But though it is this aspect of the truth I have felt it specially
needful to press, I need scarce say what new depth and intensity man's
sin and God's grace give to the humility of the saints. We have only
to look at a man like the Apostle Paul, to see how, through his life
as a ransomed and a holy man, the deep consciousness of having been a
sinner lives inextinguishably. We all know the passages in which he
refers to his life as a persecutor and blasphemer. 'I am _the least of
the apostles_, that am _not worthy to be called an apostle_, because I
persecuted the Church of God. ...I laboured more abundantly than they
all; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me' (1 Cor. xv.
9,10). 'Unto me, who am _less than the least of all saints,_ was this
grace given, to preach to the heathen' (Eph. iii. 8). 'I was before a
_blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious;_ howbeit I obtained
mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief. ...Christ Jesus came
into the world to save _sinners, of whom I am chief'_ (1 Tim. i. 13,
15). God's grace had saved him; God remembered his sins no more for
ever; but never, never could he forget how terribly he had sinned. The
more he rejoiced in God's salvation, and the more his experience of
God's grace filled him with joy unspeakable, the clearer was his
consciousness that he was a saved sinner, and that salvation had no
meaning or sweetness except as the sense of his being a sinner made it
precious and real to him. Never for a moment could he forget that it
was a sinner God had taken up in His arms and crowned with His love.
The texts we have just quoted are often appealed to as Paul's
confession of daily sinning. One has only to read them carefully in
their connection, to see how little this is the case. They have a far
deeper meaning, they refer to that which lasts throughout eternity,
and which will give its deep undertone of amazement and adoration to
the humility with which the ransomed bow before the throne, as those
who have been washed from their sins in the blood of the Lamb. Never,
never, even in, glory, can they be other than ransomed sinners; never
for a moment in this life can God's child live in the full light of
His love, but as he feels that the sin, out of which he has been
saved, is his one only right and title to all that grace has promised
to do. The humility with which first he came as a sinner, acquires a
new meaning when he learns how it becomes him as a creature. And then
ever again, the humility, in which he was born as a creature, has its
deepest, richest tones of adoration, in the memory of what it is to be
a monument of God's wondrous redeeming love.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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