There is not one of us that has come up to the standard. Man after man
may be conceived of as bringing in his hands the actions of his life,
and laying them in the awful scales which God's hand holds. In the one
are God's requirements, in the other my life; and in every case down
goes the weight, and 'weighed in the balances we are altogether lighter
than vanity.' We stand before the great Master in the school, and one by
one we take up our copybooks; and there is not one of them that is not
black with blots and erasures and swarming with errors. The great cliff
stands in front of us with the victor's prize on its topmost ledge, and
man after man tries to climb, and falls bruised and broken at the base.
'There is none righteous, no, not one.' Micah's requirements come to
every man that will honestly take stock of his life and his character as
the statement of an unreached and unreachable ideal to which he never
has climbed nor ever can climb.
Oh, brethren! if these words are all the words that are to be said about
God and me, then I know not what lies before the enlightened conscience
except shuddering despair, and a paralysing consciousness of inevitable
failure. I beseech you, take these words, and go apart with them, and
test your daily life by them. God requires me to do justly. Does there
not rise before my memory many an act in which, in regard to persons and
in regard to circumstances, I have fallen beneath that requirement? He
requires me 'to love mercy.' He requires me 'to walk humbly,' and I have
often been inflated and self-conceited and presumptuous. He requires me
to walk with Himself, and I have shaken away His hand from me, and
passed whole days without ever thinking of Him, and 'the God in whose
hands' my 'breath is, and whose are all' my 'ways,' I have 'not
glorified.' I cannot hammer this truth into your consciences. You have
to do it for yourselves. But I beseech you, recognise the fact that you
are implicated in the universal failure, and that God's requirement is
God's condemnation of each of us.
If, then, that is true, that all have come short of the requirement,
then there should follow a universal sense of guilt, for there is the
universal fact of guilt, whether there be the sense of it or not. There
must follow, too, consequences resulting from the failure of each of us
to comply with these divine requirements, consequences very alarming,
very fatal; and there must follow a darkening of the thought of God. 'I
knew thee that thou wert an austere man, reaping where thou didst not
sow, and gathering where thou didst not straw.' That is the God of all
the people who take my text as the last word of their religion--God
'requires of me. The blessed sun in the heavens becomes a lurid ball of
fire when it is seen through the mist of such a conception of the divine
character, and its relation to men. There is nothing that so drapes the
sky in darkness, and hides out the great light of God, as the thought of
His requirements as the last thought we cherish concerning Him.
There follows, too, upon this conception, and the failure that results
to fulfil the requirements, a hopelessness as to ever accomplishing that
which is demanded of us. Who amongst us is there that, looking back upon
his past in so far as it has been shaped by his own effort and his own
unaided strength, can look forward to a future with any hope that it
will mend the past? Brethren! experience teaches us that we have not
fulfilled, and cannot fulfil, what remains our plain duty,
notwithstanding our inability to discharge it--viz., 'To do justly, and
to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.' To think of God's
requirements, and of my own failure, is the sure way to paralyse all
activity; just as that man in the parable who said, 'Thou art an austere
man,' went away and hid his talent in the earth. To think of God's
requirements and my own failures, if heaven has nothing more to say to
me than this stern 'Thou shalt,' is the short way to despair. And that
is why most of us prefer to be immersed in the trivialities of daily
life rather than to think of God, and of what He asks from us. For the
only way by which some of us can keep our equanimity and our
cheerfulness is by ignoring Him and forgetting what He demands, and
never taking stock of our own lives.