If we confess our sins: not our crimes, mark. Most likely none of us is a criminal, but we all are sinners. " For all have sinned and fallen short." Crime is but a small corner of the great sin-swept continent in which , alas ! we every one reside . Crime is a social state . It is governed by human law . But sin is spiritual territory . It belongs to God's jurisdiction . Crime can be weighed in the balances of human justice and its ordinariness or enormity adjudicated , but who hath scales sufficiently sensitive to record the gravity of a sin ? No man hath . Sin is evil-doing in the heavenly Fairbanks . It is the transgression of the law . Whose law ? His law . "Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned." Sin is when a man is alone , and face to face with his Maker . We sin against our bodies , but only because our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost . We offend against man , but we sin against God. .....
....Jesus Christ never attempted to work into this shroud of sackcloth one thread of colour . His hatred of sin was well-nigh furious . He used the most withering words in language to describe it . Sin , to Him , was ugliness , ungodliness , rebellion , the final failure , eclipse , darkness , doom . "He went out and it was night." It was the ghastly wound of the Cosmos . It was the crowning horror in the dissecting-room of life . And to his greatest Apostle it was the same black , baleful bankruptcy . It was the mockery and the mystery and the tragedy of the soul . It was the blot on the world's beauty , the secret of her sore and moaning and groaning misfortune . "The whole creation travaileth in pain ." Those there are today who make light of sin . They call it the other side of goodness , the shadow on the canvas , a lesser degree of holiness , the mistake of the beginner , a cinder in the eye , a splinter in the flesh , a backward eddy in the stream , the sentimentalism of aspiration , a secretion of the soul . It is to them simply immaturity , imperfection , error , tunelessness , misfortune . Matthew Arnold said that sin is not a monster but an infirmity . These people are deaf to the discord . They are blind to the forbidding . They weave a verbal veil of coloured court-plaster over the suppurating sore . They ignore the riot raging within . But on the page of the Apostle sin is made to look just what it is . "Sin that it might appear sin." It is denuded . It loses the dazzle of its dress , the glitter of its jewelry , the sorcery of its siren song . It is graceless , grim , ghastly , godless . It is the one loathsome reality . It is leprose , pimply , scaly . It leads the soul to that inevitable finish where the grave is dug . "For the wages of sin is death ."
Let us then , for a moment, pursue the path of Scripture to this black and bitter fountain of such all-inclusive sorrow . Let us consider her plan of conquest and her promise of ultimate and jubilant victory . It will be noted that there are two stages mentioned in the text , but if the context be taken into account it will at once be seen that there are three . The context throws an illuminating light upon the text . "If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us , but if we confess our sins He is faithful and righteous to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." So here we have conviction of sin, confession of sin, and cleansing from sin. Let us approach these facts by way of the Cross.
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