'All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the Lord
weigheth the spirits.'--PROVERBS xvi. 2.
'All the ways of a man'--then there is no such thing as being
conscious of having gone wrong, and having got into miry and foul
ways? Of course there is; and equally of course a broad statement such
as this of my text is not to be pressed into literal accuracy, but is
a simple, general assertion of what we all know to be true, that we
have a strange power of blinding ourselves as to what is wrong in
ourselves and in our actions. Part of the cure for that lies in the
thought in the second clause of the text--'But the Lord weigheth the
spirits.' He weighs them in a balance, or as a man might take up
something and poise it on his palm, moving his hand up and down till
his muscles by their resistance gave him some inkling of its weight.
But what is it that God weighs? 'The spirits.' We too often content
ourselves with looking at our ways; God looks at ourselves. He takes
the inner man into account, estimates actions by motives, and so very
often differs from our judgment of ourselves and of one another.
Now so far the verse of my text carries me, and as a rule we have to
keep ourselves within the limits of each verse in reading this Book of
Proverbs, for two adjoining verses have very seldom anything to do
with each other. But in the present case they have, for here is what
follows: 'Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts' (about
thyself and everything else) 'shall be established.' That is to say,
since we make such terrible blunders about the moral character of our
own works, and since side by side with these erroneous estimates there
is God's absolutely correct and all-penetrating one, common sense
says: 'Put yourself into His hands, and then it will be all right.' So
we consider now these very well-worn and familiar thoughts as to our
strange blunders about ourselves, as to the contemporaneous divine
estimate, which is absolutely correct, and as to the practical issues
that come from two facts.