Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded

Repentance involves the moral judgment of ourselves under the action of the Word of God by the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the discovery of our utter sinfulness, guilt and ruin, our hopeless bankruptcy, our undone condition. It expresses itself in these glowing words of Isaiah, “Woe is me; I am undone,” and in that touching utterance of Peter, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” Repentance is an abiding necessity for the sinner, and the deeper it is the better. It is the ploughshare entering the soul and turning up the fallow ground. The ploughshare is not the seed, but the deeper the furrow, the stronger the root. We delight in a deep work of repentance in the soul. We fear there is far too little of it in what is called revival work. Men are so anxious to simplify the gospel and make salvation easy, that they fail to press upon the sinner’s conscience the claims of truth and righteousness.

No doubt salvation is as free as the grace of God can make it. Moreover, it is all of God from first to last. God is its source, Christ its channel, the Holy Spirit its power of application and enjoyment. All this is blessedly true, but we must never forget that man is a responsible being, a guilty sinner commanded to repent and turn to God. It is not that repentance has any saving virtue in it. As well might we assert that the feelings of a drowning man could save him from drowning or that a man could make a fortune by a deed of bankruptcy filed against him. Salvation is wholly of grace; it is of the Lord in its every stage and every aspect. We cannot be too emphatic in the statement of all this, but at the same time we must remember that our blessed Lord and His apostles constantly urged upon men, both Jews and Gentiles, the solemn duty of repentance.

There is a vast amount of bad teaching on the subject, a great deal of legality and cloudiness whereby the blessed gospel of the grace of God is sadly obscured. The soul is led to build upon its own exercises instead of on the finished work of Christ — to be occupied with a certain process, on the depth of which depends its title to come to Jesus. In short, repentance is viewed as a sort of good work instead of the painful discovery that all our works are bad and our nature incorrigible. Still, we must be careful in guarding the truth of God. While utterly repudiating Christendom’s false teaching on the important subject of repentance, we must not run into the mischievous extreme of denying its abiding and universal necessity.

Take a case. There are two men in a lifeboat; one was picked up after two hours of terrible struggle with the waves, in the most awful mental agony through fear of death. The other was picked off the wreck a few minutes after she struck the reef and hardly had time to feel his danger. Both are in the lifeboat; both are safe, the one as safe as the other. They are saved by the lifeboat. It is not a question of their previous feelings, but simply of their being in the lifeboat.

No doubt, the former will have a deeper sense of the value of the life-boat, but that is a matter of experience and not a question of salvation. There are hardly two cases of conversion alike. Some go through exercises of soul before they come to Christ, others after. It is the Christ I reach and not the way I reach Him, that saves my soul.

We cannot lay down a rigid rule. We believe that all must, sooner or later, learn what the flesh is, and the sooner and the more thoroughly we learn it the better. We have invariably found that those who have gone through the deepest ploughings at the first, make the steadiest and most solid Christians afterwards. But we are saved by Christ and not by experience. It often occurs to us that many of our young people who have been religiously brought up and led to make a profession, are much to be felt for when called to go out into the world. They are ignorant of their own hearts, ignorant of the snares and temptations of the world, ignorant of the devices of Satan. They have never proved what the world is. They were led perhaps gradually, imperceptibly, into the divine life, but have never been sifted and tested. Hence when brought face to face with the stern realities of life, when called to grapple with the difficulties of the day, to meet the reasonings of the infidel, the fascinations of ritualism or the allurements of the world — the theatre, the ballroom, the concert, the thousand and one forms of pleasure — they are not able to withstand these things. They are not decided for Christ; their Christianity is not sufficiently pronounced; they give way and fall under the power of temptation; and then they are most miserable, often brought almost to despair. But God in His mercy brings them back after their terrible conflict and overrules all the exercise for the deepening and consolidation of His work in their souls.

But, if there be not the germ of divine life; if it be merely the effect of religious training and home influence, then sadly the poor soul plunges with terrible eagerness into the vortex of sin and rushes headlong to destruction.

How many a lovely youth has gone forth from the parent’s home, virtuous and unsophisticated, ignorant of the cruel ways of the world and ignorant of his own heart. The enemy lays some trap for him; he is caught in the snare; one thing leads to another; he goes from bad to worse, until at the last, he becomes the degraded victim of lust and vice, a moral wreck over which broken-hearted parents are called to shed many a bitter tear or by which their gray hairs are brought down with sorrow to the grave.

We are most thoroughly persuaded that what is needed for the day in which our lot is cast is whole-hearted, out-and-out, undivided consecration of heart to Christ. We need a thorough breaking with the world in its every phase and that perfect rest and satisfaction of heart in God Himself which renders a man wholly independent of all this wretched world has to offer. If there be not this, we need not look for any real progress in the divine life.