Thus it is with the returning and repentant sinner. When he is far from God and is first drawn by the Spirit and assured by revelations of His mercy, he with considerable courage begins to seek and pray. But as he comes nearer and the light from the Excellent Glory grows stronger, and he sees more of his sins, he begins to doubt and to falter. But when God sees him thus afar off, sees a little love in his heart, He comes to meet him. He puts the robe of Christ upon him and gives to him the signet ring.
My dear friends who are out of Christ, you are away from home. You are perishing. You have no food for your souls. You will die and be lost. Why sit here and perish in a foreign land? Why feed on husks when you may have the choicest of the wheat? There is bread enough in your father’s house. Many have gone there; more are on the road; others are coming. Won’t you join the goodly company? Be resolute. Say, “I will.” Be resolute as in the emergencies of life and business; as when the lee shore is on one side and the gale on the other, and the seaman presses the canvas on the cracking spars and the straining rigging, and the ship must carry it or be dashed upon the breakers; be resolute as when one sees his friend perishing in the water and says, “I will save him or die with him.”
My dear hearers, won’t you say: “I will go. Nothing shall keep me back from my Saviour. Sins nor fears nor devils shall not stop me. I will try if I die. I know that God is merciful.”
WRESTING THE SCRIPTURES
The Second Epistle of Peter, Chapter III, part of 16th verse. “In which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, unto their own destruction.”
In speaking from this text I might dilate upon the etymology of the words “unlearned” and “unstable.” I might go on to observe that we must take the Bible as a whole and be taught of the Spirit in order to practice its plain truths and fathom its more difficult ones; that as in the schools of human science the elementary text-books are simple while those designed for the advanced classes are more abstruse, thus the Bible contains many things which are now far beyond the reach of our minds, but to the comprehension of which we shall clamber up in eternity; that in the Bible, the book of time and eternity, the two volumes are bound in one. Here we only read the preface and the introduction; in the hereafter we shall peruse the whole of the book.
But as these themes are frequently discussed with more of learning than I can presume to bring to the task, I shall pursue a less beaten path and content myself with observing that to “wrest” a thing signifies to wrench or twist it from its true position; the very word implies violence. Thus to wrest a truth of Scripture signifies to detach it from the other truths of the system, to make it bear a false meaning, or to rob it of all meaning. A truth of Scripture thus wrested is no longer a truth, and is, therefore, of no avail to the man who has wrested it. It can do him no good; he can no more get to heaven with it than a man who should tear a plank or a breast-hook from a ship could cross the Atlantic upon it. But as there are capillary veins and nerves in the bodily organization which discharge important though minute functions, and becoming diseased affect larger vessels and tissues, the consequence of which is sickness, and the result death, so there are methods of wresting the Scriptures less violent but not less fatal in their consequences. So great, my friends, is the evil bias of our nature and so deceitful is the human heart that we are prone to deceive ourselves, imagining that we are doing the will of God while we are doing our own will, obeying while we are wresting the Scriptures. This principle, following the example of Jesus of Nazareth, I will illustrate by a parable.
In that never-to-be-forgotten year when the Pilgrim Fathers of New England rose up from their knees beneath the cliffs of Holland and embarked, there dwelt, where Derwent-Water pours its swift current into the black gorges of a lonely tarn, the descendant of a house, rich in ancestral memories and renowned in arms. Often had these massive walls rung to the battle clarion and its floors echoed to the tread of mail-clad men. But their descendant, though inheriting all the lofty heroism of his race, is, with a heart subdued by grace, a man of scholarly tastes, of peace, and of God.