094. The Guilt Of Sin Did Help Me Much.

XCIV ‘The Guilt Of Sin Did Help Me Much.’ WHEN we set ourselves to study John Bunyan scripturally and experimentally and sympathetically, and to study in the same way some other men of his spiritual insight and spiritual depth and spiritual power, we find that they all agree in this: that their great sinfulness greatly helped them; first, to their own salvation, and then to their efficiency and their success as preachers of the Gospel. Let us do our best then to look into this somewhat deep matter to-night: that is to say, into some of the clearly ascertained ways in which their great sin and their great guilt did so much help Bunyan and some other Bunyan-like men. And to begin with, John Bunyan tells us that his great guilt immensely helped him to read his Bible aright. The Bible was written for the salvation of guilty sinners alone; and no man, learned nor simple, has ever read the Bible aright, or ever will read it aright, unless he always comes to it as a guilty sinner. And John Bunyan himself was all his days the very man for whom the Bible was written. For all his days and down to the end of his days he became more and more the chief of sinners. No man in the whole of England in that day was better fitted to read the Bible and to understand it and to appreciate it than was that ungodly tinker of Bedford, that man of untutored genius called John Bunyan. And the deeper and the more spiritual his experience of his sinfulness became the better a reader of the Bible he became. Till he became as sure that the Bible was the very word of God to him as he was sure of his own existence. Indeed in his own believing and bold way, Bunyan held that both David and Paul had been specially raised up, and had been specially tempted and tried and brought low, in order to pen their psalms and their epistles for his sake; far less for their own sakes than for his sake. For he saw himself as in a divine glass every time he opened a penitential psalm or returned to study an experimental epistle. Till as time went on he felt absolutely sure that He who had made him had had the Bible specially written for him in all its message of salvation by the blood of the Son of God. ‘I was driven by those fomentations of error that were abroad in my day,’ he says, ‘to a far deeper search of the Scriptures; and was, through their testimony, not only enlightened, but greatly confirmed and comforted. And, besides that, the guilt of my sin did help me much, both to understand the Scriptures, and continually to close with Christ.’ And from that John Bunyan’s sin and guilt went on to help him much both in his prayers and in his praises. No man ever prayed without ceasing, as Paul tells all men to do, who did not also sin without ceasing, as Paul did himself. Luther, who was Paul’s best successor, was wont to say that since he was always sinning so he was always confessing sin and was always praying for its pardon. Many men have prayed without ceasing for this thing and for that thing at certain seasons in their lives, but their sinfulness makes some men pray at every season, and day and night, and more and more the longer they live. And so it was with Bunyan’s singing of God’s praises also both in the church and at family worship, and in the way he filled up his time when he was walking to and fro in pursuit of his calling. And let God be most warmly thanked that He has so bountifully provided both prayers and psalms and hymns for the chief of sinners. As for instance, the penitential and the Pauline Psalms, the Olney Hymns, the Wesley Hymns, the Bonar Hymns, and many more hymns of that most excellent sort for the chief of sinners. And then most happily for his people John Bunyan’s abiding and increasing sinfulness greatly helped him to preach the Gospel in all its freeness and in all its fullness when he became a minister. Vanity Fairlong ago had a caricature of Mr. Gladstone, under which these words were written: ‘If he were a worse man he would be a better statesman. ‘I hae nae doot,’ said an old woman in Glasgow to her elder who was canvassing his district for signatures to a call which was being subscribed to a young minister: ‘I hae nae doot but that the lad is all you say he is, but it’s clear to me that he disna ken that he’s fallen yet, an’ he’s no the minister for me.’ The radiant youth had preached an eloquent college discourse on ‘The Dignity of Human Nature,’ which had captivated the raw elder but had exasperated the old saint. You are not unfamiliar in this house with the great name of Thomas Halyburton, Professor of Divinity in the University of St. Andrews. To some ministers standing beside his deathbed, Halyburton raised himself up and said:

‘I am in circumstances now that justify me in suggesting to you all this word of advice. Be diligent in composing your sermons. But above all be diligent in scanning your own evil hearts. And then make use of the discoveries you get there to enable you to dive down into the consciences of your people, to unmask the hypocrites among them, and to separate the precious from the vile. I loved to preach in that way,’ he added, ‘and since I lay down here I have not changed my mind about my preaching.’

And, as is the influence of sinfulness on preaching, so is it in the matter of hearing preaching and understanding it and valuing it. Many of yourselves now hearing me have — I will not say too little sin — but I will say far too little conscience of sin to make you good hearers of good preaching. Your minister is your very best friend when in his despair of you he prays and waits for something to happen to you that will come both to his help and to your help in the matter of your salvation. I will not be bold enough to put into plain words what I sometimes ask for some of you. But when your sin and your guilt do at last come to help forward your salvation, then you will understand and will defend and will justify me for asking for you what I dare not now name. Up till now the holy law of God has not entered your heart. And till that all-essential experience conies home to you no preacher worth calling a preacher will have any acceptance or any success with some of you. It is a terrible truth, but it is as true as the Gospel is true, that it is only through his great sin that any sinner will ever come to his great salvation. It is only in the measure of the burden and the bitterness and the curse of his sin that any sinner will ever repent and believe to everlasting life. ‘I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. The whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick,’ said the Saviour and the Healer of sinners. And then Bunyan’s great sin and great guilt greatly helped him to understand and to console the great sinners who crowded round his pulpit. They crowded round his pulpit till he had sometimes to be carried shoulder high into his pulpit. And it was largely his terrible sense of sin that made him so popular. How far away some of our most popular modern preachers are from us when our hearts are sick and our consciences are laden with sin! How far away we are from them! They seem to know nothing of the disease, and how then can they apply the proper remedy? They cannot. They never felt this awful kind of pain, and no wonder they are no hands at administering the right alleviation of such pain. They never ran up between the walls called salvation with a great burden on their back, and how can they guide us up to the place where stands a cross? They cannot. They never needed to wash in the Fountain opened for sin and uncleanness, and how can they be expected to be good at giving a sinner a hand to help him down into that Fountain? Did you ever read John Bunyan’s exquisite Preface to his Grace Abounding? If you have the book at home you might read the preface to-night in support and in supplement of what I am now saying, if your interest in what I am now saying lasts till you get home. When you read and understand and love that remarkable piece, the great writer of it will tell you what a heavy price he had to pay before he was fully taught of God how to unburden loaded consciences, and how to bind up broken hearts, and how to cheer the sin-sad children of God. As John Bunyan’s friend Thomas Goodwin says, ‘His own sinfulness, and his own suffering, combine to give a minister a lady’s hand for the binding up of broken hearts.’

Now in all that of the guilt of his sin helping him so much, John Bunyan is neither so original, nor is he so exceptional, as you might think he is. By no means. He is only one among many if you know where to find them, and if you have any interest and any pleasure in finding them. I have found some of them for you, and I will not wind up to-night till I have introduced you to some of them. Some of them are old authorities and old favourites with some of you. And you will not weary to hear them again on this great matter of how sin and guilt are sometimes employed for a sinner’s great help in entering on and in living out the divine life. And first, hear Hooker himself on Peter’s great fall, In his Learned Sermon of the Nature of Pride that great father of the English Church says this:

‘I am not afraid to affirm it boldly, with St. Augustine, that puffed up men receive a benefit at the hands of God, and are assisted by His grace, when with His grace they are not assisted, but are permitted, and that grievously, to transgress. Ask the very soul of Peter, and it shall undoubtedly make you this answer: My eager protestations, made in the glory of my ghostly strength, I am ashamed of; but those crystal tears, wherewith my sin and weakness were bewailed, have procured my endless joy: my strength hath been my ruin, and my fall hath been my stay.’ And hear Hooker’s still greater contemporary, —

O benefit of ill! now I find true That better is by evil still made better; And ruin’d love, when it is built anew, Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater. So I return rebuk’d to my content, And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent. Or as our own fellow-townsman almost too boldly has it, —

O Lord, if too obdurate I, Choose Thou before my spirit die, A piercing pain, a killing sin, And to my dead heart run them in. And hear Halyburton again on his death-bed;

‘I was fond enough of books, but I must say that what the Lord let me see of my own ill heart, and what was necessary against it, that was more steadable to me than all my books.’ And again:

‘The Lord did humble me, and did prove me, and did let me see what all was in my heart, even a great deal more of wickedness than I had suspected. And the Lord hereby instructed me that this is not my rest, and made me value heaven far more than otherwise I would have done. Thus was I made a gainer by my losses, and a more upright man by my falls, to the praise of His glorious grace.’ And our old Highland friend Fraser, that truly great theologian and truly great saint, has this which I have had by heart ever since I first read it some forty years ago:

‘I find advantages by my sins,’ he says. ‘“Peccare nocet, peccavisse vero juvat.” I may say, as Mr. Fox said (not George; George as a preacher was like Mr. Gladstone as a statesman): As Mr. Fox said, My sins, in a manner, have done me more good than my graces. For, by my sins I am made more humble, more watchful, and more revengeful against myself. I am made to see a greater need to depend upon God, and to love Him the more who continues such kindness to me, notwithstanding my manifold provocations. I find that true also which Thomas Shepard saith, My sin loses some of its strength by every new fall of mine.’ My brethren, know and honour and love the names of those great men of God. They are the only true theologians, and they are the very princes of preachers. But none of them all can beat Bunyan.

‘Oh, the remembrance of my great sins! They bring afresh into my mind the remembrance of my great help, and my great support from heaven, and the great grace that God extended to such a wretch as I. Great sins do draw out great grace. And where guilt is most terrible and fierce, there the mercy of God in Christ appears most high and mighty.’

And, after enumerating the ‘seven abominations’ that he still finds in his heart, he bears this experimental witness:

‘Yet,’ he says, ‘the wisdom of God doth order them for my good. For (1) they make me abhor myself;

(2) they keep me from trusting my heart;

(3) they convince me of the insufficiency of all inherent righteousness;

(4) they show me the necessity of fleeing to Jesus;

(5) they press me to pray unto God;

(6) they show me the need I have to watch and be sober;

(7) they provoke me to look to God, through Christ, to help me, and to carry me through this world.’

Dr. Du Bose, in some of his books, is about the best writer of the present day to my taste. Dr. Du Bose is one of the most up-to-date, as you would say, of all our living divines. And as to the subject in hand, namely, the serviceableness of sin in the work of salvation, this is a specimen of what the divinity students are taught in the University of the South.

‘The distinction,’ says Dr. Du Bose, ‘which our Lord and the New Testament consistently make, is not that some men are sinners, and some are not. But that some men are so content to be sinners that they know not that they are sinners. While other men are so convinced and convicted of their own unholiness that they are conscious of nothing else in themselves but their sin. Blessed are we, even that we are sinners, if we know our sin; if through knowledge of the curse of sin we have been brought to know the blessedness of holiness. For beings like ourselves, the consummate joy of holiness would be incomprehensible and impossible save through a corresponding and an equal sense of sin, and sorrow for sin. All our true joy, in what we are to be, is born of our true sorrow for what we now are.’ But all the greatest authorities in the world, ancient and modern, apostolical and evangelical, Anglican and Puritan, will not convince the man who is not, by his own experience, absolutely convinced of all that already. And the man who is absolutely convinced of all that already, he does not need the men of authority whom I have now laid before him. He does not need them: no, but he immensely enjoys them; and makes them, more and more, his favourite authors. Who are your favourite authors?

Since I finished the writing of these lines I stumbled last night upon this in Jonathan Edwards that prince in our Puritan Israel: ‘Our sin and our misery, by this divine contrivance of redemption, are made the occasion of our greater blessedness. By our sin we had deserved everlasting misery; but, by the divine wisdom and grace, our sin and our misery are made the occasion of our being everlastingly blessed. The saved sinner shall be far more holy and far more blessed than he would have been if he had never sinned at all. His great sin is made the occasion of his far greater salvation. For, where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. That, as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign, through righteousness, unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord.’