| The Secrets of a Beautiful Life |
Chapter 20 |
Page 5 |
If He ever did grow weary of our persistent sinning, and were to let us have our own way, what would be the result? Suppose that Jesus had let Peter go that night, after his denial, giving him no further thought, what would have become of the poor fisherman? He would have been swept away on the dark bosom of sin’s floods, and would never have seen his Lord’s face again. We do not know the perils of our own weakness, nor our capacity for sinning.
When the disciples were told by their Lord that one of them should betray Him, they did not begin to suspect one another. Each one seemed to be seized with a terrible dread lest it might be himself that would do this dreadful thing. Who has not shuddered when hearing of the fall of some other person into sad, dishonouring sin, feeling that it might have been himself? Terrible are the possibilities of sin in human hearts. ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
We talk lightly of sin and sin’s dangers. We speak ofttimes sternly and bitterly of those who are overcome in temptation and swept down in its relentless tides. Ofttimes we have little charity for those who fall. It is because we do not know sin’s awful power. There is evil enough lurking in the heart of the holiest of us, if only it were unleashed, to destroy our souls for ever. Nothing but the mighty power of the grace of God keeps those who are preserved blameless through life. We cannot fathom what we might have been, abandoned to ourselves to drift in the wild floods, had it not been for the hand of Christ, who saves us from our fatal self.
It is told of a saintly man that by his own request the only epitaph on his grave was the word “kept.” We are all “kept,” we who do not fall away into the darkness of eternal death — we are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation. Some people speak of the beginning of their Christian life, when they decide to follow Christ, as if that were all, as if the struggle were all over when the choice is made. We hear it said that certain persons are saved, as if the whole of being saved is accomplished in the one act of deciding to be a Christian. Really, however, the struggle only begins with the conversion, ending only when the life reaches glory.
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