Paul, as I said in my introductory remarks, puts us here as spectators
of the very act of submission. He shows it to us in its beginning--he
shows us the state from which he came and that into which he passed,
and he tells us, 'I _became_--not disobedient.' In his case it was a
complete, swift, and permanent revolution, as if some thick-ribbed ice
should all at once melt into sweet water. But whether swift or slow it
was his own act, and after the Voice had spoken it was possible that
Paul should have resisted and risen from the ground, not a servant, but
a persecutor still. For God's grace constrains no man, and there is
always the possibility open that when He calls we refuse, and that when
He beseeches we say, 'I will not.'
There is the mystery on which the subtlest intellects have tasked their
powers and blunted the edge of their keenness in all generations; and
it is not likely to be settled in five minutes of a sermon of mine. But
the practical point that I have to urge is simply this: there are two
mysteries, the one that men _can_, and the other that men _do_, resist
Christ's pleading voice. As to the former, we cannot fathom it. But do
not let any difficulty deaden to you the clear voice of your own
consciousness. If I cannot trust my sense that I can do this thing or
not do it, as I choose, there is nothing that I can trust. Will is the
power of determining which of two roads I shall go, and, strange as it
is, incapable of statement in any more general terms than the
reiteration of the fact; yet here stands the fact, that God, the
infinite Will, has given to men, whom He made in His own image, this
inexplicable and awful power of coinciding with or opposing His
purposes and His voice.
'Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.'
For the other mystery is, that men _do_ consciously set themselves
against the will of God, and refuse the gifts which they know all the
while are for their good. It is of no use to say that sin is ignorance.
No; that is only a surface explanation. You and I know too well that
many a time when we have been as sure of what God wanted us to do as if
we had seen it written in flaming letters on the sky there, we have
gone and done the exact opposite. I know that there are men and women
who are convinced in their inmost souls that they ought to be
Christians, and that Jesus Christ is pleading with them at the present
hour, and yet in whose hearts there is no yielding to what, they yet
are certain, is the will and voice of Jesus Christ.