The Heart–a Den of Evil
A sermon
(No. 732)
Delivered on Lord's-day Morning, JANUARY 27, 1867, by
C.H.SPURGEON,
At the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington
"For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries,
fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies."- Matthew 15:19.
WE cannot too often insist upon it that religion is a matter of the
heart. It is the besetting sin of man to forget that God is a Spirit
and that worship rendered to God must be of a spiritual kind. Idolatry
is the full carrying out of this mischievous propensity. Instead of
adoring the Great Invisible and giving Him the love of the heart, man
sets up a block of wood or stone, and, burning incense and performing
genuflections before it, he cries, "This is my god." Where this
idolatry does not assume the very grossest form it takes another which
is equally as objectionable in the sight of God. Man pleads that he
cannot worship God with his heart unless his memory is assisted by some
outward object, and then he smuggles in his idol and gratifies his
depraved nature with will worship and outward formalism.
God requires soul worship and men give him body worship! He asks for
the heart and they present Him with their lips. He demands their
thoughts and their minds, and they give Him banners, and vestments, and
candles. Where man is hunted by very shame from outward superstitions,
he betakes himself to anything sooner than yield his heart's love to
his Maker, submit his intellect to the great Creator's teaching, or
render all his faculties to the service of the Most High. No matter how
painful may be the mortification, rigid the penance, severe the
abstinence–no matter how much may be taken from his purse or the wine
vat, or the store–he will be content to suffer anything sooner than
bow before the Most High with a true confession of sin, and trust in
the appointed Savior with sincere childlike faith.
In this age, as much as in past times, the watchmen of our Israel must
insist upon the spirituality of worship, for the old paganism lives
among us–altered in form but unchanged in spirit. We spoke of idolatry
as being buried at Athens and consigned to its tomb at Rome, but it
lives in the Puseyism of the present hour! Men are naturally idolaters
and it is nothing but idolatry which nowadays, in the toyshops of the
Tractarian, is polluting the simplicity of our worship by thrusting
their childish symbols and emblems before the sublime Truth that God is
to be worshipped in spirit, and only to be approached through the
atoning sacrifice of His only begotten Son.
This morning I trust I shall not be guilty of attracting your attention
for a single moment to anything that is external, however gaudy or
however simple. It is to the human heart that I ask you now to turn
your eyes. It is to your own hearts, my Hearers, you that are converted
and you that are not! It is to a consideration of your own inner
natures that I entreat you now to turn your serious thoughts. My text
is a looking glass in which every man may see himself. He may see not
his face which he can see anywhere–but his heart, his moral nature,
his innermost self. Here sin is in many a heart laid bare, turned
inside out, anatomized and depicted by One who cannot lie and cannot be
deceived.
We shall come to the text at once, and observe, first, the humiliating
doctrine which it teaches. Then we shall occupy the rest of your time
by mentioning the kindred doctrines of which it reminds us.
I. FIRST NOTICE THE HUMILIATING TRUTH which the Savior here sets forth.
He tells us that out of the heart all sorts of moral evils proceed. He
selects not the milder forms of sin but the grosser shades–adulteries,
murders, blasphemies–these are words of no common import–and stand
for sins of no common dye. The accusation laid against human nature
here is one of the most solemn that could possibly be put into words.
The Savior has not minced matters in any degree nor chosen smooth forms
of speech. He has selected the grossest shapes of human sin and He has
said that all these come out of the human heart.
There have been men who have asserted that sins are merely accidents of
man's position. But the Savior says they come out of his heart. Some
have affirmed that they are mistakes of his judgment–that the social
system bears so harshly at certain points that men can scarcely do
otherwise than offend–for their judgment misleads them. The Savior,
how-
ever, traces these offenses not to the head and its mistaken judgments,
but to the heart and its unholy affections. He plainly tells us that
the part of human nature which yields such poisonous fruit is not a
bough which may be sawn off, a limb which may be cut away–but the very
core and substance of the man–his heart.
He, in effect, tells us that lust does not come out of the eyes merely,
but from the inmost nature of a depraved being. Murder comes not, in
the first place, from the hasty hand but from a wild ungovernable
heart. He declares that theft is not the mere result of a hasty
temptation, but is the outflow of a covetous desire which dwells in the
being of which disorganized affections are the real source. All the
mischiefs mentioned in our text come out of man's essential self–that
is what I understand the Savior to mean by the heart.
The heart is the true man. It is the very citadel of the City of
Mansoul. It is the fountain and reservoir of manhood and all the rest
of man may be compared to the many pipes which run from the fountain
through the streets of a city. The Savior puts His finger on the
mainspring of the machine of manhood, and cries, "Here is the evil!"
Like a great physician, He lays His hands upon the very core of human
nature and exclaims, "Here is the disease." The leprosy of sin is not
as to its primary seat in the head, nor the hand, nor the foot–but in
the very heart. The poison is in the center, and consequently all the
outlying members share in the poison.
By the heart we usually understand the affections, and doubtless the
affections of man are the sources of his crimes. It is because man does
not love his Maker with all his heart, and soul, and strength–but
loves himself–that he therefore breaks his Maker's Laws to please
himself. It is because man does not love that which is right, and good,
and true, but because he delights in that which is false and evil, that
his actions become defiled. It comes to the same thing, you see,
whether you interpret the word "heart" to mean the central core of the
man, or to signify the affections. You come to the same result that it
is the man's vital self which is wrong. It is manhood's real essence
which is vitiated.
Manhood in its most vital essence is corrupt through and through. To
use the words of the infinite Jehovah Himself, "Every imagination of
the heart of man is evil from his youth." "The whole head is sick, and
the whole heart faint." "The heart is deceitful above all things, and
desperately wicked." Observe with humiliation those foul streams which
the Savior declares flow from the heart of man! He speaks of evil
thoughts. Some make little of thoughts of evil, but God does not so
judge. He judges an action not so much by the outward motions of the
matter of the body by which the action is performed, as by the inward
motion of the inner man by which that motion was instigated and
dictated.
Evil thoughts have in them the absolute essence of sin quite as surely
as evil acts, for when we come to trace an action to its essential evil
we have to look to the motive which dictates it–which motive brings us
at once into the region of thought. So that evil thoughts, instead of
being less evidently sinful than actions, are most clearly the very
nest in which the principle and soul of sin is to be found.
Men sometimes say, "We shall not be hanged for our thoughts." But it
will be well for them to know that except they repent of them, they
certainly will be damned for their thoughts! And even if those thoughts
of theirs never shaped themselves into actions, yet their guilt would
remain! If the men were shut up in cells so that they could not commit
that which their nature instigated them to do, yet, as before the Lord,
seeing they would have been such sinners outwardly if they could have
been, their hearts are judged to be no better than the hearts of those
who found opportunity to sin and used it.
A vicious horse is none the better tempered because the kicking straps
prevent his dashing the carriage to atoms. And so a man is none the
better, really, because the restraints of custom and Providence may
prevent his carrying out that which he would prefer. Poor fallen human
nature behind the bars of Laws, and in the cage of fear of punishment
is none the less a fearful creature. Should its master unlock the door
we should soon see what it would be and do. Evil thoughts flow out of
the heart. Such as evil thoughts of God, evil thoughts of man. Thoughts
about evil, doting imaginations, and foul desires, the rolling of evil
under the tongue as a sweet morsel, and such like. Many a man who has
not committed an outward act of sensual lust has nevertheless thought
it over and relished it, and so perpetrated it in his soul.
Many a man who had not the courage to be a thief in very deed has
nevertheless been a thief a thousand times over in his heart. And he
who dared not blaspheme God with his lips has cursed God in his heart
ten thousand times. These evil thoughts are signs of what is in the
heart. They would not bubble up within us if they were not first there.
They could not come into the mind if they were not essential to the
soul.
Our Lord next speaks of murders, by which He means, according to John's
interpretation of it, every form of unjustifiable anger. Those
ebullitions of evil temper in which we wish people were dead, or
otherwise injured, and would gladly punish them if we could, are in the
same class as murders. Murders, themselves, arise from the evil
passions of the human heart. If the fire were not there, temptation
could not fan it to a flame. Is it not because men love themselves
better than their neighbors that they commit murder? It is clear to
everyone that it must be so. Therefore it is the failure of the
affections to work accurately which leads men to the commission of this
terrible deed. An evil nature sits by the fireside and murders men in
thought, and hurls daggers at them in the heart in words, because it is
evil, self-loving, and vile!
The inventory next mentions acts of unchastity. Men would never fall
into evil lusts if it were not that they are dear to their hearts.
Because these things are sweet to the heart, therefore men follow them.
If the ox drinks water, it is because the ox thirsts. And if man goes
after vice, it is because his soul longs after it. Those who never
indulged in these actions may yet have meditated upon them–and in such
a case the heart has committed uncleanness before God. So also the
injuring of others by theft is from the heart. Is it not, again,
because we love ourselves better than God, and better than others, that
we are tempted to covet and led from covetousness to acts of
dishonesty? And when it comes to the bearing of false witness, what is
this, again, but an intense lie of one's own proper being, and a lack
of love to our neighbors and our
God?
When the list closes with blasphemy, what is this but the heart setting
itself up higher than God and then seeking to tread God beneath its
feet by the use of opprobrious and wicked epithets concerning Him? The
heart is at the bottom of it all. There would be no murder, no
fornication–there could be no blasphemy if the heart were pure and
right. If God were loved first and foremost, these offenses could not
occur! But the heart is mischievous and therefore these things exist.
The Savior does not stop to prove that these things come out of the
heart–He asserts it–and asserts it because it is self-evident. When
you see a thing coming forth, you are clear it was there first.
Last summer I noticed hornets continually flying from a number of
decayed logs in my garden. I saw them constantly flying in and out, and
I did not think myself at all unreasonable in concluding that there was
a hornet's nest there. I suppose that was the inference which everybody
would have drawn. If we see the hornets of sin flying out of a man, we
suppose at once that there is sin within him. Look at yonder spring–it
is bubbling up with cool and fresh water–do you not conclude that
somewhere or other there is a reservoir of this water from which it
rises? If you did not conclude so, you would be so unreasonable that
you might be the common butt of laughter.
And when we know that all sorts of evil thoughts and murders, and
lustful desires come from men's hearts, it is not at all a difficult
conclusion that they must be in men. And inasmuch as all men, more or
less, fall into these displays of sin, we conclude that there is in all
men a great storehouse of sin–a secret fountain of sin–a mass of
inward evil from which outward evil proceeds. If this needed any
sustaining at all I might offer these few observations, namely, that
nobody ever needs any training to commit sin. Albeit there may be
schools of virtue–there is certainly no necessity to open a school for
vice! Your child will have evil thoughts without your sending him to a
diabolical infant school. Lads who have never seen the act of theft, or
children who have been brought up in the midst of honesty will be found
guilty of little thefts early enough in life.
Lying and false witness, which is one form of lying, is so common that
perhaps to find a tongue which never did bear false witness would be to
find a tongue that never spoke! Is this caused by education or by
nature? It is so common a thing that even where the ear has heard
nothing but the most rigid truth, children learn to lie and men learn
to lie and commonly do lie and love to tell an evil tale against their
fellow men whether it is true or not–bearing false witness with an
eagerness which is perfectly shocking! Is this a matter of education,
or is it a depraved heart?
Some men will willfully invent a slanderous lie knowing that they need
not take any special care of their offspring, for they may lay it in
the street and the first passerby will take it up and nurse it–and the
lie will be carried in triumph round the world! Whereas a piece of
truth which would have done honor to a good man's character will be
left to be forgotten till God shall remember it at the Day of Judgment.
You never need educate any man into sin. As soon as ever the young
crocodile has left its shell, it begins to act just like its parent,
and bites at the stick which broke the shell. The serpent is scarcely
born before it rears itself and begins to hiss. The young tiger may be
nurtured in your parlor, but it will develop, before long, the same
thirst for blood at if it were in the forest.
So is it with man! He sins as naturally as the young lion seeks blood
or the young serpent stores up venom. Sin is in his very nature that
taints his inmost soul. What is worse, it is certain that men sin under
all conceivable circumstances. You have heard much romance about
unsophisticated nature. It used to be a theory that the untutored
savage saw God in every cloud and heard Him in the wind. But when
travelers go to see these model, untutored savages, what miserable
specimens of humanity they are! The very philosophers who once set them
up as being models, change their minds and tell us that they are a
connecting link between man and the ape.
This is what unsophisticated nature becomes. The ragtags of
conventionalism are taken away. The tricks of commerce are removed–and
the child of nature is brought up naked–and a very pretty child he is!
Let those who admire him live with him and see if the very brutes do
not shame him! The character of the uncivilized man is generally such
that it were impossible for us to describe it in your hearing, so
degraded and so debased is savage man. Is he any better, however, if he
is highly educated? I suppose there was no nation of antiquity more
highly educated than the Greeks. And yet if history is credited, the
private characters of her best philosophers such as Socrates and Solon
were stained with vices revolting to the mind!
In modern times there has been ample proof that neither ignorance nor
learning are an effectual check to sin. The fool learns sin without his
books and the scholar learns it none the less with all his lore. One of
the most educated nations of modern times is the Hindu, and what is the
moral character of the Hindu? Those who have been among the Hindus
never dare to tell all that they have seen, and missionaries inform us
in a whisper that what they have seen in the temples where the Hindus
meet for worship, and where surely the better parts of their nature
ought to be seen in the presence of their gods, is so utterly obscene
that it is degrading to the mind to know that such a thing exists.
"Yes," you say, "some races are vicious both when trained under a
certain civilization and when left uncivilized. But how about Christian
civilization?" Why, the so-called Christians are scarcely any better! A
man with religion is not any better than a man without it unless that
religion changes his heart and makes a new man of him. The heart under
a Christian's coat is as vile as that under a Bushman's sheepskin
unless Divine Grace has renewed it! If you take a child and tutor him
in all the outward observances of our own holy faith–if you shall see
that in everything he is brought up after the straightest sect that
your judgment shall select–yet unless the Holy Spirit shall come and
give him a new heart and a right spirit his heart will find out ways of
showing its sin!
No, it has been notorious that some who were brought up with
Puritanical rigidity have been the most vicious in after life, and
those who have not been so have become what is almost as
detestable–hypocritical pretenders to a religion to whose real power
they are strangers. "You must be born again," is a Truth of God which
is as true in the Hottentot's kraal as it is in the midst of this
congregation! And as true in the home of piety as it is in the haunt of
vice. The old nature everywhere–wash it, cleanse it, bind it, curb it,
or bridle it–is still the old fallen nature and cannot understand
spiritual things!
You may take the man and treat him as they did the demoniac of old. You
may bind him with chains. You may seek to tame him down. But when the
old evil spirit comes up again he snaps the bonds of morality and
rushes away to one form of sin or another–either to the outward excess
of his carnal passions–or else to the equally vicious excess of
hypocrisy, formalism and self-conceit. These things may surely
strengthen this Truth of God. Man sins in every place, in every shape.
And yet more–he sins after he knows the mischief of sin! As the moth
flies into the candle after singeing its wings, so man will fly into
sin after he knows the bitterness of it. If he reforms as to one sin he
takes up another till he does no better for himself than Dr. Watts's
fever patient, of whom he says–
"It is a poor relief we gain, To shift the place and keep the pain."
They do so. They give up, perhaps, drunkenness. What then? Why then
they become self-righteous. If you can drive a man from outward vice,
how far have you improved him if he lives in inward sin? You have
benefited him as far as the sight of man is concerned, but not before
God. There was a man killed on Holborn Hill this week and I have heard
that there was little or no external appearance of injury upon his
body. He had been crushed between an omnibus and a cart, and all the
wounds were internal. But he died just as surely as if he had been
beaten black and blue, or cut in a thousand pieces. So a man may die of
internal sin–it does not appear outwardly for certain reasons–but he
will die of it just the same if it is within.
Many man has died from internal bleeding, and yet there has been no
wound whatever to be seen by the eyes. You, my dear Hearer, may go to
Hell as well dressed in the garnishing of morality as in the rags of
immorality! Unless the very center of your soul and the core of your
being is made obedient to the living God, He will not accept you, for
He looks not only to your outward actions, but to your heart's secret
loyalty or treachery towards Himself. Man sins, moreover– to close
this very fearful impeachment against manhood–man sins not as the
result of mistaken intellect, but as the result of his heart being
vile.
When a man sins by mistake. When he does not know it to be sin. When he
sins thinking that he is doing right–as soon as he gets to know his
error he forsakes the sin with horror, and flies to God with
repentance. But this is never done by men naturally. The natural heart
of man, if it finds out sin to be sin, very frequently feels all the
more delight in it just as the Apostle Paul says he had not known lust
unless the Law had said, "You shall not covet." Our corrupt nature
loves forbidden fruit! Some people would not care to work on Sunday
unless they had been commanded to rest. Many would never care to go to
the Crystal Palace on any day in the week, but they crave to go on
Sunday simply because it is forbidden.
Some fellows are lazy enough on Monday and make a saint's day of it.
And yet Sunday rest they oppose with all their might. It is strange
that what God makes common, man wants to make special, and what God
makes special, man wants to make common! As soon as ever a child is
told he must not do such a thing, although he had never thought of
doing it before, he wants to do it now. That is the nature of us. "When
the Commandment came," says the Apostle, "sin revived, and I died."
This is not the Law's fault, but ours. Cool water thrown upon unslaked
lime produces a burning heat–it is not the fault of the water that the
heat is produced–the lime, alone, is to blame. So the very command of
God, "You shall not do this," or "You shall not do that," leads man
into sin, and so it proves the innate and thorough viciousness of the
nature of man.
"I do not like it," says one. "I do not like to hear human nature
spoken so evil of." And do you suppose I like to speak of it in this
way? It is no more pleasing to me than to you. "Well, but," says one,
"I believe in the dignity of human nature." Believe in it, my dear Man,
and try and prove it if you can! Nobody will be more glad than I shall
be to see any true dignity in anybody. But why do we speak like this?
Why, because our solemn conviction is that we speak the Truth of God!
We thus speak because we believe the Word of God teaches it. And,
moreover, we know by sorrowful experience that if the charge is not
true of others, it is certainly true of us.
We have been preserved from known outward sin, but we have to mourn
over the terrible evils of our heart. And being willing to endorse the
indictment, and personally to plead guilty, we are the more confident
in bringing it forward and saying, "This is the case with the whole
race of man, without a single exception! We must all stand guilty
before God." Not one heart by nature is right with God–Jew and Gentile
are all under sin–"We are all gone out of the way, we are altogether
become unprofitable: there is none that does good, no not one."
II. We shall now turn aside to notice THE TRUTHS WHICH ARE CONNECTED
WITH THIS HUMBLING
FACT. First observe that receiving our Lord's testimony concerning our
hearts–that they have become dens of evil, that out of them comes evil
thoughts, fornication, theft, and so on–we are driven to believe in
the doctrine of the Fall. If we are in this state, it is inconceivable
that God should have made us so! A pure and holy Being must have been
the creator of pure and holy beings.
As Job says, "Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one."
We may reverse the question and say, "How could an unclean thing come
out of a clean thing?" The Holy God must be the Parent of holy
children, and when God made manhood He must have made it perfect,
otherwise He did not act according to His own Nature. It remains a
marvelous riddle how man is what he is till you turn to this Book. And
when you read the story of the Fall, the riddle is all unriddled! Then
we see how that first parent of ours, who stood for us as our
representative, sinned, and by that sin tainted the whole race, so that
we, being born of him, are born in his image and in his likeness. And
he being a rebel we are born rebels. He being a traitor we are born
traitors, too.
"Behold," says David, "I was shaped in iniquity; and in sin did my
mother conceive me." There is the root of the matter! It is not by
God's making that we are sinful–it is by Adam's unmaking of us and
ruining of us that we come to be what we are–inheritors of original
sin and corruption. If it shall be asked, How is this great mystery
still further to be explained and the justice of it proved? We answer,
that these are things too deep and too high for us–that we think
we can see the justice of it and we have sometimes admired the mercy of
it, too–but, nevertheless, we are not accustomed to dispute facts we
cannot understand. But we believe them if God reveals them–and since
it is revealed that by one man's transgression many were made sinners,
we believe it, and raise no further question.
We must leave the fact as a fact, feeling that it is a great deep. You
ask an explanation of this, and refuse to believe till you understand.
We are obliged to refer you to all other things in Nature which at the
bottom must be matters of faith rather than of reason. There are ten
thousand mysteries in Nature which you know are there, but which you
cannot understand. You cannot even tell me what electricity is, nor
what is the attraction of gravitation. There are these forces, for you
see their effects, but how the forces first began you know not.
And here is a great force which is in mankind–the force of evil–and
you see its effects everywhere, but how it came there you could not
have told unless God had said it came there through inheritance from
your parents as the result of the fall of Adam! And there you must
leave it and bow your heads. Only let this be remembered–if you would
prefer every one of you to have stood or fallen for yourselves, it is
more than probable you would have fallen–and if you had fallen, you
would have fallen forever! The devils, angels as they once were, stood
every one upon his own footing. When, therefore, the angels fell and
became devils, they could never be saved–they were left forever to
perish!
But because we fell in another and did not fall, in the first place, in
our own persons, it became possible to restore us by the merits of
Another. And we have been restored in the Person of the Lord Jesus, so
that whoever believes in the Lord Jesus is delivered from the fall of
Adam and saved through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ! The way by
which we are ruined was such a way that there was a possibility of our
being rescued from it. But had we been ruined by our own actual sin at
the commencement, it is probable our ruin would have been like that of
those evil spirits for whom are reserved chains of fire and the
blackness of darkness forever! This doctrine, then, of the evil
character of man, necessitates the belief in the Fall.
In the next place, this doctrine shows the need of a new nature. There
is a young man here who says, "I mean to lead a perfectly pure and holy
life. I resolve to serve God." Now should we dissuade such a man from
the attempt? By no means! It has been sometimes said that we speak
against morality. Never, never a word against it! But we have spoken
against the attempt being made to produce purity from impurity! And we
have said that such a nature as ours needs renewing before it will be
holy. If it shall be said that we speak against navigation because we
say that leaky vessels are not fit to put to sea, we are content that
fools should so judge us! On the contrary, we hold that we are speaking
for the true art of navigation when we say to the man with his
water-logged vessel, "You must find another ship if you would navigate
a boisterous ocean."
Young man, you wish to be holy and pure? Then remember that if your
heart is full of theft, murder, adultery, and so on, it will always be
seeking to come forth from you in word and act–and your utmost
endeavors will not be able utterly to restrain the outcoming of that
which is there–according to Christ's word. You had better, then,
instead of beginning in your own strength, stop awhile and count the
cost. What if you could get a new heart and a right spirit? What if
that nature of yours could be changed? What if the Divine One who made
Adam perfect should make you anew? What if He should drop into you a
new spark of life of a higher order than that which now possesses you?
Then you would have a nature as inclined to holiness as your present
nature tends to sin! Then you would, by force of a new nature, follow
after that which is right, as you now naturally follow after that which
is evil. "Oh," you say, "is this possible?" Possible? It is the Gospel
of our salvation! We tell you that whoever believes in the Lord Jesus
Christ shall be saved! And the process of salvation consists, in part,
of the implantation of a new nature. By trusting in Jesus you come to
love Him. And the love of Him, by the power of the Divine Spirit,
becomes a master passion–a new heart by which you war with your old
passions, trample them under foot, and subdue them!
As soon as you clearly see in your soul, by the Holy Spirit, that Jesus
loved you and gave Himself for you, your heart sings–
"Now for the love I bear His name,
What was my gain I count my loss.
My former pride I call my shame,
And nail my glory to His Cross." Then you have a new Object for your
love! Instead of loving self, you love God in the Person of His Son,
Jesus Christ. And that new love becomes to you the heart which
overcomes the old corruption, and prompts you to walk in holiness
and in the fear of God all your days. Oh, young Man, go not forth to
this warfare till you have considered the charges! As good men as you
have sought to fight with sin and have found its arm too strong for
them! Come to the Cross and ask the Savior who fought, Himself, with
temptation and overcame it! Ask Him to cleanse you from your past sins
in His precious blood! Ask Him to let His Divine Spirit, who is the
great Regenerator, enter into you and make you a new creature! And when
you are a new creature then there shall be the new longings, the new
hopes, the new fears which shall enable you to follow a new course to
the glory of God.
If your heart is evil, you must get a new heart or you cannot be holy.
Do you not see how necessary it is that we should be regenerate or made
new creatures, because such a heart as ours cannot possibly enter into
Heaven? If the natural heart is a great barracks of evil–a sort of
Thebes with a hundred gates from which black warriors of sin are
continually streaming–how can such an abomination as that ever pass
through the pearly gates and be where God is, before the Eternal
Throne? O Sirs, these hearts of ours–these depraved affections must be
slain! They must be crucified with Christ! They must be conquered, put
down, stamped out, or how can we be where Jesus is? Who can do this but
the Holy
Spirit?
He can do it, He can do it now! He can put into you a new heart which
will begin fighting with this old heart at once! And which will go on
fighting with it as long as you live–contending, struggling,
wrestling–till at last it will drive the old loves out! Your
affections will no more be set on self and on evil things, but you will
become as pure as God is pure, because God Himself has renewed you in
the spirit of your mind. Then you shall enter Heaven! Then you shall
dwell with angels! Then you shall see God because you have been made
perfectly like God by the work of the Holy Spirit!
Reverence and esteem, dear Hearers, that blessed Spirit who can make
new creatures of us! Pray to Him that the old man may die in us. That
it may be crucified daily. That the old nature may be buried in the
tomb of the Savior and that a new heart and right spirit in us may
continually gather strength and force till they shall come to their
ultimate perfection and we shall enter into our rest.
There is another doctrine which receives also very great strength from
this Truth of God. If man's heart is nothing but a source of blackness
and sin, admire the Divine Grace of God! What should have led the Lord
to save such creatures as we have described if they are, indeed, such
creatures? What but Sovereign Grace could look on such wretches? Those
who give glory to human merit always try to puff up human nature by
speaking in its praise, but we who believe human nature to be utterly
fallen and debased–we admire the wonderful kindness and matchless
goodness of God–that He should ever have set His love upon such
unworthy creatures!
Paul is in admiration of it when he says, "His great love wherewith He
loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses and sins." A heart full
of evil thoughts, and yet He loved me! A heart full of fornication and
adultery, and yet He loved me! A heart full of murder, and yet He loved
me! A heart that could bear false witness, a heart that could
blaspheme, and yet He loved us! O Brothers and Sisters, if we could see
ourselves as God saw us in the Fall we should wonder how the eyes of
Infinite Purity could have borne with us! How the heart of Infinite
Love could have set itself upon us!
You were not loved because of your goodness! You were not chosen
because of anything in you that was lovely and amiable! You were loved
because He would love you! You were chosen because He would do it for
His name's sake–
"He saw you ruined in the Fall, Yet loved you notwithstanding all. He
sa ved you from your lost estate, His loving kindness, oh how great!"
Why, Beloved, it must be Sovereign Grace from top to bottom! Grace must
be the Alpha. Grace must be the Omega. If this is the true state of the
case I do not wonder that so many kick against the doctrine of Election
and the kindred doctrines of Grace when they have such a high opinion
of themselves! But if God would make them see their own hearts then
they would cry out, "God be merciful to me a sinner!"
And then they would understand that if ever a man is saved, it is not
by his own doing or his own willing, but by Divine Grace alone. It is
not of him that wills nor of him that runs, but of God that shows
mercy, for He will have compassion on whom He will have compassion. The
Sovereignty of God would become an easy doctrine to believe if we felt
the depravity of our own hearts! If we saw ourselves as in the glass of
Scripture and abhorred ourselves in dust and ashes, then instead of
having any claims upon God we should say, "Let Him do as seems Him
good," and make our appeal not
to His justice but to His unfathomable mercy, crying, "According to the
multitude of Your loving kindnesses and Your tender mercies blot out my
iniquities."
Yet once again–how this doctrine illustrates the doctrine of the
Atonement! Brethren, sin defiles us most horribly! Its act defiles our
character, but its essence has ruined our nature! It appears from
Christ's statement that we are defiled internally as well as
outwardly–that sin is not only an eruption, as it were, upon the
skin–but it is in the center of our nature. Behold, then, the need of
the precious blood and admire its wonderful potency! The blood of God's
own dear Son which streamed on Calvary's accursed tree cleanses us in
our inner man. O matchless blood! O marvelous purification! Come here,
Sinner–though your sins are as scarlet they shall be as wool. And
though your heart itself is even more scarlet than your actions, He can
cleanse your heart as well as your life!
Christ can cleanse the fountain and the stream, too. He can remove the
external leprosy and heal the internal leprosy, also. Both root and
branch He bears away. O Souls, admire and wonder! Bow down with tears
streaming from your eyes, and then look up with gladness to the Son of
God made flesh, crucified for sinners! For whoever believes in Him
shall not perish but have everlasting life. Come, you black-hearted!
Come, you defiled and ruined sons of Adam! Come, you that are perishing
at the gates of Hell shut out from hope! Come, you who like the men of
Zebulun and Naphtali sit in darkness and in the valley of the shadow of
death!
Come and trust Christ, and He will send His Spirit upon you and give
you new hearts and right spirits! From all your iniquities will He
cleanse you! He will be the new Creator, for He sits on the Throne this
day, and He says, "Behold, I make all things new." Oh that Jesus may
make some new who are here this morning! I have laid the axe at the
root of the tree–and every tree that is here must be cut down and cast
into the fire unless Christ changes the nature of that tree–and makes
it bring forth fruit unto righteousness. I have tried to show that man
is utterly ruined in himself. That he has become like the ruins of
Babylon where dwell hideous dragons and all manner of loathsome
creatures.
I will even liken him to the troubled sea whose waters cast up mire and
dirt–where Satan dwells as a leviathan– and with him creeping things
innumerable, things obscene and horrible. I have tried, as far as I
could, to preach the old unfashionable Truth of God, and I expect to be
hated for so doing it! But now, over all, there comes the proclamation
of mercy–that God is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself–not
imputing their iniquities! And whoever believes in Him shall be
delivered from the mischief of the Fall and lifted to dwell where God
is–in perfect purity and happiness!
What a wonder is this choice mercy, that a den of dragons should become
a temple of the Holy Spirit! What a wonder that the heart, through
which blasphemy raged, should become a soul in which Divine Grace
reigns! That the profane mouth should become the organ of holy song! Oh
what a thousand wonders, that that black heap of human na-ture–that
dunghill of the heart–should yet be made pure as alabaster! That it
should become glittering in holy light, and bright with Heaven, shining
like pure gold, like transparent glass–and that the Holy Spirit
Himself should agree to dwell where the devil dwelt!
"Know you not that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit?"
What wonder! Once they were the temples of lust, of anger, of evil
speaking, of blasphemy! And yet they can be, and I trust now are, the
temples of the Holy Spirit! Oh marvelous! Marvelous! Let us bless God,
and ask that we may realize in ourselves this wondrous miracle to the
praise and glory of His Grace, where He has made us accepted in the
Beloved.
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Unstaggering Faith
A sermon