to know sin to be sin, and we must have a restoration of the tenderness of conscience which would have been ours had we never fallen. A measure of this discernment and tenderness of judgment is given to us at conversion. For conversion, apart from the knowledge of sin, would be impossible. How can a man repent of that which he does not know to be sin? How shall he humble himself before God concerning that which he does not recognize to be evil in God's sight? He must have enlightenment. Sin must be made to appear sin to him. Moreover, man will not renounce his self-righteousness until he sees his sinfulness. As long as he believes himself to be righteous, he will hug that righteousness and stand before God with the Pharisees' cry, God, I thank you that I am not as other men are. As long as it is possible for us to swim on the bladders of our own righteousness, we will never take to the lifeboat of Christ's righteousness. We can only be driven to salvation by free grace, by the knowledge of our sinfulness.

It is a miracle of grace to make a man see himself, so as to loathe himself and confess the impossibility of being saved by his own works. Yet, until this is done, faith in Jesus is impossible, for no man will look to the righteousness of another while he is satisfied with his own righteousness. And everyone believes he has a righteousness of his own until he sees sin in its native hideousness. Unless sin is revealed to you as a boundless evil, whoever you may be, you can never be saved and admitted to heaven. You must be made to see that your heart reeks with evil, that your past life has been defiled with iniquity. And you must also be taught that this evil of yours is no trifle, but a monstrous and horrible thing. You must be made to loathe yourselves as in the presence of God, or else you never will fly to the sin atoning blood for cleansing. Unless sin is seen to be utterly sinful, grace will never be seen to be grace, nor Jesus to be his Savior. And without this, salvation is impossible.

Here then we leave this important point, bearing witness again that to the natural man, sin does not appear exceedingly sinful. Therefore, a work of grace must be wrought in him to open his blind eyes, or he cannot be saved. These are no soft speeches and fair words, but solemn truths. May the Holy Spirit lead many hearts to feel how sorrowfully true they are.

This leads us to our second consideration. Secondly, where sin is most clearly seen, it appears to be utterly sinful. Sin, in its most terrible aspect, is best seen in a man's natural self. Sin then appears to be utterly sinful.

Do I seem to repeat myself? Does this utterance sound like a mere platitude? Then I cannot help it. For the text puts it so, and I know you will not despise the text. But indeed, there is a depth of meaning in the expression, sin, that it might appear sin, as if the apostle could find no other word so terribly descriptive of sin as its own name.

He does not say, sin, that it might appear like Satan. No, for sin is worse than the devil, since sin made the devil what he is. Satan is God's creature, and sin never was. Its origin and nature are altogether apart from God. Sin is even worse than hell, for it is the sting of that dreadful punishment. Anselm used to say that if hell were on one side and sin on the other, he would rather leap into hell than willingly sin against God.

Paul does not say, sin, that it might appear madness. Truly sin is moral insanity, but it is worse than that by far. Sin is so bad that there is no name for it but itself. One of our poets who wished to show how evil sin looks in the presence of redeeming love could only say, when the wounds of Christ exploring, sin does like itself appear.

If you need an illustration of what is meant, we might find one in Judas. If you wanted to describe him, you might say he was a traitor, a thief, and a betrayer of innocent blood. But you would finish up by saying, he was a Judas. That gives you all in one. None could match him in villainy.

If you wished a man to feel a horror of murder, you would not wish murder to appear to him as manslaughter, or as destruction of life, or as mere cruelty, but you would want it to appear as murder. You could use no stronger expression.

So here, when the Lord turns the strong light of His eternal Spirit upon sin and reveals it in all its hideousness and defilement, it appears to be not only moral discord, disorder, deformity, or corruption, but neither more nor less than sin.

Sin, says Thomas Brooks, is the only thing that God abhors, Sin brought Christ to the cross. Sin dams souls. Sin shuts heaven. Sin laid the foundations of hell.

There are many who see sin as a misfortune, but this is far short of the true view, and indeed, very wide of it. How commonly do we hear an atrocious sinner called an unfortunate one, or one who made bad choices? This indicates a very lax morality.

Truly it is a calamity to be a sinner, but it is much more than a calamity, and he who only sees sin as his misfortune has not seen it so as to be saved from it.

Others have come to see sin as folly, and so far they see it right, for it is essentially folly, and every sinner is indeed a fool. A fool is God's own name for a sinner, commonly used throughout the book of Proverbs.

But for all that, sin is more than folly. It is not mere mistaken judgment. It is the knowing and willful choice of evil, and it has in it a certain maliciousness against God which is far worse than mere stupidity.

To see sin as folly is a good thing, but it is not a gracious thing, nor a saving thing.

Some, too, have seen certain sins to be crimes, and yet have not viewed them as sins. Our use of the word crime is significant. When an action hurts our fellow men, we call it a crime. When it only offends God, we call it a sin.

If I were to call you criminals, you would be disgusted with me. But if I call you sinners, you will not be at all angry, because to offend man is a thing you would not like to do. But to offend God is to many people only a small matter, scarcely worth a moment's thought.

Human nature has become so perverted that if men know that they have broken human laws, they are ashamed. But the breach of a command, which only affects the Lord himself, causes them very small concern.

If we were to steal, or lie, or knock another down, then we would be ashamed of ourselves, and so we ought to be. But for all that, such shame would be no work of grace.

Sin must appear to be sin against God. That is the point. We must say with David, Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done this evil in your sight. With the prodigal we must cry, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and am no more worthy to be called your son.

That is the true view of it. May the Lord bring us to confess our transgressions after that sort.

And now lend me your ears a minute or two. Think how odious a thing sin is.

Beloved, our offenses are committed against a law which is based upon righteousness. It is holy and just and good. It is the best law which could be conceived.

To break a bad law may be more than excusable, but there can be no excuse for transgression when the commandment commends itself to every man's conscience.

There is not one command in God's Word which is either harsh, arbitrary, or unnecessary. If we ourselves were perfect in holiness and infinitely wise and had to write a law, we would have written exactly the moral law which God has given us. The law is just to our fellow men, and beneficial to ourselves. When it forbids anything, it does but set up danger signals where real danger to ourselves exists. The law is a kind of spiritual police to keep us out of harm's way. Those who offend against it only injure themselves.

Sin is a false, base, unrighteous thing. It does evil all around and brings good to nobody. It has not one good feature. It is evil, only evil and that continually. It is a wicked, wanton, purposeless, useless rejection of that which is good and right, in favor of that which is disgraceful and injurious.

We ought also to remember that the divine law is binding upon men, because of the right and authority of the lawgiver. God has made us. Then ought we not to obey Him? Our existence is prolonged by His kindness. We could not live a moment without Him. Then should we not obey Him? God is superlatively good. He has never done us any harm. He has always designed our benefit and has treated us with unbounded kindness. Why should we willfully insult Him? By breaking laws which He had a right to make. and which he has made for our good, is it not shameful to do that which he hates, when there can be nothing to gain thereby, and no reason for doing it?

How I wish every heart here could hear that plaintive lamentation of the Lord! It is wonderful condescension that he should describe himself as uttering it. The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's feeding trough, but Israel does not know. My people do not understand.

that other word of pleading is equally pitiable, where the Lord expostulates and cries, Oh, do not do this loathsome and shamefully vile thing that I hate and abhor. After all his tenderness in which he has acted towards us as a father to his child, we have turned against him and harbored his enemy. We have found our pleasure in grieving him. and have called his commands burdens and his service a weariness. Shall we not repent of this? Can we continue to act thus vilely?

This day, my God, I hate sin not because it damns me, but because it has done wrong to you. To have grieved my God is the worst of grief to me. The heart renewed by grace feels a deep sympathy with God in the ungrateful treatment which He has received from us. It cries out, How could I have offended Him? Why did I treat so gracious a God, in so disgraceful a manner? He has done good and no evil to me. Why have I slighted Him?

Had the Eternal been a tyrant, and had His laws been despotic? then I could imagine some dignity in a revolt against him. But seeing he is a father full of gentleness and tenderness, whose loving-kindnesses are beyond all count, sin against him is exceedingly sinful. Sin is worse than beastle, for the beasts only return evil for evil. Sin is devilish, for it returns evil for good. Sin is lifting our heel against our best benefactor. It is basing gratitude, treason, causeless hate, spite against holiness, and a preference for that which is vile and groveling. Sin is sin, and in that word we have said all.

It would appear that Paul made the discovery of sin as sin, through the light of one of the commands. He gives us a little bit of his own biography, which is most interesting to notice. He says, I would not have known lust, except the law had said you shall not covet. It strikes me that when Paul was struck down from his horse on his way to Damascus, the first thought that came to him was, this Jesus whom I have been persecuting is after all the Messiah and Lord of all. Oh, horror of horrors, I have ignorantly warred against him. He is Jesus, the Savior who saves from sins. But how horrid are my sins! How gravely have I offended against the law!

In his lonely blindness, his mind involuntarily ran over the Ten Commandments. And as he considered each one of them with his poor, half-enlightened judgment, he cried to himself, I have not broken that particular law. I have not broken that other particular law. Until at last he came to that command, You shall not covet. And in a moment, as though a lightning flash had cut in twain the solid darkness of his spirit, he saw his sin and confessed that he had been guilty of inordinate desires. He would not have known lust if the law had not said, You shall not covet. When that discovery unveiled all the rest of his sins, the proud Pharisee became a humble penitent, and he who thought himself blameless cried out, I am the chief of sinners.

I pray God by some means to let the same light stream into every soul here, where as yet it has not penetrated. O my hearers, I beseech the Lord to let you see sin as sin, and so lead you to Jesus as the only Savior.

I shall need your best attention to the third point, which is this.

Thirdly, the sinfulness of sin is most clearly seen, in ITS perverting the best of things to worst of purposes. So the text runs, sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good. It is evident that we are atrociously depraved, since we make the worst conceivable use of the best things. Here is God's law, which was ordained to life, for he who does these things shall live by them, is willfully disobeyed, and so sin turns the law into an instrument of death.

Sin does worse still. The sin that is in us, when it hears the commandment, immediately resolves to break it, It is a strangely wicked propensity of our nature that there are many things which we should not care for otherwise, which we lust after at once, as soon as they are forbidden. Have you ever noticed, even in regard to human law, that when a thing is prohibited, then people long after it? I do not remember, in all the years I have lived in London, any cravings of the populace to hold meetings in Hyde Park, until an attempt was made to keep them out, and then, immediately, all the railings were pulled down and the park was stormed. The park has been a field of battle ever since. Had liberty of speech in the park never been interfered with as it was, most unwisely, then nobody would have cared to protest. They would have said, what's the use of dragging up there all through the mud for miles, when we can meet more comfortably in a hall undercover? But because they must not do it, then they resolve to do it. That is the way with our common nature. It kicks at restraint. If we must not do a thing, then we will do it.

Even before she fell, our mother Eve felt drawn to the forbidden tree, and the impulse in her fallen sons and daughters is far more forcible, as by one common impulse we wander from the road appointed, and break hedges to leap into fields enclosed against us. To our depraved nature, law is but the signal for revolt. Sin is a monster indeed, when it turns a preventative law into an incentive to rebellion. This is far from being the only case in which good is turned to evil through our sin. I might mention many others. Very briefly then, how many there are who turn the abounding mercy of God, as proclaimed in the gospel, into a reason for further sin? The preacher delights to tell you in God's name that the Lord is ready to forgive and willing to have mercy upon sinners, and that whoever believes in Jesus shall receive immediate pardon. What do these men say? Oh, if it is so easy to be forgiven, then let us go on to sin. If faith is so simple a matter, then let us put it off until some future time. Oh, base and cruel argument. To commit greater sin. From God's infinite love. What if I call it devilish reasoning? For so it is. To make of the goodness of a gracious God. A reason for continuing to offend Him. Is it so that the more God loves, the more you will hate Him? The better He is ROU. The worse you will be to Him? Shame. Shame. Then, again, there are individuals who have indulged in very great sin and have very fortunately escaped from the natural consequences of that sin. And what do they gather from this forbearance on God's part? God has been very patient and pitiful to them, and therefore they defy Him again and return presumptuously to their former habits. They dream that they have immunity to transgress, and even boast that God will never punish them. Let them act as wickedly as they desire. Sin appears sin, indeed, when God's forbearance, which should lead to repentance, is regarded as a license for further offending. What a marvel that the Eternal God does not crush His foes at once, when they count His gentleness to be weakness, and make His mercy to be a ground for further disobedience. Look again at thousands of prosperous sinners whose riches are their means of sinning. They have all that heart can wish, and instead of being doubly grateful to God, they are proud and thoughtless, and deny themselves none of the pleasures of sin. The blessings which God gives to them become their curses, because they only inflame their arrogance and worldliness. They war against God, with weapons from his own armory. They are indulged by God's gracious providence, and then they indulge their sins the more. Fullness of bread too often breeds contempt of God. Men are lifted up, and then look down upon the gospel and speak loftily against the people of God, and even against the Lord Himself. with God's food in their mouths. They blaspheme their benefactor. And with the wealth which is the loan of God's charity, they purchase the vile pleasures of iniquity. This is horrible. But so it is. The more God gives to man, the more man hates God. He to whom God multiplies his mercies, returns it by multiplying his transgressions. I remember in our Baptist Martyrology the story of one of the Baptists of Holland escaping from his persecutors. A river was frozen over, and the godly man crossed it safely. But his enemy was of greater weight, and the ice gave way under him. The Baptist, like a child of God as he was, turned around and rescued his persecutor, just as he was sinking beneath the ice to certain death. And what did the wretch do? As soon as ever he was safely on the shore, he seized the man who had saved his life and dragged him off to the prison, from which he was soon taken to be put to death. We wonder at such inhumanity. We are indignant at such base returns to the kindnesses of others, but the returns which the ungodly make to God are far more heinous. I wonder myself as I talk to you. I wonder that I speak so calmly on so terribly humbling a theme. remembering our past lives, and our long ingratitude to God. I marvel that we do not turn this place into one vast botchum, a place of weeping, and mingle our tears in a flood, with expressions of deep shame and self-abhorrence for our vile ingratitude to God. The same evil is manifested when the Lord reveals His justice and utters threats. When a threatening sermon is delivered, you will hear men say as they go out from hearing such a discourse, although the preacher has spoken most affectionately, we will have no more of this hellfire preaching. We are wearied and worried with these threatenings of judgment. Try the same man with God's tenderness, and speak of God's love, and he will be hardened by it. For the gospel hardens some men, and becomes a savor of death unto death unto many. O sin, you are sinfulness indeed, to make the gospel of salvation a reason for deeper damnation. When great judgments are abroad in the land, most of the ungodly become more insolent against God, and even rail at Him as a tyrant. The fire which ought to melt them only makes them harder. The terrors of God they defy, and like Pharaoh they demand, Who is the Lord, that I should obey Him? We have known people in adversity, very poor and very sick, who ought to have been led to God by their sorrow, but instead thereof, they have become careless of all religion and cast off all fear of God. They have acted like a has of whom it is written, in the time of his distress, he sinned yet more against the Lord. God's rod did not separate them from sin, but whipped them into a worse state. Their medicine had become their poison. The more the tree has been pruned, the less fruit it has yielded. Plowing has only made the field more barren. That which has often proved so great a blessing to believers has been utterly lost upon the ungodly. why should they be smitten anymore? They will only revolt more and more. One very singular instance of the heart's perversity is the fact that familiarity with death and the grave often hardens the heart. None become more callous than gravediggers and those who carry dead men to their graves. Men sin openly. When graves are opened before them, it is possible to work among the dead, and yet to be as wild as the man possessed of a devil in our Lord's day, who dwelt among the tombs. The Egyptians were accustomed to hold their riotous festivals in the presence of a corpse, not to sober their mirth, as some have said, but to make them the more lustful, gluttonous, and drunken because they would so soon die. Coffins and shrouds should be good sermons, but they seldom are so to those who see them every day. In times when cholera has raged, and in seasons when the pestilence, in the olden times, carried off its thousands, many men have not been at all softened, but have grown callous in the presence of God's grim messenger, and even mocked him, Unholy men are as far off from God in a churchyard as in a theater. Another strange thing I have often noticed. As a proof of sin's power to gather poison from the most healthful flowers, I have observed that some transgress all the more, simply because they have been placed under the happy restraints of a godly family. Though trained to piety and virtue, they rush into the arms of vice as though it were their mother. As gnats fly at a candle, as soon as ever they catch sight of it, so do these foolish ones dash into evil. Young people who are placed in the providence of God where no temptations ever assail them, in the midst of holy and quiet homes, where the very name of evil scarcely comes, will often fret and worry themselves to get out into what they call life, and thrust their souls into the perils of wicked company. The sons and daughters of Adam long to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Their very preservation from temptation grows irksome to them. They loathe the family fold and long for the friendship of wolves. They think themselves harshly treated, that they have not been raised in the midst of vileness and tutored in crime. Strange infatuation, and yet many a parent's heart has been broken by this freak of depravity, this reckless lust for evil. The younger son had the best of fathers, and yet he could never be quiet until he had gained his independence and had brought himself to beggary and shame in a far country by spending his living with harlots and most despicable people. Observe another case. Men who live in times when zealous and holy Christians abound are often the worst for it. What effect has the zeal of Christians upon such? It only excites them to malice. All the while the church is asleep, the world says, Ah, we do not believe your religion, for you do not act as if you believed it yourselves. But the moment the church bestirs herself, the world cries. They are a set of fanatics. Who can put up with their ravings? We could have believed their religion, had it been brought to us with respectful sobriety, but accompanied by wild enthusiasm. It is detestable. Nothing will please sinners but their sins. Fallen man will always go contrary to God. His very nature is enmity against His Creator. Sin is thus seen to be exceedingly sinful. That plant must possess great vitality, which increases by being uprooted and cut down. that plant which lives by being killed, is strangely full of force. That must be a very hard substance, which is hardened by lying in the blast furnace, in the central heat of the fire, where iron melts and runs like wax. That must be a very terrible power, which gathers strength from that which should restrain it, and rushes on the more violently in proportion as it is reigned in. Sin damns men by that which was ordained to life. Sin makes heaven's gifts to be the stepping stones to hell. Sin is that strange fire which burns the more fiercely for being damped, finding fuel in the water which was intended to quench it. The Lord brings good out of evil, but sin brings evil out of good. Sin is a deadly evil. O that men knew sin's nature, and abhorred it with all their hearts! May the Eternal Spirit teach men to rightly understand this worst of evils, that they may flee from it to Him who alone can deliver them. Now, what is the drift of this discourse? Well, the drift of it is this. There is in all people by nature a propensity to sin which we cannot conquer, and yet conquered it must be, or we can never enter heaven. Your resolutions to overcome sin are as feeble as though you should try to bind Leviathan with a thread and lead him with a string. as well as hope to bind the tempest and rain in the storm, as to hope to govern yourself by your own resolutions not to sin. Nor is sin to be overcome by philosophy. It laughs at such a spider's web. Nor can sin be prevented. Nor will the soul be cleansed from sin by any outward observances. Genuflections, penances, and fastings are all in vain.

What then must be done? We must be created anew. We are too far gone for mending. we must be cleansed and made afresh. And for cleansing there is no water beneath the skies, nor any above them that can remove our sinful stains. But there is a fountain filled with the blood of God's own Son. He who is washed there shall be made as white as snow. And there is an all-creating Holy Spirit who can make us anew in Christ Jesus unto holiness.

I hope that you have all despaired of being saved, except by a miracle of saving grace. I hope that you have utterly despaired of being saved, except by the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. I hope that all of you were driven to look away from self, to Him who on the bloody tree bore the wrath of God, for there is life in a look at Him.

Whoever looks to him shall be saved, saved from the power of sin, as well as its guilt. That which the brazen serpent took away was the burning poison in the veins of the men who had been bitten by the serpents. They were diseased with a deadly disease, and they looked, and it was healed. It was not filth that was taken from them. It was disease that was healed by their simple look.

In the same way, a look at Christ does not merely take away sin, but it heals the disease of sin. Christ crucified is the only possible healing for the leprosy of iniquity. Faith in Jesus brings the Holy Spirit with His sacred weapons of invincible warfare into the field of the human heart, and He overthrows the impregnable strongholds of sin, makes lust a captive, and slays the enmity of the heart.

Sin being made to appear sin, then grace is made to appear grace. God's Holy Spirit gets the victory, and we are saved. May God grant that this may be the experience of us all. Amen and Amen.