'Too strong for me,' and yet they _are_ me. Me, and _not_ me; mine, and
yet, somehow or other, my enemies, although my children--too strong for
me, yet I give them their strength by my own cowardly and feeble
compliance with their temptations; too strong for me and overmastering
me, though I pride myself often on my freedom and spirit when I am
yielding to them. Mine iniquities are mine, and yet they are not mine;
me and yet, blessed be God! they can be separated from me.
The picture suggested by the words is that of some usurping power that
has mastered a man, and laid its grip upon him so that all efforts to
get away from the grasp are hopeless. Now, I dare say, that some of you
are half consciously thinking that this is a piece of ordinary pulpit
exaggeration, and has no kind of application to the respectable and
decent lives that most of you live, and that you are ready to say, with
as much promptitude and as much falsehood as the old Jews did, even
whilst the Roman eagles, lifted above the walls of the castle, were
giving them the lie: 'We were never in bondage to any man.' You do not
know or feel that anything has got hold of you which is stronger than
you. Well, let us see.
Consider for a moment. You are powerless to master your evil, considered
as habits. You do not know the tyranny of the usurper until a rebellion
is got up against him. As long as you are gliding with the stream you
have no notion of its force. Turn your boat and try to pull against it,
and when the sweat-drops come on your brow, and you are sliding
backwards, in spite of all your effort, you will begin to find out what
a tremendous down-sucking energy there is in that quiet, silent flow. So
the ready compliance of the worst part of my nature masks for me the
tremendous force with which my evil tyrannises over me, and it is only
when I face round and try to go the other way, that I find out what a
power there is in its invisible grasp.
Did you ever try to cure some trivial bad habit, some trick of your
fingers, for instance? You know what infinite pains and patience and
time it took you to do that, and do you think that you would find it
easier if you once set yourself to cure that lust, say, or that
petulance, pride, passion, dishonesty, or whatsoever form of selfish
living in forgetfulness of God may be your besetting sin? If you will
try to pull the poison fang up, you will find how deep its roots are. It
is like the yellow charlock in a field, which seems only to spread in
consequence of attempts to get rid of it--as the rough rhyme says; 'One
year's seeding, seven years' weeding'--and more at the end of the time
than at the beginning. Any honest attempt at mending character drives a
man to this--'My iniquities are too strong for me.'
I do not for a moment deny that there may be, and occasionally is, a
magnificent force of will and persistency of purpose in efforts at
self-improvement on the part of perfectly irreligious men. But, if by
the occasional success of such effort, a man conquers one form of evil,
that does not deliver him from evil. You have the usurping dominion deep
in your nature, and what does it matter in essence which part of your
being is most conspicuously under its control? It may be some animal
passion, and you may conquer that. A man, for instance, when he is
young, lives in the sphere of sensuous excitement; and when he gets old
he turns a miser, and laughs at the pleasures that he used to get from
the flesh, and thinks himself ever so much wiser. Is he any better? He
has changed, so to speak, the kind of sin. That is all. The devil has
put a new viceroy in authority, but it is the old government, though
with fresh officials. The house which is cleared of the seven devils
without getting into it the all-filling and sanctifying grace of God and
love of Jesus Christ will stand empty. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so
does Satan, and the empty house invites the seven ill-tenants, and back
they come in their diabolical completeness.
So, dear friends! though you may do a great deal--thank God!--in
subduing evil habits and inclinations, you cannot touch, so as to
master, the central fact of sin unless you get God to help you to do it,
and you have to go down on your knees before you can do that work.
'Iniquities are too strong for me.'
Then, again, consider our utter impotence in dealing with our own evil
regarded as guilt. When we do wrong, the judge within, which we call
conscience, says to us two things, or perhaps three. It says first,
'That is wrong'; it says secondly, 'You have got to answer for it'; and
I think it says thirdly, 'And you will be punished for it.' That is to
say, there is a sense of demerit that goes side by side with our evil,
as certainly as the shadow travels with the substance. And though,
sometimes, when the sun goes behind a cloud, there is no shadow, and
sometimes, when the light within us is darkened, conscience does not
cast the black shade of demerit across the mind; yet conscience is
there, though silent. When it does speak it says, 'You have done wrong,
and you are answerable.' Answerable to whom? To it? No! To society? No!
To law? No! You can only be answerable to a person, and that is God.
Against Him we have sinned. We do wrong; and if wrong were all that we
had to charge ourselves with, it would be because there was nothing but
law that we were answerable to. We do unkind things, and if unkindness
and inhumanity were all that we had to charge ourselves with, it would
be because we were only answerable to one another. We do suicidal
things, and if self-inflicted injury were all our definition of evil, it
would be because we were only answerable to our conscience and
ourselves. But we _sin_, and that means that every wrong thing, big or
little, which we do, whether we think about God in the doing of it or
no, is, in its deepest essence, an offence against Him.
The judgment of conscience carries with it the solemn looking for of
future judgment. It says, 'I am only a herald: _He_ is coming.' No man
feels the burden of guilt without an anticipation of judgment. What are
you going to do with these two feelings? Do you think that _you_ can
deal with them? It is no use saying, 'I am not responsible for what I
did; I inherited such-and-such tendencies; circumstances are so-and-so.
I could not help it; environment, and evolution, and all the rest of it
diminish, if they do not destroy, responsibility.' Be it so! And yet,
after all, this is left--the certainty in my own convictions that I had
the power to do or not to do. That is a fundamental part of a man's
consciousness. If it is a delusion, what is to be trusted, and how can
we be sure of anything? So that we are responsible for our action, and
can no more elude the guilt that follows sin than we can jump off our
own shadow. And I want you to consider what you are going to do about
your guilt.
One thing you cannot do--you cannot remove it. Men have tried to do so
by sacrifices, and false religions. They have swung in the air by means
of hooks fastened into their bodies, and I do not know what besides, and
they have not managed it. You can no more get rid of your guilt by being
sorry for your sin than you could bring a dead man to life again by
being sorry for his murder. What is done is done. 'What I have written I
have written!' Nothing will ever 'wash that little lily hand white
again,' as the magnificent murderess in Shakespeare's great creation
found out. You can forget your guilt; you can ignore it. You can adopt
some of the easily-learned-by-rote and fashionable theories that will
enable you to minimise it, and to laugh at us old-fashioned believers in
guilt and punishment. You do not take away the rock because you blow out
the lamps of the lighthouse, and you do not alter an ugly fact by
ignoring it. I beseech you, as reasonable men and women, to open your
eyes to these plain facts about yourselves, that you have an element of
demerit and of liability to consequent evil and suffering which you are
perfectly powerless to touch or to lighten in the slightest degree.
Consider, again, our utter impotence in regard to our evil, looked upon
as a barrier between us and God. That is the force of the context here.
The Psalmist has just been saying, 'O Thou that hearest prayer! unto
Thee shall all flesh come.' And then he bethinks himself how flesh
compassed with infirmities can come. And he staggers back bewildered.
There can be no question but that the plain dictate of common sense is,
'We know that God heareth not sinners.' My evil not only lies like a
great black weight of guilt and of habit on my consciousness and on my
activity, but it actually stands like a frowning cliff, barring my path
and making a barrier between me and God. 'Your hands are full of blood;
I hate your vain oblations,' says the solemn Voice through the prophet.
And this stands for ever true--'The prayer of the wicked is an
abomination.' There frowns the barrier. Thank God! mercies come through
it, howsoever close-knit and impenetrable it may seem. Thank God! no sin
can shut Him out from us, but it can shut us out from Him. And though we
cannot separate God from ourselves, and He is nearer us than our
consciousness and the very basis of our being, yet by a mysterious power
we can separate ourselves from Him. We may build up, of the black blocks
of our sins flung up from the inner fires, and cemented with the
bituminous mortar of our lusts and passions, a black wall between us and
our Father. You and I have done it. We can build it--we cannot throw it
down; we can rear it--we cannot tunnel it. Our iniquities are too strong
for us.
Now notice that this great cry of despair in my text is the cry of a
single soul. This is the only place in the psalm in which the singular
person is used. 'Iniquities are too strong for us,' is not sufficient.
Each man must take guilt to himself. The recognition and confession of
evil must be an intensely personal and individual act. My question to
you, dear friend! is, Did you ever know it by experience? Going apart by
yourself, away from everybody else, with no companions or confederates
to lighten the load of your felt evil, forgetting tempters and
associates and all other people, did you ever stand, you and God,
face to face, with nobody to listen to the conference? And did you
ever feel in that awful presence that whether the world was full of
men, or deserted and you the only survivor, would make no difference
to the personal responsibility and weight and guilt of your individual
sin? Have you ever felt, 'Against Thee, Thee only, have
I'--solitary--'sinned,' and confessed that iniquities are 'too strong
for me'?
II. Now, let me say a word or two about the second clause of this great
verse, the ringing cry of confident hope.
The confidence is, as I said, the child of despair. You will never go
into that large place of assured trust in God's effacing finger passed
over all your evil until you have come through the narrow pass, where
the black rocks all but bar the traveller's foot, of conscious impotence
to deal with your sin. You must, first of all, dear friends! go down
into the depths, and learn to have no trust in yourselves before you can
rise to the heights, and rejoice in the hope of the glory and of the
mercy of God. Begin with 'too strong for me,' and the impotent 'me'
leads on to the almighty 'Thou.'
Then, do not forget that what was confidence on the Psalmist's part is
knowledge on ours. 'As for our transgressions, Thou wilt purge them
away.' You and I know why, and know how. Jesus Christ in His great work
for us has vindicated the Psalmist's confidence, and has laid bare for
the world's faith the grounds upon which that divine power proceeds in
its cleansing mercy. 'Thou wilt purge them away,' said he. 'Christ hath
borne our sins in His own body on the tree,' says the New Testament. I
have spoken about our impotence in regard to our own evil, considered
under three aspects. I meant to have said more about Christ's work upon
our sins, considered under the same three aspects. But let me just, very
briefly, touch upon them.
Jesus Christ, when trusted, will do for sin, as habit, what cannot be
done without Him. He will give the motive to resist, which is lacking
in the majority of cases. He will give the power to resist, which is
lacking in all cases. He will put a new life and spirit into our nature
which will strengthen and transform our feeble wills, will elevate and
glorify our earthward trailing affections, will make us love that which
He loves, and aspire to that which He is, until we become, in the change
from glory to glory, reflections of the image of the Lord. As habit and
as dominant power within us, nothing will cast out the evil that we have
entertained in our hearts except the power of the life of Christ Jesus,
in His Spirit dwelling within us and making us clean. When 'a strong man
keeps his house, his goods are in peace, but when a stronger than he
cometh he taketh from him all his implements in which he trusteth, and
divideth his spoil.' And so Christ has bound the strong man, in that one
great sacrifice on the Cross. And now He comes to each of us, if we will
trust Him, and gives motives, power, pattern, hopes, which enable us to
cast out the tyrant that has held dominion over us. 'If the Son make you
free, ye shall be free indeed.'
And I tell all of you, especially you young men and women, who
presumably have noble aspirations and desires, that the only way to
conquer the world, the flesh, and the devil, is to let Christ clothe you
with His armour; and let Him lay His hand on your feeble hands whilst
you aim the arrows and draw the bow, as the prophet did in the old
story, and then you will shoot, and not miss. Christ, and Christ alone,
within us will make us powerful to cast out the evil.
In like manner, He, and He only, deals with sin, considered as guilt.
Here is the living secret and centre of all Christ's preciousness and
power--that He died on the Cross; and in His spirit, which knew the
drear desolation of being forsaken by God, and in His flesh, which bore
the outward consequences of sin, in death as a sinful world knows it,
'bare our sins and carried our sorrows,' so that 'by His stripes we are
healed.'
If you will trust yourselves to the mighty Sacrifice, and with no
reservation, as if you could do anything, will cast your whole weight
and burden upon Him, then the guilt will pass away, and the power of sin
will be broken. Transgressions will be buried--'covered,' as the
original of my text has it--as with a great mound piled upon them, so
that they shall never offend or smell rank to heaven any more, but be
lost to sight for ever.
Christ can take away the barrier reared by sin between God and the human
spirit. Solid and black as it stands, His blood dropped upon it melts
away. Then it disappears like the black bastions of the aerial
structures in the clouds before the sunshine. He hath opened for us a
new and living way, that we might 'have access and confidence,' and,
sinners as we are, that we might dwell for ever more at the side of our
Lord.
So, dear brother! whilst humanity cries--and I pray that all of us may
cry like the Apostle, 'Oh, wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me
from the body of this death?'--Faith lifts up, swift and clear, her
ringing note of triumph, which I pray God or rather, which I beseech you
that you will make your own, 'I thank God! I through Jesus Christ our
Lord.'