Bitter experience teaches that the imprisoning net clings too tightly
to be stripped from our limbs by our own efforts. Nay rather, the net
and the captive are one, and he who tries to cast off the oppression
which hinders him from following that which is good is trying to cast
off himself. The desperate problem that fronts every effort at
self-emendation has two bristling impossibilities in it: one, how to
annihilate the past; one, how to extirpate the evil that is part of my
very self, and yet to keep the self entire. The very terms of the
problem show it to be insoluble, and the climax of all honest efforts
at making a clean thing of an unclean by means within reach of the
unclean thing itself, is the despairing cry, 'O wretched man that I
am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?'
But to men writhing in the grip of a sinful past, or paralysed beyond
writhing, and indifferent, because hopeless, or because they have come
to like their captivity, comes one whose name is 'the Breaker,' whose
mission it is to proclaim liberty to the captives, and whose hand laid
on the cords that bind a soul, causes them to drop harmless from the
limbs and sets the bondsman free. Many tongues praise Jesus for many
great gifts, but His proper work, and that peculiar to Himself alone,
is His work on the sin and the sins of the world. He deals with that
which no man can deal with for himself or by his own power. He can
cancel our past, so that it shall not govern our future. He can give
new power to fight the old habits. He can give a new life which owes
nothing to the former self, and is free from taint from it. He can
break the entail of sin, the 'law of the spirit of life in Christ
Jesus' can make any of us, even him who is most tied and bound by the
chain of his sins, 'free from the law of sin and death.' We cannot
break the chains that fetter us, and our own struggles, like the
plungings of a wild beast caught in the toils, but draw the bonds
tighter. But the chains that cannot be broken can be melted, and it
may befall each of us as it befell the three Hebrews in the furnace,
when the king 'was astonished' and asked, 'Did not we cast three men
bound into the midst of the fire?' and wonderingly declared, 'Lo, I
see four men loose walking in the midst of the fire, and the aspect of
the fourth is like a son of the gods.'