THE PRIVILEGE OF REPENTANCE. BY THE REV. A. K. H. BOYD, D.D., FIRST MINISTER OF ST. ANDREWS. "From that time Jesus began to preach; and to say, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."-ST. MATT. iv. 17. EVERY preacher of any experience knows | debasing Confession in the ear of man of Ε the advantage, specially when preach- what ought only to be known between the ing to a congregation to which he is a soul and God; with the irrational and unstranger, of having a text which is a suggestive Christian Satisfaction by one's own doing or or (what some people call) a striking one. suffering; which lose the simplicity of New It will commonly fix the attention of the Testament Repentance in the Sacramental congregation to at least the first sentences Penance of the unreformed Church. Yet, of the sermon which follows. It need not apart from this, apart from all factitious be an eccentric or extraordinary text: such addition of disagreeables, there remains as a will rather repel intelligent hearers; and such | fact in human nature, that it goes against the are generally prefixed to discourses whose text grain with man to frankly say he has done is the only remarkable thing about them. wrong not wrong vaguely and generally, And every preacher knows too the damp- but wrong in this or that. I have known ing of anything like interested attention many people who would tell any number of which follows the announcement of what the most apparent lies, rather than frankly may be called the regulation text, which admit that they had done wrong. Their commonly precedes that kind of sermon rule plainly was, Never admit that. And so which might be preached over every Sunday the excuse was always ready, though it could without any one recognising it ;-the kind of mislead nobody. To people of more prinsermon which reaches nobody, which gives ciple, and more sense, the candid confession no offence, which does no harm, and which of having behaved foolishly or wickedly most assuredly does no good. remains a sad and humbling necessity, too. Now I know quite well that my text at And so it is, that we have all been told a this time is not the sort of text which many great deal about the Duty of Repentance, people hear read out with much anticipation and the Necessity of Repentance, and about of interest. I am well aware that in these how Gospel Repentance goes against the days there is in many congregations a distaste proud heart of the Flesh, and how God's for theological terms, such as Repentance, as purpose is that we all be brought down into Faith, as Justification and Sanctification; the very dust of humiliation before He will and a shrinking from the discussion of theo- let us get off the painful consequences or logical doctrines, as something unreal, and even escape the enslaving power of our sins. uninteresting, and (in any case) as something There is confusion, too, in many minds as that you are quite tired of being preached to what Repentance actually is. Forgetting to about. So when I say that my subject is the manly and downright and common-sense Repentance, I know that I am placed at account of it given in the Shorter Catechism, some disadvantage. I hope to get over there are those who would make it a matter that: I trust that God's grace may make of the nervous system,-who would carry each soul here present to feel that a more the penitent into the realm of hysteria,real and practical thing cannot be. And and associate Repentance unto Life essenthere is something besides. It is common tially with unmanly tears which are merely to speak of Repentance as a humiliating manifestation of exceptive physical tempera-` thing, a sore thing, a thing our passing ment, and with extravagant self-abasement through which will always be looked back which I do not believe that God can be upon with something like shame, and a sense pleased to see in any immortal creature of of personal degradation. An eminent Roman His hand. I have known men call themCatholic writer, the late Cardinal Wiseman, selves, in their confessions of sin, what they says that Repentance is "the one door of would have been very angry had any other the sheep, the one entrance to the Church person called them. Hence a general imof Christ, narrow and low perhaps, and caus-pression of unreality: and so it comes that ing flesh and blood to stoop as it passes it." as to forgive as a Christian sometimes means But then Cardinal Wiseman was speaking of not to forgive at all; in like manner to say Repentance, not as Christ preached it, but in a prayer that one is sinful,—to call one's as the Roman Church has made it; with the self sinful in a theological sense,—often implies no real and deep sense that one has done grievously wrong. Now this is bad. There is no great harm in telling a man that you are his obedient servant without meaning much but never go and tell God that you are a miserable sinner unless you mean what you say. It cannot please God that any man should call himself worse than he feels himself to be. Nor does inordinate selfdebasement go to make New-Testament Repentance; any more than exceptional emotion, which it is not in some natures to yield. I desire to preach to you of the Privilege of Repentance. I desire to speak of it, not as a painful and humbling necessity, but as a great and blessed privilege. I wish I may be helped to show you that we can never thank God enough that we are allowed to repent. For, indeed, Repentance, rightly understood, is as grand a gift as Christ ever won for us. We might well take for granted that our Saviour would not have preached oftentimes on Repentance, and indeed have made that the characteristic staple of His preaching when He began His ministry, had not the subject been one of vital moment. And it is plain, too, that the subject is of just as much concern now as ever. You remember, likewise, that on this matter the Saviour's Fore-runner S. John the Baptist had uttered the self-same words: the same counsel, or command (if you will), Repent: the same reason why, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. To repent is the thing to be done: the thing everybody needs to do. Now there are two different words used in the New Testament, both of which are translated into the English word Repentance: one of them conveys specially the notion of being sorry for having done wrong; the other conveys specially the notion of changing one's mind as to things,-seeing things in a different light, and then shaping one's conduct accordingly, trying to mend one's life. It is this second word which Christ used: which you can see is the fuller and larger word, including substantially the meaning of the first word too: taking in the being sorry for the wrong-doing and ashamed of it, coming to right views, beginning afresh and trying to do better. This is Gospel Repentance in which, as the Catechism has it, a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, doth with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it unto God, with full purpose of, and endeavour after, new obedience." It is not difficult to understand: it is indeed very 66 plain: it does not seem as if Christ thought it needful to give much explanation of what He meant to the plain folk He preached to. A very little child, who has done something wrong, is able thoroughly to grasp the idea of what is meant by repenting of it. And so with older folk. You see that wrongdoing (or call it sin) is very bad, which you had thought not so bad: you see it leads to infinite trouble and shame, when you had thought you would get pleasure out of it and escape the trouble: you are sorry for it, you are ashamed of it, you feel degraded by it: you turn over a new leaf, and begin again afresh, upon a clean page. By God's mercy you will cease to do evil and learn to do well: you will sever the connection with the miserable past: you will start anew, get into the right way and stick to it. That is Repentance: that is what Christ bade us all do and He added for encouragement, that a new and milder dispensation was here : "The kingdom of heaven is at hand." The religion Christ taught was the first which offered forgiveness without suffering, on the part of the penitent, or inflicted by the penitent. False faiths had told of expiatory penances: starve yourself, torture yourself, deny every desire of your nature, measure a thousand miles by lengths of your body, find out by trial how miserable a poor wretch may be, and then you will be forgiven: God will never be hard on a tortured creature that has been so awfully hard upon himself. And how natural the fancy, though so wrong! And in the dawning light of the Jewish law, if the sinner himself was not required to suffer, then some helpless thing must that had never sinned: the harmless lamb, the innocent dove, must die: "without shedding of blood there was no remission:" the eternal truth of the inevitable link between sin and suffering must be held forth before all. Nor ought we to forget that when the better "kingdom of heaven did come at last, that fundamental truth was still recognised and affirmed in the suffering and death of our Blessed Redeemer, upon whose head, as the one self-sufficing sacrifice of all sacrifices that ever were offered, were made to meet the iniquities of us all. But now, when we would repent, when we would find pardon, though we ever plead that Great Sacrifice, there is no suffering needed any more. All the suffering was borne, long ago, and once for all, that brought our salvation. And now "if we confess our sins,"-that is all,-" if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." No wonder that it was said, as strongest encouragement to repent, that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand!" For the coming of that kingdom has made repentance efficacious, and made it simple, as it never was before. : Now here is the sum of Christ's preaching. The command, the exhortation, let us call it, is to Repent. That preaching starts from a fact: the fact that there is something wrong: the fact, ordinary preachers would say, that men are sinners. And this is fact, not doctrine or if you will call it doctrine, it is fact stated dogmatically. For it is fact, that there is something wrong; wrong in our lives, wrong in our natures. Our natures are all twisted, and amiss: wherever the wrench came from that left us so. If we be not the chief of fools we all know that. Look back on your life and oh the follies, the failures, the dark transgressions! The remembrance bows you down. Now Repentance is just the right and healthy feeling of the awakened soul that sees its own sin. Once a man is made to see he is a sinner, see he has done wrong times beyond counting, then if his mind be in any way healthy and true, the state of feeling which arises in it is what we call Repentance. And it includes all that has been said. Sorrow and shame for having done wrong: an earnest wish to get out of wrong and to be right: turning with true purpose and intention into the right way, and holding on in that. My friends, if this be truth, and it is truth, is it not strange that repentance should be so commonly thought a painful duty? It is a grand and inexpressible privilege. There is nothing degrading in it; the degradation is all in the state it takes us out of. It is degrading to stay in sin, not to get out of it. And there is no humiliation, beyond the fact that it is a humble thing to be a human being, in confessing that we have been wrong. It is too common for that. It is just the condition of being a human being. We take that for granted. "To go wrong is human;" everybody everywhere has always known that. And that Christ's Gospel invites us to repentance just means that man is not tied to go on in his wrong and misery. It means that he has not got into that miserable lane in which there is no turning. It means that, save in our despairing imaginations, there is no such thing on God's earth. You are not such a fool as to fancy you never go wrong? Well, repentance is getting right. What an unspeakable and blessed relief to one who feels he has made a mess of his life if you get him to take in that it may all be mended yet! Then that was exactly what our blessed Saviour said-said to every mortal-when he preached, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Many a poor soul, bogged, shamed, crushed, broken-hearted, has cried in agony, Oh, if I could only get beginning again!" Well, says Christ, begin again! There is nothing to hinder you. Sad as is the past, it may all, so far as concerns the worst about it, be as if it had never been. God never ties any mortal to sin who honestly longs to be delivered from it. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow: though they be red like crimson they shall be as wool." I do not say that the truest and heartiest repentance will avail to deliver a human being from all the painful consequences of transgression. It can never be in this world that the grievous sinner should be as though he had not sinned. The future punishment of sin, and the present power of it, from these things the penitent is delivered through God's mercy in Christ, and by the grace of the Holy Spirit; but the needful course of things here often denies the wrongdoer the mercy here which all of us pray he may receive from God. The temporal consequences of sin and folly, lesser and greater sin and folly, cannot, in the nature of things, be quite taken away here, though true penitence will show the way to bear them better. It is an unhappy thing about this life, and it often seems a very hard thing, that human beings, when very young and inexperienced, can spoil it all. this not merely by some grievous wrongdoing, whose stain can never be effaced in this world, but by lack of judgment, of tact, of energy, of decision, when the whole thing was misfortune and not fault. A man takes the wrong turning at some critical time, and never gets over it. A man makes a wrong choice of a profession, and all his life feels himself misplaced, and does his work ill, does it heartlessly and inefficiently, and taking no pleasure in it, perhaps downrightly hating it, while there is some other vocation in which he would have been in his right place, and useful-perhaps eminently useful, and happy in feeling himself so. I have known very middling preachers who were first-rate lawyers spoiled. But it was too late. It could not be helped. And there are other choices which have blighted the whole life And of man or woman. Most of us have grieved over cases in which we have seen it so. But there was no place of repentance. There was nothing for it but to make the best of a ruinous bargain. Blessed be God, it is never so as to the worst consequences of the worst sin! As for sin, as for its doom, as for its blasting influence on the character, that is all remediable; and when Christ said these words of my text, He told all men so. He said to the worst, You may get out of the slough; you need not stop in the prison of Giant Despair; you cannot have made such a ravelled misery of your life, but I can help you, and I will. You need not perish; you need not abide in your sore misery and degradation; everything may be set right yet. "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven," the reign of Gospel mercy and grace, is here. Would that all sinful creatures could take that in and be sure of it! Would that all sinful creatures could realise the meaning of that inspired declaration, that God "is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance!" The worst things that human beings ever have done they did because they thought there was no room for repentance left to them. They thought they were so bad that they never could be better; so bad that they could not be worse; and so they grew reckless. It is in that desperate, miserable mood that the worst has been done that ever has been done. But the traitor Judas might have done better than go and hang himself. The devil might do better than hold on in that despairing warfare against good and against God. O that great gospel privilege of repentance: that we, always going wrong, are not to be tied to our wrong-doing and what comes of it; but are mercifully suffered to cut the link that would naturally bind us to our sin and misery, and escape from that bondage into the liberty of the sons of God. We never can reach the full depth and meaning of the old familiar story that Christ takes away sin. For only through His life and death it is, that so complete deliverance waits the repenting sinner. Forasmuch as we daily sin, we will repent daily; get out of the entanglement, the sorrow, the degradation; break away from it, and leave it all behind; for now the kingdom of heaven has come, and God waits to receive. It is His nature and property ever to have mercy and forgive: ""forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin," and Christ's precious blood avails to take it all away. Now this is one of the last things we really take in. I know how 66 young creatures have thought to themselves times without number, "O, I am all wrong! I never can get right again; I dare not tell my father and mother what an awful scrape I have got into." Little things five or six years old have known the feeling the curious feeling, common to humanity, that they have done something so bad that it can never be mended, when they have done some childish misdeed only to be smiled at ; and wicked and cruel beyond words is that mortal who would instil into any heart, young or old, the natural but false belief that any error or sin is irremediable by repentance. Let us cast out that false belief that has done so much mischief, and be done with it for evermore. The Gospel knows it not; the Gospel knows no sin of which it does not call men to repent. Christ never looked upon the sinner to whom he needed to say, "You must just go on in your sin, however sorry you are for it; there is no repentance for you: my blood cannot take away your sin!" Dear friends, it is blasphemous to admit that wretched illusion! People have talked rubbish about this or that ecclesiastical arrangement being what they called "Christ-dishonouring;" but in very deed it is Christ-dishonouring to doubt His willingness or power to save. He came "to save sinners;""He is able to save to the uttermost" all who will be saved. If sincere, repentance is never too late it is never, on this side the grave, too late to mend. You know that no worthy man even would cast in the offender's face a misdeed frankly acknowledged, heartily apologised for, and all possible amends made for it. Far less, infinitely less, would the all-merciful Saviour take pleasure in pinning any poor mortal to his repented sin, and in seeing him drink to the dregs the cup of humiliation. What would be contemptible, what would be devilish, in man, will never, never be found in God. And the intuitive sense in us, that if the offender confess his wrong-doing and testify deep sorrow for it, and do his very best to make up for it, you cannot say more, you cannot keep raking it up against him; that sense, which is in every good man, is the reflection of a fact in the Divine nature. It is in you because it was first in your Maker. David, king and psalmist, knew that long ago, and said, "The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy: He will not always chide, neither will He keep His anger for ever. He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us." We thank God for that: but the light is far clearer and fuller now. "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." "God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved." And if any one but Christ Himself had told the story of the Prodigal Son, we sinful creatures should have thought it far too good to be true! My subject has been the grand Gospel gift and privilege of Repentance: the blessed truth that poor Human Nature cannot be so bad but that it may yet be lifted up towards God: that the worst of us, who are all evil enough, may begin anew to-day, and cast off all our connection with the blotted past: "forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before." It is a pleasant and hopeful subject; not a sad one. It is a good and hopeful message; not a humbling one. The humiliation, deep and dark, is here already, in the fact that we are poor sinners: the invitation is to get out of it. A good man of a past generation said that he would wish to preach Repentance every Sunday. It was said of a great preacher, dead now for five-and-forty years, that however his sermons began, they all ended with Repentance and Faith. They could not possibly have ended better. It seems as if Christ's preaching, when He began to preach, were begun, continued, and ended, with Repentance: Duty, Privilege, and Grand Encouragement. For all needed it then all need it yet: need it anew each day. The Worship of the Christian Church, where worthily rendered, has begun, every time it was rendered, with an act of Repentance has begun with the penitent confession of sin, and the prayer for pardoning mercy and sanctifying grace. And there is more cheer now than when Christ began to preach. Then, the encouragement was, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand." But now, The kingdom of heaven is here. "We will arise and go to our Father, and will say unto Him, Father, we have sinned against heaven and before Thee, and are no more worthy to be called Thy sons." But as we go, we know the gracious welcome that waits us. And we know, too, that the blest ones above do not grudge us our repentance: they do not wish to keep all their purity and peace to themselves and to keep us tied to our evil and miserable choice. Their happiness grows greater, as it is shared. "There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth!' : For the black has been made white: the wretched has been made happy: the vile has been made beautiful: the WRONG has been made RIGHT. And if we know anything certainly, we know that that is the thing which must please God. HOLY COMMUNION. "As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father; so he that eateth me, even he shall live by WE sing the everlasting truth Of words that Jesus said: There is a holy human life Upon the earth we tread. It was poured out our faith to win, E'en here among the dead. O Lord of all the angel host We know Thee in the midst of us Lift up to Thee the heaven-born hymn me."-ST. JOHN vi. 57. "Amen, Allelujah!" Hail, Bread of God that men may take !— His Spirit teaches how. The dying soul that eateth Thee Shall even live as Thou. "Come, eat," the faithful Witness saith To sinners breathing mortal breath, And live for ever after death; Yea, live for ever now." This being, with its ransomed powers, O let Thy body feed, And make the very life it lives An endless life indeed. With faith in Thy anointing shod, It chooses paths which Thou hast trod, And offers to the living God Its whole immortal need. |