I ask every converted man here just to look through his own biography. Some of you were, perhaps, converted while you were young, and so were kept from the grosser sins into which others fall; but there were some who were suffered to go into drunkenness, or into uncleanness and all manner of iniquity. God has forgiven you, my brother, and has washed all that evil away in the precious blood of Jesus; but you feel that you can never forgive yourself.
I know that I am bringing some very unhappy memories before you, of which you say, “Would God that night had never been, or that day had never passed over my head! “The Lord grant that, as you look back upon those sins of yours, you may feel deeply humbled, and, at the same time, may be devoutly grateful to God for “his great love” wherewith he hath loved you! There have been some, who seem as if they had gone to the utmost extremity of sin, — as if they dared and defied the Most High; and yet, notwithstanding their atrocious sins, free grace has won the day. There has seemed, in some cases, to be a stern struggle between sin and grace, as if sin said, “I will provoke God till grace shall leave him;” but grace has said, “Provoked as the Lord is, yet still will he stand to his purpose of mercy; he will not turn away from the decree of his love,”
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, I ask you to think this subject over in your own private meditations. There are some things that it would not be right to mention in any ear but the ear of God; for it certainly was a horrible pit out of which he took us, and miry clay indeed out of which he drew us; so we may well praise “his great love wherewith he loved us even when we were dead in sins.”
From a sermon entitled, "His Great Love," delivered August 15, 1875.
Photo by Peter Davis. Some rights reserved.
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