1 John 1:8-10 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.… It is among the most potent of the energies of sin, that it leads astray by blinding, and blinds by leading astray. I. THE APOSTLE DECLARES THAT THE IMAGINATION OF OUR OWN SINLESSNESS IS AN INWARD LIE. To believe or to deny the possibility of Christian "perfection" is to leave the motives of the spiritual life almost wholly unchanged, as long as each man believes (and who on any side doubts this?) that it is the unceasing duty of each to be as perfect as he can, and, in the holy ambition of yet completer conquest, to "think nothing gained while aught remains to gain." Were a perfect man to exist, he himself would be the last to know it; for the highest stage of advancement is the lowest descent in humility. As long as this humility is necessary to the fulness of the Christian character, it would seem that it is of the essence of the constant growth in grace to see itself lowlier as God exalts it higher. Besides this operation of humility, it must be remembered that the spiritual life involves a progressively increasing knowledge of God. Now, though the spirit of man assuredly must brighten in purity as thus in faith and love it approaches the great Source of all holiness, it must also appreciate far more accurately the force of the contrast between itself and its mighty model; and thus, as it becomes relatively more perfect, it may be said to feel itself absolutely less so. Nay, I doubt not but it is the very genius of that Divine love which is the bond of perfectness, to be lovingly dissatisfied with its own inadequacy; and such a worshipper in his best hours will feel that, though "love" be, indeed, as these divines so earnestly insist, the "fulfilling of the law," his love is itself imperfect, deficient in degree, and deficient in constancy; and that in this life it can, at best, be only the germ of that charity which, "never-failing," is to form the moving principle of the life of eternity. But it is not of those, whom some would not only pronounce "perfect," but enjoin to feel and know themselves such; it is not of those, who (as I would rather represent it) doubt all in themselves while they doubt nothing in Christ, that I have now to speak, but of those whose cold hearts and neglectful lives utter the bold denial of a sinlessness which the lips dare not deny; who "cry out of the depths"! indeed, but not for rescue or redemption; who cannot know God as a Redeemer, for they cannot feel from what He is to redeem! II. IT WOULD BE VAIN TO THINK OF SPECIFYING THE PARTICULAR, CAUSES OF THE EVIL; WE CAN ONLY SPEAK OF SOME OF THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES ON WHICH IT RESTS. The whole mystery of deceit must be primarily referred to the governing agency of Satan — in this sense, as in every other, "the ruler of the darkness of this world." It is a living spirit with whom we have to contend, as it is a "living God" whom we have to aid us. The cunning of the Serpent alone can reach the master subtlety of making the soul of man do his work by being its own unpitying enemy, and traitor, and cheat; it is only the "father of lies" that thus can make the wretched heart a liar to itself. But then it is certain, that as God is pleased to work by means, and to approach circuitously to His ends, so, still more, is His enemy bound to the same law; and that, therefore, as the Creator's path of light, through providence and grace, is occasionally discoverable by experience, and directed on principles already prepared to His Almighty purposes, so also may the crooked ways of the Evil One, similarly adjusted, be similarly sought and known. 1. The first and darkest of his works on earth is also the first and deepest fountain of the misfortune we are now lamenting — the original and inherited corruption of the human soul itself. It is ignorant of sin, just because it is naturally sinful. We cannot know our degradation, we cannot struggle, or even wish, to rise, if we have never been led to conceive the possibility of a state higher than our own. Nature can teach discontent with this world, but there her lesson well nigh closes; she talks but vaguely, and feebly, and falsely of another! Now, if this be so, have we not for this mournful unconsciousness of our personal depravity a powerful cause in that depravity itself? 2. If Nature alone — treacherous and degraded nature — is silent in denouncing sin — if she has no instinctive power to arouse herself, what shall she be when doubly and trebly indurated by habit; when the malformed limb becomes ossified; when that faculty which was destined to be, under Divine guidance, the antagonist of nature, "a second nature," as it is truly called, to reform, and resist, and overlay the first — is perverted into the traitorous auxiliary of its corruption? We know not ourselves sinners, because from infancy we have breathed the atmosphere of sin; and we now breathe it, as we do the outward air, unceasingly, yet with scarcely a consciousness of the act! The professional man, for example, who may become habituated to the use of falsehood or duplicity, as little knows how to disentangle this, even in conception, from the bulk and substance of his customary business — to regard it as something separately and distinctively wrong — as men think of mentally decomposing into their chemical constituents the common water or air, every time they imbibe them. The mass of men know these, as they know their own hearts, only in the gross and the compound. Is it not thus that constant habit persuades us "we have no sin" by making us unceasingly sin; and increases our self-content in direct proportion as it makes it more and more perilous? 3. As men copy themselves by force of habit, they copy others by force of example; and both almost equally foster ignorance of the virulence of the evil they familiarise, and perpetually reconcile the sinner to himself. Mankind in crowds and communities tend to uniformity; as the torrents of a thousand hills, from as many different heights, meet to blend in one unbroken level. And in that union, the source of so much happiness and of so much guilt, each countenances the other to console himself; we are mutual flatterers only that the flattery may soothingly revert to our own corruptions. 4. How the power of this universality of sin around us to paralyse the sensibility of conscience is augmented by the influence of fashion and of rank — not merely to silence its voice, but to bestow grace, and attraction, and authority upon deadly sin — I need not now insist. Philosophers tell us that the least oscillation in the system of the material universe propagates a secret thrill to its extremity; it is so in the every act of social man; but the disorders of the upper classes are publicly and manifestly influential — they are as if the central mass itself of the system were shaken loose, and all its retinue of dependent worlds hurled in confusion around it. 5. But to example and authority, thus enlisted in the ranks of evil, and thus fortifying the false security of our imaginary innocence, must be added such considerations as the tendency of pleasure itself, or of indolence, to prolong this deception, and our natural impatience of the pain of self-disapproval. Now you know there are two ways of easing an aching joint — by healing its disease or by paralysing the limb. And there are two ways of escaping an angry conscience — by ceasing from the evil that provokes it or by resolutely refusing to hear its voice, which soon amounts to silencing it forever. And all this proceeds in mysterious silence! There are no immediate visible attestations of God's displeasure to startle or affright. All our customary conceptions of the justice of heaven are taken from the tribunals of earth, and on earth punishment ordinarily dogs the heels of crime. Hence, where the punishment is not direct, we forget that the guilt can have existed. The very immutability of the laws of visible nature, the ceaseless recurrence of those vast revolutions that make the annals of the physical universe, and the confidence that we instinctively entertain of the stability of the whole material system around us, while they are the ground of all our earthly blessings, and while they are, to the reason, a strong proof of Divine superintendence, are as certainly to the imagination a constant means of deadening our impressions of the possibility or probability of Divine interposition. Surely the God will break forth at length from His hidden sanctuary, and break forth, as of old upon the Mount, "in fire and the smoke of a furnace." (Prof. W. A. Butler.) Parallel Verses KJV: If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.WEB: If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. |
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