Romans 7:7-13 What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. No, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust… 1. Paul had lived with a conscience, but one that was not rightly instructed. He had kept his conscience on his side, though he was living wickedly. But there came a time of revelation in which his conscience took sides against him. And the result was that right before him rose his whole lifetime of sin, by which, as it rushed upon him, he was swept away slain. "I used, before I knew what God's true light was, to be active and complacent; but when that spiritual law was revealed to me, all my life seemed like the unfolding of a voluminous history of transgression. And I fell down before the vision as one dead." 2. The difference between a man when his conscience is energised and when his conscience is torpid is a difference as great as that between a man that is dead and a man that is alive and excited to the utmost tension of endeavour. 3. Excitement is itself a matter of prejudice; but no one objects if it is the excitement of enterprise; if it is physical or civic excitement. When it becomes moral, then men begin to fear wild fires and fanaticisms. 4. Now excitement is only another name for vitality. Stones have no excitability. The vegetables rank higher, because they are susceptible of excitement, although they cannot develop it themselves. An animal ranks higher than a vegetable, because it has the power of receiving and developing excitability. Man is the highest; the capacity of excitability marks his position in the scale of being. 5. Now, when excitement is out of all proportion to the importance of the objects presented, or the motive powers, then there is an impropriety in it; and this prejudice against it has arisen from its abuse. There have been moral excitements that are disastrous; but these are effects of a prior cause, namely, absence of wholesome excitement before. You will find frequently where Churches are dead that there will come a period of fanatical revival influence. It is reaction, the violent attempt of life to reinstate itself. But at its worst this is far better than death. I. RATIONAL MORAL EXCITEMENT LEADS MEN TO APPLY TO THEIR LIFE AND CONDUCT THE ONLY TRUE STANDARD, NAMELY, THAT OF NIGHT AND WRONG, upon a revealed ground. 1. Ordinarily, men judge their conduct by lower standards. Most men judge of what they are by the relations of their conduct to pleasure and pain, profit and loss; that is, by the law of interest. But if that is all, how mean it is! Men are apt to measure themselves as they stand related to favour. That is, they make others' opinions of them the mirror in which to look upon their own faces. Now, it is true that a man's reputation is apt to follow closely upon his character, but there is an interval between that men skip. Men measure themselves by the law of influence, and by ambitious aspirations. Then public sentiment, fashions, customs, the laws of the community, are employed by men to give themselves a conception of what they are. 2. Now not one of these measurings is adequate. No man knows what he is that has only measured himself by them. A man desires to know what he is as a man, and he calls in his tailor. He only judges him as a man with clothes. He calls in his shoemaker. He only judges him with relation to shoes. He calls in the surgeon and the physician, and they, having examined him in every part, pronounce him sound and healthy. Is there nothing more? Yes, there are mental organs. Then call in the psychologist. Has the man yet come to a knowledge of what he is? Is there nothing to be conceived of as moral principle? Is there nothing called manhood, in distinction from the animal organism, etc.? 3. We need to go higher before we can consider this case settled. It must be submitted to the chief justice sitting in the court of the soul. Conscience calls in review all these prejudgments; not because they are wrong in themselves, but because they are inadequate. Conscience introduces the laws of God. Men are called to form a judgment of what they are, not so much from what they are to society as from what they are in the sight of God. You never can get this judgment except where conscience has been illuminated by the Divine Spirit. I am only measured when the soul is measured; and only can it be measured when it is put upon the sphere of the eternal world, and upon the law of God. This is the first great element that enters into moral excitability. II. AN INCREASED SENSIBILITY OF CONSCIENCE IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS OF GENERAL MORAL EXCITEMENT. 1. The not using of one's conscience works lethargy and blindness. But when the conscience is fired by the Divine Spirit, it awakes and glows. You know what it is to have your hand numb; and what it is to have it acutely sensitive. You know what it is to have the eye blurred, and what it is to have it clear. So conscience may exist in a state in which things pass before it, and it does not see them; but lies at the door like a watchdog that is asleep, past which goes the robber into the house and commits his depredations undisturbed. It is a great thing for a man to have a conscience that rouses him up and makes him more and more sensitive; but just as soon as the conscience becomes sensitive, it brings a man's sins to a more solemn account than before. 2. There are many things that we adjudge to be sinful. A man says, "Profanity or dishonesty is sinful"; but, after all, he has a good natured way of dealing with these things. If men were as good-natured to their enemies as they are to their own sins, there would be much less conflict in the world, a man had a huge rock in his field. He did not want to waste time to remove it; he planted ivy, and roses, and honeysuckles about it, to cover it up; and he invited people to come and see how beautiful it is. A certain part of his farm was low, moist, and disagreeable; and, instead of draining it, he planted mosses, ferns, rhododendrons, etc., there; and now he regards that as one of the handsomest parts of his farm. And men treat their faults so. Here is a man that has a hard and ill temper; but he has planted all about it ivy and roses and honeysuckles. He thinks he is a better man because all his imperfections are hidden from his sight. Here is a man that does not drain his swamps of evil courses, but covers them over with mosses and various plants, and thinks he is better because he is more beauteous in his own eyes. Men lose their conviction of the hatefulness of sins, they get so used to them. But there come times when God makes sin in these respects appear so sinful that they tremble at it. You know how bonds go up. Today they are worth a hundred; tomorrow they are a hundred and five. And then when it is understood that they are going up, they begin to rush; and in the course of a few months they have got up to two or three hundred. When a man is running up values on his sins, they do not go down again. Under the power of an illuminated conscience a man says, first, "Why, sin is sinful!" Next, "It is very sinful!" Next, "It is exceedingly sinful!" Next, "It is damnably sinful!" 3. The next fact of this reviving of the conscience is that it brings into the category of sins a thousand things that before we never have called such. When gold comes into the assay office, they treat it as we do not treat ourselves. It is carefully weighed, and during the process it is worked up to the very last particle. Yea, the very sweepings of the floor are gathered and assayed again. Now men throw in their conduct in bulk, and do not care for the sweepings; and vastly the greatest portion of it comes out without being brought to any test. But it is to the last degree important that there should come periods in which men are obliged to bring into the category of sins those practices which otherwise they would call their faults, or weaknesses. 4. In New York there is a board of health. And how much dirt there was found the moment there was an authority to make men look for it. It is not half as dirty as it was a little while ago; but the dirt is more apparent, because it is stirred up. Only give a clearer sense of what is right to men, and they will instantly see in themselves much wrong that they have not before discovered. The probability is that now, in New York, there is more apprehension of danger from a want of cleanliness than there has been during the last twenty-five years put together. This has arisen from the increased sensibility of men on the subject, and the application of a higher test to it. There is special need of an awakened conscience to bring to light these things, that are not less dangerous because men do not know of them, but all the more dangerous. III. AN AWAKENED CONSCIENCE CANNOT FIND PEACE IN ANY MERE OBEDIENCE. There is this benefit — that when once a man's conscience has begun to discriminate, he naturally betakes himself to reformation to satisfy his conscience. But his conscience becomes exacting faster than he can learn how to perform. So that the more he does, the less he is satisfied. Here stands an old house, that has been a hundred years without repair. The old master dies, and a new man comes in. He sends for the architect, who commences searching, and it is found that there is decay all through the building. Part leads to part, and disclosure to disclosure, and decay to decay; and it seems as though it were almost impossible ever to make it good. That is but a faint emblem of the work of reformation in the human soul. A house offers no resistance to his attempts to renovate it; but the human disposition is an ever-fertile, ever-growing, ever-recreating centre. And a man is conscious that the more he tries to regulate it, the harder it is to do it. A man who has been drinking all his life, and lost his name and his business, and nearly ruined his family, attempts to reform. After a month he says, "I never had so much trouble in all my experience. It has seemed as though everything went against me, and was determined that I should not lead a good life, and I am almost in despair." Oh, yes. Laws are like fortifications. They are meant to protect all that are inside, and repel all that are outside; and, if a man gets outside and attempts to come back, he must do it against the crossfire of the garrison. No man departs from the path of rectitude that, when he comes back, does not come back by the hardest. There is the experience of the apostle, "When I would do good, evil was with me. I perceived that the law was holy and just and good, and I approved it in the inward man. But the more I struggled to obey it the worse I was." "O wretched man that I am," etc. Then rose up before him that which must rise up as the ground of comfort in every awakened soul — namely, Jesus Christ. IV. THE ONLY REFUGE OF AN EXCITED CONSCIENCE, as a judge and schoolmaster, MUST BE TO BRING THE SOUL TO CHRIST. A child is taken by a teacher out of the street, wretchedly clad, bad in behaviour, and woefully ignorant. The old nature is strong. Still he begins to study a little, while he plays more. He is fractious, and comes to grief every day; but by and by he comes to that point where he feels himself to be a bad scholar, and in a flood of tears goes to the teacher and says, "It is useless to try and make anything out of me, I am so bad." The teacher puts his arm round the child, and says, "Thomas, if I can bear with you, can you with me? I know how bad you have been. But I love you; and I will give you time, and you shall not be ruined." Cannot you conceive that, under such circumstances, there might spring up in the heart of the child an intense feeling of gratitude. And so the teacher carries the child from day to day. Now this is just the work that God's great heart does for men. And where there is a man that has a rigorous conscience, let him take refuge with one that says, "Shift the judgment seat. I will not judge you by the law of justice, but by the law of love and of patience." By faith and love in Christ Jesus we may find rest. (H. Ward Beecher.) Parallel Verses KJV: What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. |
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