2. And your second danger in connection with your minister is, that you
have, and may have long had, a good minister, but that you still remain
yourself a bad man. My brethren, be you all sure of it, there is a
special and a fearful danger in having a specially good minister. Think
twice, and make up your mind well, before you call a specially good
minister, or become a communicant, or even an adherent under a specially
good minister. If two bad men go down together to the pit, and the one
has had a good minister, as, God have mercy on us, sometimes happens, and
the other has only had one who had the name of a minister, the
evangelised reprobate will lie in a deeper bed in hell, and will spend a
more remorseful eternity on it than will the other. No man among you,
minister or no minister, good minister or bad, will be able to sin with
impunity. But he who sins on and on after good preaching will be beaten
with many stripes. 'Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Woe unto thee, Bethsaida!
For if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and
Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I
say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of
judgment than for you.' 'Thou that hast knowledge,' says a powerful old
preacher, 'canst not sin so cheap as another that is ignorant. Places of
much knowledge'--he was preaching in the university pulpit of Oxford--'and
plentiful in the means of grace are dear places for a man to sin in. To
be drunken or unclean after a powerful sermon, and after the Holy Ghost
has enlightened thee, is more than to have so sinned twenty times before.
Thou mightest have sinned ten times more and been damned less. For does
not Jesus Christ the Judge say to thee, This is thy condemnation, that so
much light has come to thee?' And, taking the then way of execution as a
sufficiently awful illustration, the old Oxford Puritan goes on to say
that to sin against light is the highest step of the ladder before
turning off. And, again, that if there are worms in hell that die not,
it is surely gospel light that breeds them.
EXPERIENCE
'My heart had great experience.'--The Preacher.
'I will give them pastors after Mine own heart.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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