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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadQuiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Personal Problems: 07. The Sinless Man.
TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Personal Problems (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 07. The Sinless Man.
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The Sinless Man.
But here steps one upon the scene of life from another sphere—Jesus. By His own word, and by the frank confession of those who know Him most intimately, He is free from sin. The Jew who so foully betrayed, and the Roman who so unfairly gave sentence of death, agreed fully in this. Being without sin, He is not under action of this law. He steps on the scene. And in effect He says, "It grieves me to the quick that this great race of splendid men is in such bad shape." But mark you keenly, and let the truth here be said with the greatest reverence, not even Jesus the Son of God can change the working of this law of life. He came not to break but to fulfill.
What can He do? This is what He did do. He went down, of His own voluntary accord, went down to where men's sin had driven man. He tasted death. Tasted? aye, drained its dregs to a bitterness not known by any other before or since. He went down into the throat of death, into the mouth of hell, and seizing death by the throat throttled it, and then rose by the moral gravity of His own being up to a new life, a deathless life for all men. And now Jesus offers that new deathless life as a free gift to all who will accept it, and accept with it the conditions of life.
But will you kindly note as keenly as you ever noted anything that there are three qualifying facts that belong in here. There has been a sort of a weak sentimentalism, common in some quarters, about salvation through Jesus, as though by some sort of legerdemain all the evil results of sin were at once wiped out, and all the benefits of the new life come fully in by means of an assent to Jesus' offer of salvation. It does seem sometimes as though there were those who say, "We can do about as we please, indulge in sin as suits us now, and then after a while,—well, there's Jesus, He's loving; God is love, He is too loving ever to let anyone be lost. We'll just line up that way and pull through all right." I do not mean that I have ever heard anybody put it so bluntly, and baldly, and irreverently as that into words. But I have surely heard a great many say it loudly with their lives. Better, maybe, if they had put the language of their lives into the language of the lips, that its very baldness might shock them into thinking of the truth.
The first qualifying fact to note is this: accepting Jesus does not nullify nor neutralize the results in this life of past sins. That man who lost his arm through a drunken debauch will remain so, without the arm, crippled in body and in activity to the end of the years. Those years absorbed in selfish pleasure-seeking are lost forever, and the mental strength that was not held and matured by earnest effort can never again be gotten. The grave of the past never gives up its dead, only their spectres to trouble and haunt.
The broken home circle can never be restored. A new one may be made, but never the old. That saintly mother, grief-stricken in heart through somebody's sin, broken in strength and shattered in her years—that is not changed. There may be some softening of after-years, but the old deep scars upon heart and body and life are never removed. Time softens greatly where conditions are changed, but under all remains the old wound, and it pains sharply when a bit of damp weather comes. The man who through dissipation has depleted his vitality never will be, never can be, either in body, or in his mental powers, or in his spiritual perception and grasp, what he was meant to be, and would have been. The bird with the broken pinion never does soar as high again. Its broken wing has forever broken the strength and swiftness of his flight.
The man may be fully forgiven, and blessedly changed, and wondrously used, but never can he be the man God meant, nor be used in service as he could have been had God had the use of his full, unstunted, unwasted powers. Selfishness is a spirit-paralysis. The powers never fully recover. The daily grubbing for gold, with no high spirit-motive gripping and sweetening, forges a finely woven network about all of the powers. And however the life may afterwards be surrendered to Jesus the hampering movement is never wholly gone. It has been rutted deep into the cellular tissue of the body.
The heart may become wholly, blessedly pure, the motives and impulses all sweetly and fragrantly cleansed, but the mark of the past is dented deep in the body, the energies, the activities, the outlook. This is the simple, sad, tragic truth. It should all be said in softest tone of lowered voice, for we are talking of our brothers; and said too with a hush of shame over the spirit, for we are talking about ourselves here together. But it should be said, very distinctly, with the words pronounced clear and sharp, that the process may be stopped instantly.