S. The Convicting Power of the Church

THE CONVICTING POWER OF THE CHURCH

TEXT: And thus are the secrets of his heart made manifest; and so falling down on his face he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth. - 1 Corinthians 14:25. If you should go out and try to count the stars tonight; try to comprehend all the glory that the heavens declare; try to trace all the handiwork of God in the skies, your finite mind would break down under the vastness and complexity of the problem. If, you should turn to earth and attempt to number the leaves on the trees, the green blades of grass and nodding flowers on wide, rolling prairies, or the sands which gulf billows fondle, you would equally fail; if you should try to master the height and the depth and the scope of the law of God, you would make a greater failure, for the commandments of God are exceeding broad. But you might just as well try to master every secret of nature, whether revealed by stars in their shining, or by night in her deepest and darkest character, as to try to comprehend all the mysteries of our inner nature. Who can know? Who can sound the depths of one human heart? Who can lay bare all of its most secret thoughts? Who can measure the flight of its erratic fancy? Who has ever been able to ascend to the top of its aspiration “and vaulting ambition? Who has ever been able to measure its presumption? Who, its lusts? Who, its blasphemies? Who, its wishes which night curtains from the sight and that would eclipse the moon if it should fully shine in the dark faces of those hideous secrets? Why is it that the heart is so much more difficult to understand than astronomy? Because, vast as is the page which God unrolls in the skies to the upturning reverent eye, and as complicated as is the system of worlds, and boundless as are the orbits in which they roll, there is nothing deceitful in their motions, not even in a comet whose flight, to us, seems erratic. All heavenly bodies pursue the several paths marked out for them by their Creator, with unerring accuracy and without collision. There is no deceit in nature. Everything is evenly balanced and adjusted to all other things in the vast correlated system, and while you may become appalled by the vastness of it, yet you can make definite progress in your investigation and you may know that what you have learned is sure. But who can say, in trying to aggregate the results of the investigation of his own heart, “that this much is certain?” You revise tomorrow your seemingly best conclusions of today. The heart is deceitful above all things. Nothing that ever yet throbbed with life in the universe of God takes such protean shapes, that so turns and twists and doubles, that assumes so many colors. Who can know it-who can know it? Almighty God alone. There is nothing in the world fresh from God’s hands out of plumb, out of harmony, out of adjustment. All of it moves silently and yet certainly and surely in its allotted direction. But the heart of man is wicked-desperately wicked. Wicked to a degree that when you attempt to rectify it, despair comes to you, despair to understand it, despair to manage it, despair to cleanse it. No Augean stable is comparable to it. Who can know it? Who can cleanse it? Who can fathom its mysteries? Desperately wicked! And yet, there is a way by which the secrets of the heart may be ascertained. There is a light which can shine down into its depths. By the law comes the knowledge of sin. The law of the Lord is perfect. The light of God’s truth enlightens our eye and we can never know our hearts (I mean even approximately) until we have brought them under the focus of God’s law. Then you begin to find it out. When the law says, “Thou shall not covet,” the heart covets. There is the standard with its straight line, and here the warped and biased affection of the heart and its crookedness and defects and iniquities made manifest by laying the straight edge of the law to it. “Judgment will I lay to the line and righteousness to the plummet,” saith the Almighty. And when the law of God is aligned with the heart, we find how very, very much it is missing the mark, how far astray it is going. We can then determine something of the latitude and longitude of the ship of the soul that has been driven by adverse winds far out of its course and is now rotting on seas of calm or tossed by storms on dangerous shores. A farmer once said to me that he never had great trouble in dealing with the breaks and gaps in his fence that were known to him, but always suffered the greatest loss from secret breaks and gaps in his fence. Those he never watched. He didn’t even know they were there. Hence, the Psalmist says, “Who can understand his errors?” Who can locate, who can enumerate, who can measure them? And being ignorant of them, what provision can be made against them? Who can guard a breach in the wall of which he knows nothing? Who will stop a leak in the ship of which he is unconscious? Who will guard against the approach of an insidious disease that throws out no visible symptom and does not indicate by any pain, any present pain, that it is stealing up to take by surprise the unprepared citadel of life? And hence he prays, “Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.” And hence Job, when he offered sacrifices for his children, was accustomed to pray, “Oh God, forgive the boys and girls for the sins of ignorance-sins unwittingly done.” He had some conception of the nature of the heart. It is a dark subject, and it is an unhappy thing to think about. It is an awful pit to explore. It is worse than a cage where unclean birds are housed. It is worse than a cave where wild beasts have dwelt and fed their young. And yet, it is essential that you should look at it somewhat. It is essential that the law of God should enlighten our eyes. It is essential that we should know something of sin and realize something of its terrible consequences. And why? I do not believe that anybody ever has sound doctrinal views who has light views of human depravity. How can he believe in the doctrines of grace, in the necessity for the work of the Holy Spirit, in the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ, in the perseverance of the saints, unless he looks at the pit from which he was digged, and the hole in the rock from which he was hewn? And not only is this true, but you will never see one truly humble in the sight of God who has not had some light shining on the secret depravity of his heart, unless you can make him feet and know somewhat of his moral deformity, of his unworthiness, of his utter unfitness to stand in the presence of God. He will he proud-proud as Lucifer-proud as the devil, and arrogant in his pride, and for that pride to fall as a tree falls beneath the stroke of the woodman’s ax, it is necessary that the Spirit of God shall come with the keen edge of the law and not only cut it down but dig it up by the roots and let that man see that there is no good in him no good utterly unworthy to come into the presence of God; that all of his righteousness in which he prides himself is but as filthy rags in the sight of God. Otherwise, he never has sound views of doctrine. He is never humbled, and never appreciates a Savior unless he sees his need of a Savior. Oh, when he is sick and knows it, when he is dying and knows it, when he is condemned to eternal death and knows it, when hell is the suitable place for him and he knows it, and he is nearly there, and the gravitation of sin is dragging him down, he then knows that only Omnipotence can suspend that law of gravitation, and only grace, the grace of a Divine Savior, can ever save him. I confess that I stand appalled at the slowness and lightness of men’s convictions of sin. It can only be accounted for by the fact that they have never known their hearts. You say of a certain one: “He is a good-hearted man.” Let me show you. See yonder beautiful mountain. See how it catches the sunlight. See the flowers; they are blooming on its grassy side; that beautiful mountain! But come nearer to it and behold the mouth of a cave that hollows it. Now watch when the sun goes down. Behold! There creep out with stealthy tread a pack of ravening wolves, or fiercer beasts of prey. These are not so fierce as a troop of evils lurking in a wicked heart, ready to issue forth on occasion. There comes out murder, dagger in hand. There comes out foul-mouthed blasphemy. There comes out a troop of evil thoughts fiercer than wild beasts. Out of what come they? Out of the heart; out of the heart proceed these children of the devil. You hear the sharp crack of the pistol on the streets. You rush to the spot. See a man weltering in a pool of his own blood, and a good man, one who had committed no offense. You hear the night air pierced by a scream, and there comes rushing with unlifted hand and with quivering lip, and shrieks that rend the air, the wife to look upon the body of her husband, dead, dead! See little children rushing out and walking barefoot in that father’s blood. Murder, murder, murder! Where did it come from? Out of the heart, out of the heart of one who was called, perhaps, a good-hearted man. There it is; look at it. There was a man once standing before a prophet of God, and the prophet being able to read the heart, or to look far ahead and see of what development the man was capable, seeing the unfolding of his as yet unformed character, tears began to run down his face and shudders shook him. “And Hazael said, Why weepeth my Lord? And he answered, Because I know the evil that thou wilt do unto the children of Israel: Their strongholds wilt thou set on fire, and their young men wilt thou slay with the sword, and wilt dash their children, and rip up their women with child. And Hazael said, But what is thy servant, a dog, that he should do this great thing? And Elisha answered, The Lord hath shewed me that thou shalt be king over Syria.” And yet he did more than that and it was in him then, but the circumstances had not called it out. There are restraints built up by society. There are restrictions called “good manners” which fence in a man and say to him, “It is proper not to go over this line, and it is better for propriety’s sake to stop here.” But let poverty try him; let worry try him; let temptation try him; and afterward a chance for the possibility and potentiality of his wicked nature to develop, and who would recognize the development? Now, I want to bring out a special thought: The last Scripture which I read, the one from which the text is taken, describes a company of God’s people assembled to worship as you are here assembled to worship, as you are here gathered tonight. Let us restate it: “If therefore the whole church be come together in one place, and all speak with tongues, and there come in those that are unlearned, or unbelievers, will they not say that ye are mad? But if all prophesy, and there come in one that believeth not, or one unlearned, he is convinced of all, he is judged of all. And thus are the secrets of his heart made manifest; and so falling down on his face he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth.” This scripture teaches most profitable lessons. It shows that every unbeliever who attends a church service goes away either better or worse than when he came. He is never the same. It shows that the church service impels him to form a conclusion in his mind as to the worshippers. If disorder, confusion or a bad spirit prevail, he says within himself “They are mad.” If piety, love and edification prevail, he reports to other outsiders that truly God is with those Christian people. But the thoughts most pertinent to our theme are these: 1. A bad service shows the infidel observer our sins. 2. A good service shows him his own sins. 3. A good service for Christian edification is the most potent of all services in convicting sinners. See the whole ministry of Spurgeon as an illustration. It is a great mistake that you can reach sinners only by direct sermons to them. They are watchful, distrustful, on their guard against impressions from such services. But when they are merely observers of the effects of worship on Christians, they are not guarding against impressions on their own heart. And so by the order, spirit and power of Christian worship, “he is convinced of all, he is judged of all.” Every Christian rightly serving God, unwittingly shoots an arrow of conviction into his heart. Christian character judges and condemns him. 4. “And thus are the secrets of his heart made manifest.” This last is the point which connects with all previous statements. If no man can understand his errors or be able to number his secret faults, if the heart is so deceitful and desperately wicked that none can know it and yet, if a knowledge of its disorder and depravity must be obtained before “he will fall on his face and worship God,” and if the quiet, orderly, spiritual worship of Christians does reveal to him the secrets of his heart, how solemn is the thought of public worship and how great its responsibility. Perhaps today there is present some ignorant, unlearned or unbelieving man. He is seeing, hearing, comparing, thinking. Impressions are being made on his mind favorable or unfavorable to you. And on his own mind that will attract him Heavenward or push him toward something about you or about himself. If your sins are revealed to him he will say you are mad, you are fanatics. Or, by observing you, by listening to what you say, by hearing the testimony which you offer of the power of God, by seeing your sincerity, by realizing that there is a power in you that he does not understand, what follows? The secrets of his heart are made manifest. He had never seen them before. He walked with a face that indicated no knowledge of his own depraved and fallen nature. He came in a sinner. He came in an unbeliever. He came in ignorant. He came in loving sin and hating righteousness, and yet thinking himself better than most people. But he hears something in the song, or something in the prayer, or something in the testimony of God’s people that strips off his disguises and lays bare his soul, and his own heart, and its fearful secrets, which have been covered up from his own sight, are brought to light, and he falls down and says, “I am a sinner. I am a sinner. I am convicted, I am judged; Lord God, I am a sinner!” The secrets of the heart are made manifest by the presence of the Spirit of God resting on His people, and evidencing Him in the very tones of their voices, in the earnestness of their hearts, and in the sincerity and Christliness of their manner and bearing. A public assembly of God’s people is like a mirror. When God’s people are moved properly by His Spirit, when they come praying, when they come humbling themselves, when they come longing after richer blessings and hungering after righteousness, when they come with charity for each other and love for the lost, I tell you it is a mirror, and the man looks into it, and there in that mirror is reflected his own true likeness. He never saw it before. The secrets of his heart are made manifest. He sees how vile, how abhorrent, how loathsome, how debased, how besmirched and defiled he is, and he says of himself, “unclean, unclean, unclean! I am convicted, I am a moral leper! Oh, is there not some place of cleansing, is there not some fountain into which I can plunge and wash away these sins that stain me and defile me and chain me to the devil’s chariot wheel?” The law of God gives the knowledge of sin, and nowhere is that law such a perfect mirror to reflect as when it is embodied in the saints of God, in God’s people, in their devotions, in their worship. When sinners come up before the law, oh, how bright and true is that mirror! Who can stand before it? Now, I want to ask you if this is not true. Didn’t you see that thing last year time and again? Didn’t you see men come in here and just take one look and begin to get restless and directly get up and leave the house? They saw a sight of heaven. They were convicted, they were judged. The secrets of their hearts were made manifest and they could not face the record. And then they would come back again and stop just in the door and maybe come up nearer and look and look and look. “Who is that I see? Oh, is it me, myself? Am I like that? I am lost! Oh, people of God, pray for me that God, for Christ’s sake, may forgive my sins.” And this would follow, as the text says. Listen at it: “He would fall down on his face and worship God, being convinced of all, being judged of all.” And then what? It says that he will go away and report “that of a truth God is among you. How do you know God is with them? I know it. I will tell you; I saw something that revealed to me everything I ever did. There was a light there that shone down into the chamber of my heart, revealing things of whose very existence I was unconscious. There was a power there that lifted the veil off of my past and waved its wand over the graves and caused the dead to rise up like spectres and shake their ghastly fingers in my face and say: ‘Thou art the man; thou didst this; thou didst commit this sin.’ And I was convicted of sin by the light of the law of God shining through His people.” Yes, the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know, who can understand his error? I stand before you tonight, having come here with just one great burning desire in my heart, for I see what is the matter. It is just as plain before my eyes as the shining of the light in that chandelier. Men do not feel that they are sinners. And I have prayed God, “Oh, turn on the light! Let it shine! It is a sickening revelation, but it is a necessary revelation. Give them a sight of iniquity. Uncover the pit and let them see what they are in thy sight, and that they are lost.” And now, brethren, the last thought I have for you is this: You do not understand the desperate wickedness of the men we are trying to save. You do not realize it. It does seem to me that if you did, it would take sleep from your eyes. It would put fire in your bones. It would make your tongue when you speak a tongue of fire. Oh, if you saw the awful, lost condition of men, their nearness to hell and its death and its darkness and its hopelessness and its eternity and its horrors and its wailing and its despair oh, if you saw it; if you saw it, you could not be willing to let one moment pass without bringing to bear all the power of Christianity to save that wretched soul. Why, if a man were to rush up here tonight and ask me to announce that a house was burning down, with two children in it, this whole congregation would turn out to save the burning children. If a messenger should come and say that one of your little boys or girls that you left at home was lost, a thousand men would be on the search before midnight. Lost! A child lost! A little, helpless child lost! A woman shut up in a burning building! But what is that loss, and what is that burning to the everlasting burning of hell? If a town were on fire and kept burning and burning like Chicago when it was on fire and the firemen could not put it out, every man would shut his door, close his business, turn from the most important interests of his life, and say, “God helping me, I will have no other business as long as those people are suffering and dying.” And if God were to send the realization of the condition of sinners here in Waco into the hearts of these church members, every merchant that is a member of this’ church would lock his store door; every lawyer would lock his office; every business man would turn away from goods and groceries and realty and say: “Let me save life, life, life! Let me help in the salvation of the lost!” God Almighty alone can give us a new heart. Will you come? Will you ask Him for it? Will you seek to be renewed? Will you seek the birth from above? I ask you to come. Oh, bring your heart, bring it with all of its wickedness and scars! Bring your sins, crimson red, bring them all and put them upon the Lord Jesus Christ and have them blotted out forever! Will you try it?