my conduct from what I do; and this life of mine, which looks to me, from
my ignorance, so spotless and perfect, may be, in His eyes, full of sins,
and weakness, and neglects, and shameful follies. “To walk humbly with
God.” Not to believe that because you read the Bible, and have heard the
gospel, and are sharp at finding out false doctrine in preachers, and
belong to the Church of England, that therefore you know all about God,
and can look down upon poor papists, and heathens, and say: “This people,
which knoweth not the law, is accursed: but _we_ are enlightened, we
understand the whole Bible, we know everything about God’s will, and
man’s duty; and whosoever differs from us, or pretends to teach us
anything new about God, must be wrong.” Not to do so, my friends, but to
believe what St. Paul tells us solemnly, “That if any man think that he
knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know”—to believe that
the Great God, and the will of God, and the love of God, and the mystery
of Redemption, and the treasures of wisdom which are in His Bible, are,
as St. Paul told you, boundless, like a living well, which can never be
fathomed, or drawn dry, but fills again with fresh water as fast as you
draw from it. That is walking humbly with God; and those who do not do
so, but like the Pharisees of old, believe that they have all knowledge,
and can understand all the mysteries of the Bible, and go through the
world, despising and cursing all parties but their own—let them beware,
lest the Lord be saying of them, as He said of the church of Sardis, of
old: “Thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of
nothing, and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor,
and blind, and naked.”
How is this? What is this strange thing, without which even the true
knowledge of doctrine is of no use; which, if a man, or a nation has not,
he is poor, and blind, and wretched, and naked in soul, in spite of all
his religion? Isaiah will tell us—What did he say to the Jews in his
day?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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