S. The Prayer of Watchfulness and Faith

THE PRAYER OF WATCHFULNESS AND FAITH

“Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me: then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression. Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.” - Psalms 19:12-14

THERE is great meaning here in saying “thy servant” (Psalms 19:11). It implies that at this stage, after all that I have seen of God as the Almighty, in the glory of creation, and as the unchangeable Jehovah, in the righteous, holy, and gracious sovereignty of his laws, I am his servant - out and out his servant. Yes, Lord! I cry, I am thy servant; truly I am thy servant, the son of thy handmaid; thou hast loosed my bonds. Once I served other masters, divers lusts and passions. But of that servitude thou hast loosed the bonds. I was not thy servant then; not truly thy servant, I winced under the admonitions of thy law; thy commandments were, in my enforced submission, grievous. But as thy servant now, made free to serve thee, I desire to be admonished, to be warned. Above all things I desire to be admonished and warned at every step. And it is because thy law, in all its forms, warns me as thy servant, that I prize it above much fine gold. And my whole heart now being in the keeping of all thine ordinances, I find that in the very keeping of them there is a great reward, a blessed satisfaction, rest and peace, such as makes them sweeter than honey and the honeycomb.

But, alas! I scarcely weigh the gold, I scarcely taste the honey, before, under the deep sense of there being so much in me and about me that is not precious but vile, not sweet but bitter; not gold or honey, but the opposite, dross and dung - I am constrained to cry out (Psalms 19:12) “Who can understand his errors?” It is a sad and plaintive cry, and yet salutary and hopeful. For it is not the language of one to whom the law of Jehovah is still an object of dislike and dread, a mere yoke of bondage. It is not the language of one vainly seeking to get acceptance, and holy joy, and life by a painful compliance with the form and letter of the law. It is the language of one to whom the law has been brought home by the Holy Spirit, in all its exceeding breadth and power and searching spirituality; in all its excellency, authority, and loveliness; of one whose whole inner man - mind, heart, soul, conscience, will - is now thoroughly on the side of Jehovah and his law; of one who most thankfully embraces that method of peace which magnifies the law and makes it honourable; of one whose real longing it is to attain to perfect conformity to the law which he loves, and to whom every instance of nonconformity to its pure spirit of love is a deep distress. In truth, it is only in such a frame of mind that you will care about understanding your errors at all; only when, consenting to all the principles of the divine administration, as brought out in that plan of saving grace by which Jehovah’s judicial righteousness and Jehovah’s fatherly love are blessedly harmonised, you go with his law, which now to you is the law of liberty and the law of love, as with a candle, into the recesses of thought and feeling within, searching yourselves, and asking the Lord to search you! Ah! then comes the woful lament: - “The law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin; I delight in the law of God after the inward man; but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. Oh! wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” “Who can understand his errors? The closing verses of this psalm give an insight into the experience you may have, as spiritually enlightened and spiritually minded men, thus applying the law of Jehovah to your own carnal selves. The several successive prayers offered up are wrung from the tried soul under the pressure of the question. Who can understand his errors? They have all a pointed reference to the power and prevalence of indwelling sin, in all its tendencies and stages, from the original source of inborn lust or desire ever striving still for the mastery, to the final consummation of apostasy and ruin, in which, but for the prayer of watchfulness and faith, it may ere long result.

I. The first prayer, “Cleanse thou me from secret faults,” springs naturally out of the complaint, “Who can understand his errors?” In searching and trying your ways as spiritual men, according to the spirit of the holy law, you soon make a sad discovery. It is this. Search as you may, ever so faithfully - all the more, in fact the more faithfully you search - you find that you are stirring the depths of a dark sea of evil - a deep abyss of disloyalty and disaffection to Jehovah’s righteous and loving rule, which all your searching cannot fathom. But you would have it purged. The unknown, unfathomable ocean-caves where the bitter waters of uncleanness ever ominously lurk, you would fain have purified. But who can purge or purify? Who but the searcher of hearts alone? Thou, Lord, understandest my errors. Thou canst reach and touch their hidden source and spring in the inner man. Therefore I come to thee for thorough inward purging and purification: “Cleanse thou me from secret faults.”

Secret faults! What are they? They are not merely offences secretly committed, and so hidden from the eyes of your fellow men. Such offences you will indeed discover in any honest, thorough, spiritual survey of your inner and outer life only too abundant! The instances in which you have ventured on the commission or tolerance of sin, in imagination at least, if not in act, in a manner and in circumstances that you would shrink from the very idea of making known to your most confidential friend on earth, are numerous enough and aggravated enough to cause deepest remorse and shame. But still these are not the secret faults from which, with the Psalmist, you pray you may be cleansed, at least not these alone, or chiefly. As in the lowest depth there is a lower still, so, far back, behind, deep down beneath, these covert indulgences of the passions, you reach the ultimate root and pregnant seed of depravity in the very nature which, as members of a fallen family, you inherit. That nature is the seat and prolific source of secret faults and of errors that never can be fully understood. Germs of evil are in it that never can be estimated or counted. They do not disclose themselves to the world’s censorious eye. They do not discover themselves to your own eye, in its flattering and self-indulgent mood, when they are dormant and you are blind. But if any of you have ever set about the work of self-discipline and self-purification, with a thorough desire to be thoroughly holy, and a thorough determination to search and renovate the deepest springs and fountains of unholiness within, you must have come to a point at which the most rigid and rigorous scrutiny of self-examination was brought to a stand. You may trace and track sin in its outward manifestations; you may reach it inwardly in its volitions, or movements of voluntary choice, but still more deeply seated is the mystery of iniquity in the inner man. There is a malign and deadly malady in your moral nature which, whenever you come closely to deal with it, baffles your utmost skill, and your most searching penetration to root it fairly out of your system.

You may not be sensible of this so long as you dally delicately with your natural corruption, your habitual frame and temper of secure and settled unconcern - keeping besetting sin at a decent distance, by means of some seemly compromise, and if not making terms with it, yet maintaining at the best a very listless, heartless show of contending against it. But come to close quarters. Come as believing men, earnest men, who would not only have the will choosing what is holy, but the very nature itself conformed to what is holy. Come as being bent not only on doing good, but on being good - good in the true, divine sense of being good - as he was who, not merely in his life went about doing good, but in his very nature was good, holy, harmless, undefiled. Alas you will soon come into contact with the secret faults of a nature very different from his; a nature radically corrupt, whose deep and desperate depravity you can neither estimate nor cure! You assail indwelling sin, working in one direction; it breaks out working in another. You mortify fleshly lust in one form of it; anon it revives in another. You think you have got the better of your ungodly passion, your unholy inclination, and for a time it seems to be overcome or to give way; but it rises again and takes you at unawares, from a different quarter, and on a different side. You are compelled to own that you have to meet in this warfare not open enemies, but ambushed traitors. They are far too many and too strong for you. “The heart is deceitful above all things,” you cry, “and desperately wicked! Who can know it?” “I, the Lord, search the heart!” Oh! may not that response relieve you. “I, the Lord, search the heart!” Then search my heart, Lord, search it thoroughly. “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean; wash me and I shall be whiter than the snow. Create in me a clean heart, Lord, and renew within me a right spirit.” By blood and water - atoning blood and purifying water - let me be thoroughly redeemed, regenerated, renewed, washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of thy Son, and by the operation of thy Spirit. Cleanse thou me from secret faults.

II. In your spiritual exercise of soul upon Jehovah’s law, you find secret faults bordering on the region of presumptuous sins. Presumptuous sins! These are acts of the will, as the former are faults of the nature. For secret faults, your nature may be said to be responsible; for presumptuous sins, your will. Does this distinction exonerate you from blame, as regards those secret faults? Not certainly if you are in earnest when you pray, “Cleanse thou me from secret faults.” The natural man, unconverted and unsanctified, who has no sense of sin’s exceeding sinfulness, or of the perfect beauty of holiness, may find solace and satisfaction in charging upon his natural disposition and temperament the blame of those evil propensities with which he does not choose to grapple. It is enough for him to regulate his outward and voluntary actions properly. The involuntary desires that are ever springing up within him are, he says, beyond his control, he cannot be expected to cope with them, he cannot be held bound to account for them. The very reverse of that will be your feeling if you have learned to love Jehovah’s law, and to hate heartily whatever is opposed to it. The experimental discovery that opposition to the law, in its essential spirit, as “Jehovah commanding,” not only characterises your outward conduct in some particulars, but is of the very essence of your carnal mind; this insight which the Spirit gives you into the inveterate depravity of your very nature and its inevitable tendency towards secret faults; so far from being accepted as a palliation of your guilt or an alleviation of your grief, only serves to aggravate and embitter your distress under the sad sense of your indwelling and inborn enmity against God, and increases the agony of your prayer for a thorough inward renewal; “Cleanse thou me from secret faults.” And this must be all the more your feeling when you find the secret faults of your nature so apt to become presumptuous sins in your life. “Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins.” The prayer implies a keen and vivid apprehension of your liability to such sins. Keep me back, I need to be kept back, from presumptuous sins. For secret faults, inward natural tendencies to evil, not rooted out, but only concealed by some superficial cleansing, are continually apt to effloresce into presumptuous sins. And let it be observed, that the more tender and faithful your conscience is, in regard to the holy claims of Jehovah’s law and the guilt of your natural insubordination to its authority, the more sensitively quick will you be to discern the elements of presumption in the sins you are apt to commit; and the keener will be your feeling of your being so carried on to the commission of such sins that you need almost violently to be kept back. Sins will appear to you presumptuous which others would regard, and you once would have regarded, as accidental, and to a large extent involuntary. Giving harbour, even for a brief moment, to an unclean thought or ungodly imagination; uttering, under provocation, a hasty and unguarded word; indulging your all but unconquerable tendency to sloth in God’s worship or weariness in God’s service; a momentary ebullition of temper; a wandering of the mind away from God and from duty; these, and similar infirmities, which so many excuse to themselves as inevitable and therefore venial, will more and more assume in your eyes, as you grow in the light and love of Jehovah and Jehovah’s law, the character and the criminality of presumptuous sins. Once you might have dismissed them from your thoughts, with the light and flippant apology - “I could not help it.” Now you see and feel that, on such occasions as those now in question, your thoughts and imaginations, as well as your actions, are far more under the control of your will than you were once prepared to admit. And entertaining an increasing dread of whatever evil in you or about you has in it, even in the smallest measure, the elements of deliberation, or voluntary choice; alive also, not only to the continued existence of natural corruption in you, but to the continual risk of your consenting to its existence; you offer, with ever deep anxiety, the double prayer: “Cleanse thou me from secret faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins.”

III. A worse evil still; worse even than the commission of presumptuous sins, but flowing from that, the spiritual man has to depreciate, under the influence of his love of Jehovah’s spiritual law, and his sad insight into his own carnality and corruption regarding it: “Let them not have dominion over me.” Let them not, these presumptuous sins, gain the mastery and ascendancy in my heart. Ah! there is the possibility of a sad downward tendency indicated here. Secret faults, if you do not seek to be cleansed from them, will soon pass into presumptuous sins; and presumptuous sins, if you are not kept back from them, will, almost before you are aware, come to have dominion over you. Any natural lust, or passion, or inclination, if the will consents to it but a little, and but for a little, becomes a tyrant whose yoke it is hard indeed to shake off. It acquires and wields the stern dominion of habit.

Mark its insidious way. An evil, or a doubtful, tendency of your nature, contrives first to get itself barely tolerated in your fancy. Then, stealing imperceptibly on, it has sop after sop ministered to it, in repeated acts of limited and cautious indulgence. It grows more and more bold and undisguised. At last it drops the mask of a humble suppliant and solicitor, ready to be content with anything, and assumes the lordly and domineering part of a master, able and entitled to dispose of all things.

Who, alas! has not too frequently experienced this melancholy working of the deceitfulness of sin? the wiles of the devil? It was a safe as well as a noble resolution to which Paul gave expression, when, with reference to fleshly indulgences and gratifications of natural desires, he exclaimed, “All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient; all things are lawful unto me, but I will not be brought under the power of any!” Tell me not of this or that practice being, in a literal, formal, technical sense, lawful. There may be no precise or peremptory categorical rule in the statute-book concerning it. I might adopt or continue it and challenge the whole church and all the world to convict me of crime. But I have felt the bitter bondage of sin. I feel the glad liberty of grace. And too well do I know my own weakness and corrupt tendency, as well as the supremacy which evil once tolerated comes by custom to exercise, to run any risk in that direction again. I know the truth, and the truth has made me free; free to trample on the lying tempter; free to serve my God and Father as a son in his house; the Son making me free with his own filial freedom. That freedom I will not compromise or endanger. All things may be lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. Keep back thy servant from presumptuous sins; sins incompatible with free filial service. Let them not have dominion over me.

IV. There is yet a further step in the line of departure from Jehovah and Jehovah’s law, against which you have to watch and pray. It is indicated in the brief saying, “Then shall I be upright.” For it is implied that were you to follow the course deprecated, in the preceding petitions, you must cease to be upright. If you are not cleansed from secret faults; if you are not kept back from presumptuous sins; if you fall again under their dominion; the consequence is inevitable. You forfeit your integrity. You no longer continue to be upright.

“Then shall I be upright.” The expression at once carries us to Psalms 32:1-11, and to the state of mind there described as being pre-eminently blessed (Psalms 32:1-2) “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.” “Behold an Israelite indeed,” said the Lord with reference to Nathanael; having, as I believe, that Psalm in his mind, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.” So may every poor sinner be hailed and welcomed, who has received grace to renounce the devices of self-righteousness, and acquiesce in the free and simple gospel of reconciliation. That gospel, so received, secures truth in the inward parts, and wisdom in the hidden parts. No other way can do so.

Invariably, and inevitably, guile is the distinguishing characteristic of all who, not knowing the righteousness of God, or not submitting themselves to it, go about to establish a righteousness of their own. They must have recourse to shifts and devices of self-justification, altogether inconsistent with a guileless spirit. Ah! it is a great matter when, through grace, this miserable necessity of guile is brought to a complete and conclusive end. David felt it to be so. The relief which he found when he was enabled thus to be upright was as if he had passed from the prostrate weakness and racking pains of a loathsome disease, to the lightness and enlargement of manly strength. It was the exchange of roaring all the day long, for the melody of joy and health to be heard in the dwellings of the righteous. David speaks, with absolute horror, of the time when he kept silence; when there was guile in his spirit; when he practised reserve, and restrained himself from the full and frank unburdening of his soul, and the opening up of his whole state before God. Instead of confessing his sins, in the assured belief that God was faithful and just to forgive him his sins, he tried to persuade himself that he had little or no sin to be confessed and forgiven. But it would not do. God would not suffer him in that way to find rest. There must be truth in the inward parts. Weary, therefore, of all concealment and disguise, he was shut up into the more excellent way (Psalms 32:5). Then came light, enlargement, joy. An honourable trust in God, an open, guileless trust in God, took the place of suspicion, alienation, and alarm. Have any of you had experience of this blessed deliverance from guile and from guilt? from guilt and guile together? If so, will you lightly incur again the hazard of being ensnared and entangled in the meshes of the guile which guilt creates. And yet how can you escape if, not cleansed from secret faults, nor kept back from presumptuous sins, these sins are allowed to have dominion over you? Know you not that whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin? It is a maxim of universal application; a law of universal sweep and range; an inherent law of the human soul. Of the unjust in the early church Peter testifies that though they promised liberty to those they would seduce, they were themselves the bond-slaves of corruption. “For,” he adds, announcing a great fact, a great principle, which cannot be evaded, “of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.” So Paul again, “Know ye not that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey, whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? But God be thanked that ye were the servants of death; but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you. Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness.” Being made free from sin, will you suffer it again to have dominion over you? If you do, can you expect still to retain your integrity? “Sin,” says Paul once again, “sin shall not have dominion over you, for ye are not under the law but under grace.” If therefore sin contrives at any time to have dominion over you, then, in so far as it succeeds, you cease practically to be under grace. To all intents and purposes you are under the law again. The old legal spirit of bondage returns, the old slavish fear and cowardly shrinking away from God. Then comes the old system of making excuses, keeping silence, and resorting once more to the old degrading arts of self-justification! Alas! who has not felt all this? May you not be feeling it now? Is there any sin, it may be a single sin and that a little one, with which you are dallying or trifling, any doubtful practice with which you are beginning to indulge, any omission of duty to the thought of which you are becoming accustomed, any one known or suspected evil thing to which you feel that you are surrendering yourself? Then do you not already find your upright standing before God compromised, and the simplicity of your reliance on his free grace spoiled, and the openness and frankness of your fellowship with him marred, by the consciousness of there being something in your spirit about which you cannot venture to speak to him unreservedly? You dare not now, with unabashed and loving eye, look your Maker and Redeemer, your God and Father, in the face. You cannot ask him honestly to search and see if there he any wicked way in you. You shrink from your own judgment much more from his. You are embarrassed and ill at ease in his presence.

O my friends! Beware of guile. And that you may beware of it, stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ makes you free.

V. But there is still one more disaster which the spiritual man dreads. To one final calamity he feels himself to be exposed. He is alive to the terrible risk and danger of “the great transgression.” He sees, beyond the loss of his spiritual integrity, and flowing from that loss, a still worse evil against which he must watch and pray. For well does he know that if once he ceases to be upright before God, and in his dealings with God, there is no security for his continuing long innocent of the great transgression.

I take this expression here to denote the unpardonable sin; the sin for which no prayer is to be made; the sin against the Holy Ghost which never can be forgiven. Into the nature of that sin I do not now particularly inquire. Upon that point, Holy Scripture leaves you very much in the dark. And it does so, I believe, designedly and of set purpose; both because the warning against it, from its very indefiniteness, may be all the more solemn; and because it is not any particular act, or course of conduct, that is meant when that sin is spoken of, but rather a certain state of mind and heart. If the sin in question had been described exactly as to its outward signs and manifestations, you might have been tempted to cherish an undue feeling of security on the mere ground of these being, as you might suppose, in your case wanting. Or on the other hand, imagining erroneously that you could detect them as characterising your spiritual position, you might be plunged into the depths of irremediable despair. The Bible therefore furnishes no means, no data, for identifying “the great transgression” as a fact of which either the individual himself who may commit it, or others around him can be cognisant. All that it does is to hold up before your eyes the distinct and unequivocal intimation that there is a kind and degree of resistance to the Holy Ghost which seals upon him who is guilty of it the sentence of final impenitence and a judicial hardening of the heart for ever. Nor is there any difficulty in ascertaining at all events whereabouts this terrible danger lies. Let the process which I have been describing be suffered to go on; the process (1) of indifference as to being cleansed from secret faults; (2) toleration of presumptuous sins; (3) subjection to their dominion; and (4) the loss of uprightness, departure from the simplicity of an honourable and single-eyed trust in God; let this sad course of backsliding and declension continue but for a little, unarrested, unchecked; and it is not hard to perceive how it must soon issue in confirmed and hopeless apostasy. For a time there may be a struggle with remaining convictions, and an attempt, by some miserable scheme of self-righteousness to impose upon yourselves, and if it were possible, upon your God. You may try a poor and pitiful game of compromise, evasion, and guile. But you cannot long keep up the farce, the trick, the device; you become weary of it, and ashamed of it. It is a positive relief to you to get rid of it, if not in the way of yielding obedience to the Spirit striving with you and working in you to revive and quicken you; then in the way of casting off his restraints and being no more troubled with his rebukes, until at last the grieved Spirit withdraws altogether, and the sentence goes forth from heaven, “Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone.”

I raise no question here, nor can I suffer any to be raised, about the perseverance of the saints, and the certainty of their final salvation. These are abundantly and effectually secured by the terms of the everlasting covenant; by the sovereign decree of election; by the good Shepherd giving his life for the sheep; by the promise of the Holy Ghost to abide with you for ever; and, to crown all, by such assurances as these, given by Jesus himself; “All that the Father giveth me shall come unto me; and him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out.” “My sheep hear my voice and I know them, and they follow me, and I give unto them eternal life. And they shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of my hand. My Father which gave them me is greater than all, and none is able to pluck them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.” So the sheep are safe to the last. But on whatever valid ground the doctrine of the perseverance and ultimate salvation of believers rests, certainly it does not rest on anything in their own consciousness or in their experience. On the contrary, and as a practical matter, their actual security lies very much in the vivid apprehension which they have in themselves of the possibility of the awful catastrophe of a final falling from grace being realised in their own case; such an apprehension as Paul had when he said, “I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection; lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”

Under this feeling, you will be ever sensitively alive to the risk you run when you linger even for a moment on any part of the downward and declining path which must plunge all who travel along it in. the depths of confirmed unbelief, and eternal, because incurable, hardness of heart. Nay, so sensitive will you be in this matter, if you are indeed spiritual men, that you will never at any time feel yourselves at all safe, unless your foot is planted in a very different path, leading to a very different goal. For you may be very sure that, if you would not run the risk of the slippery way that slopes downwards and hellwards, you make sure work of your getting and keeping some firm footing in the way that leads upwards and heavenwards to God’s own throne, and home, and heart.

VI. This accordingly you seek to do by entering into the spirit of the closing prayer: “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, Lord, my strength and my redeemer.” For I regard these words, not merely as an appendix, and as it were an amen, to the present exercise, but as an integral and essential part of it. The Psalmist is not merely asking the Lord to accept the words he has been now uttering and the meditation in which he has now been engaged. No. Generally and universally he is praying, that always and everywhere the words of his mouth and the meditation of his heart may be such as God may accept. In that view, there is a great practical truth here brought out. Holiness, godliness, conformity to Jehovah’s law, is not a mere negation; if it were so, it would be precarious indeed. It is a positive and positively active principle. It is not a mere struggle against evil. If it were so, it would be a painful and doubtful struggle to the last. It is a reaching out to that which is good. The life of God in the soul of man is not merely a life of striving against sin; but a life also of “pressing on towards the mark of the high calling of God, in Christ Jesus our Lord.” And the calling is unto holiness; unto the active, persevering, progressive pursuit of positive holiness.

Ah, friends! be sure that there is no security against sin regaining its ascendency over you in your merely aiming at keeping it out of your heart and mouth; as if the heart could be kept pure by being kept empty; and the mouth could “be kept clean by being kept shut and silent. Fill the heart with holy thoughts. Fill the mouth with holy songs and sayings. Let there not be merely the absence of corrupt musings from your heart, and vile utterances from your mouth. Let it not be counted enough that the Lord, when he searches your heart, should find no cherished thoughts of evil to be condemned, and when he listens to the voice of your lips, should hear no blasphemies, or ribaldries, or outbreaks of passion, to offend his ear. Let him find, when he comes, an acceptable meditation in your heart; acceptable words in your mouth. Is he not well entitled to this? Is he not your strength and your Redeemer; your strength, giving you ability for this very thing; your Redeemer who has bought and purchased you expressly with a view of redeeming you from the guilt and power of sin by the shedding of the precious blood of his Son; strengthening you with might by his Spirit in the inner man? He fits your mouth for speaking acceptably; your heart for meditating acceptably; and, as your strength and your Redeemer, he furnishes the very theme of meditation and speech which is most acceptable in his sight. Let mouth and heart, therefore, be ever busy. That is what you pray for. You ask the Lord, your strength and your Redeemer, to keep your heart and mouth ever busy. Let mouth and heart be occupied; pre-occupied; so pre-occupied and pre-engaged that “secret faults” may never at any time be able to win a word from you, or to win a thought from you. This alone is your security, For if once these “secret faults,” the movements of evil imagination and evil desire springing out of your corrupt nature, succeed in getting you to speak of them, or to think of them, be it but a single word, a solitary thought; they instantly take the character of presumptuous sins. They obtain an advantage over you. They sully your integrity and shake your steadfastness. Your safety lies in refusing them a word, a thought. And that you may be in a condition to refuse them when they knock, be engaged always with other visitors, better guests. “Lord, open thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise.” I will sing of thy righteousness all the day. I will be ever speaking of thy testimonies. My meditation of thee also shall be sweet. Like Isaac, I will go out to meditate in the field. Like David, I will meditate in the night watches. Like Peter, I will muse and pray on the house-top. Let my mouth be filled with thy praise and with thy honour all the day. “Give ear to my words, Lord; consider my meditation.” “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, Lord, my Strength and my Redeemer.”