THE DANGER OF UNCONFESSED SIN – Charles Spurgeon
THE DANGER OF UNCONFESSED SIN
“When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.” Psalm 32:3.
It is well known that, in ordinary cases, grief kept within the bosom grows more and more intense. It is a great relief to shed tears—it gives a vent to the heart. We sometimes pity those who weep, but there is a grief too deep for tears, which is far more worthy of compassion—we ought most to pity those who cannot weep. A dry sorrow is a terrible one, but clear shining often follows the rain of tears. Tears are hopeful things. They are the dewdrops of the morning, foretelling the coming day. So it is also a great consolation to tell your story to a friend. I do not know whether it would not be a comfort, even, to speak it to a little child, even if the child could not understand you. There is something in telling your sorrow and letting it out. Otherwise, it is like a mountain lake which has no outlet, into which the rains descend and the torrents rush, and, at last, the banks are broken, and a flood is caused. It is well for you to let your soul flow forth in words regarding your common griefs! A festering wound is dangerous. Many have lost their reason because they had good reason to tell their sorrows, but not reason enough to do so. Much talk has in it much of sin, but a heart full of agony must speak or burst. Therefore, let it talk on and even repeat itself, for in so doing, it will spend itself—
“Sorrow weeps! And spends its bitterness in tears.
My child of sorrow,
Weep out the fullness of
Your passionate grief,
And drown in tears
The bitterness of lonely years.”
We shall now, however, think of spiritual sorrows, and to these, the same rule applies. “When I kept silence,” and did not pour out my sorrow when I ought to have confessed it, “my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.” Is it not a great mercy for us that we have the Book of Psalms and the life of such a man as David? Biographies of most people, nowadays, are like the portraits of a past generation when the art of flattery in oils was at its height. There is no greater cheat than a modern biography! It is not the man, at all, but what he might have been if he had not been something else! They give you a lock of his hair, or his wig, or his old coat, but seldom the man. They make huge volumes out of a heap of his letters, which ought to have been burned. And they copy little scraps of pictures which he used to draw for friends—and neither the letters nor the sketches ought ever to have been published. Like burglars, they break into a man’s chamber and steal his hidden things. They hold up to the public eye what was meant for privacy only and expose the secrets of the man’s heart and hearth. Things which the man would never have drawn or written if he had thought that they would meet the public eye are dragged forth and brought out as precious things, and so they are, but precious nonsense! We have no biographers nowadays. When Boswell died, the greatest of all biographers died, and he was not far removed from a fool. If a man lives a noble life, he may well shrink from dying because he knows what will become of him nowadays, when writers of his memoirs unearth him and tear him to pieces! David’s Psalms are his best memorial. There you have not the man’s exterior, but his inward soul. They do not reveal the outward manifestations of the man, but you see the man’s heart—the inner David, the David that groaned and the David that wept! You see the David that sighed and the David that sinned—the David that yearned after God, and the David that was eaten up with the zeal of God’s house—the man who was born in sin and groaned over sin and was yet the man after God’s own heart. What a wonderful autobiography of a wonderful life that Book of Psalms is!
David was a many-sided man, and his life was like the life of our Lord in this respect—that it seemed to comprehend the lives of all other men within itself. There is no man, I suppose, who has known the Lord in any age since David wrote but has seen himself in David’s Psalms as in a mirror and has said to himself, “This man knows all about me. He has been into every room of my soul—into its lowest cellar and into its loftiest tower. He has been with me in the dens of my inbred sin and in the palaces of my fellowship with Christ, from which I have looked upon the Glory of God.” Here is a man who “seems to be, not one, but all mankind’s epitome.” Though we mourn over David’s sin, yet we thank God that it was permitted, for if he had not so fallen, he would not have been able to help us when we are conscious of transgression. He could not have so minutely described our griefs if he had not felt the same. David lived, in this respect, for others as well as for himself.
I am thankful that David was permitted to try the experiment of silence after his great sin, for he will now tell us what came of it—“When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.” We shall apply this first, as it should be, to the erring child of God convicted of his sin. Secondly, we shall remind you that the same rule holds good with the awakened sinner in whom the Spirit of God has begun to work a sense of guilt.
I. THE CHILD OF GOD
Children of God sin! Some of them have claimed to be nearly free from it, but—I will say no more—but I think they sinned when they talked in such a lofty strain. God’s children sin, for they are still in the body. If they are in a right state of heart, they will mourn over this, and it will be the burden of their lives. Oh, that they could live without sin! It is this that they sigh after, and they can never be fully content until they obtain it. They do not excuse themselves by saying, “I cannot be perfect,” but they feel that their inability is their sin. They regard every transgression and tendency to sin as a grievous fault and they mourn over it from day to day. They would be holy as Christ is holy. To will is present with them, but how to perform that which they would, they find not.
Now, when the child of God sins, the proper thing for him to do is at once to go and tell his heavenly Father. As soon as ever we are conscious of sin, the right thing is not to begin to reason with the sin or to wait until we have brought ourselves into a proper state of heart about it, but to go at once and confess the transgression unto the Lord, then and there. Sin will not come to any very great head in a man’s heart who does this continually. God will never have great chastisements in store for those who are quick confessors of sin.
You know how it is with your child. There has been something broken, perhaps, by carelessness. There has been some violation of a rule of the house. But if he comes and catches you by the sleeve and says, “Father,” or, “Mother, I am very sorry that I have been doing wrong”—why, you know, while you are sorry that he should transgress, you are glad to think that his heart is so right that without being questioned, he comes of his own accord and tells you so frankly that he was wrong. Whatever grief you may feel about his fault, you feel a greater joy in the frankness of his confession and the tenderness of his conscience! And you have forgiven him, I am sure, before he has gotten halfway through his open-hearted acknowledgment.
Our heavenly Father is a much more tender Father than any of us and, therefore, if we, being evil, know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more shall our heavenly Father forgive us our trespasses? “Like as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities them that fear Him,” and, therefore, He has compassion upon the children of men when they acknowledge their offenses. We are not more ready to forgive our children than our heavenly Father is ready to forgive us! We may be quite sure of that.
And so, if it is our habit—and I trust it is—never to suffer guilt to lie upon our consciences, but to go as soon as we are sensible of a fault and admit it before the Lord, asking pardon from Him for Jesus‘ sake, there will be no great amount of damage done to ourselves, and the Lord’s anger will not wax hot against us. We may endure sharp afflictions because they are often sent for another purpose, but we shall not have visitations of paternal wrath.
Did not David pray, “O Lord, rebuke me not in Your wrath, neither chasten me in Your hot displeasure”?
Now, it sometimes happens that God’s children, when they have done wrong—especially if they have done very, very wrong—do not go and confess it. When there is the most necessity for confession, there is often the greatest tardiness in making it. It was so in David’s case. Alas, how foully had he fallen! It is never to any purpose to try and excuse David’s sin. There are certain extenuating circumstances, but he never mentioned them and, therefore, we need not. Indeed, if David were here, tonight, and we were to begin excusing his sin, he would rise with tears in his eyes and say, “For God’s sake, do not attempt it! Let it stand in all its deformity, that the power of God’s mercy may be the more clearly seen in washing me and making me whiter than snow.”
But David’s heart, sometimes, was very evil. It was sound towards God as a rule. There was deep love to God always there, but it had become overlaid and crusted with what was always David’s great besetment—the strong passions of his impulsive nature. He had followed, in some measure, the ill example of neighboring kings in taking a number of wives to himself and this had fed, rather than checked, his natural tendencies. And at last, in an evil hour, he fell into a crime of deepest dye. He knew that he was doing wrong. He sinned against light and knowledge but, alas, he did not hasten to his God and confess the grievous crime.
I think I can see why he could not have gone straight away from the sin to confession, for the sin prevented the confession—the sin blinded the eyes, stultified the conscience and stupefied the entire spiritual nature of David. Hence, he did not confess at once, but surely he felt as if he must admit the fault when the time came for prayer.
I have no doubt that David prayed after a sort, but he must have presented very formal and mutilated prayers so long as he refused to acknowledge his transgression. When the time came for David to finger his harp, perhaps he did so and went through a song or a Psalm. But he could never reach the essence of true praise by pouring out his heart before God while the foul sin was hidden in his bosom. How could he? His Psalms and his prayers were silence before God, whatever sound he made—for his heart did not speak and God would not hear him.
However sweet the tone or the tune, his songs were nothing to the Most High, for his heart was silent. And why was he silent when he knew that he was wrong? Why did he not go to God at once? Well, it was partly because he was stupefied by his sin. He was fascinated, captivated, and held in bondage by it. Oh, Brothers and Sisters, beware of the serpent’s eye of sin! It is dangerous to even look at sin, for looking leads to longing. A look at sin often leads to a lusting after sin, and that soon ripens into the actual indulgence.
No man even thinks of sin without damage! I saw a magnificent photograph in Rome, one of the finest I had ever seen, and right across the middle there was the specter mark of a cart and two oxen repeated many times. The artist had tried to get it out, but the trace remained. While his plate was exposed to take the view, the cart and the oxen had gone across the scene, and they were indelible! Often in the photograph of a fine building, you will see the shade of a man who passed by, who is represented by a sort of ghostly figure. Upon our soul, every sinful thought leaves a mark and a stain that calls for us to weep it out—no, it needs Christ’s blood to wash it away! We begin with thinking of sin and then we somewhat desire the sin. Next, we enter into communion with the sin, and then we get into the sin—and the sin gets into us, and we lie as oak in it.
So David did. He did not feel it at first, but there he was, plunged into the evil deeps. In such a state, sin does not appear burdensome. A man with a pail of water on his head feels it to be heavy, but if he dives, he does not feel the weight of the water above him because he is actually in it and surrounded by it. When a man plunges into sin, he does not feel the weight of the sin as he does when he is out of that dreadful element—but then, by God’s Grace, he is burdened by it. So David did not feel His guilt at first. He knew that he had done wrong, but he did not perceive the exceeding heinousness of his evil deed and, therefore, he did not confess it.
THE POWER OF CONFESSION AND THE DANGER OF REFUSAL
When you tell us of the greatness of your sin and think that we shall surely despise you and never speak to you again, tears of joy are in our eyes to think that you feel as we did! We are glad to discover your tender and contrite spirit—we only wish that thousands felt as you do! Do you not remember what George Whitefield said when his brother at the dinner table said that he was a lost soul? Mr. Whitefield said, “Thank God,” and his brother wondered why. “Why?” said Whitefield, “Jesus came into the world to seek and to save that which was lost.” The more black you think yourself to be, the brighter is our hope for you! When you poor tremblers give yourselves an awful character, we know it is correct and we do not wish to contradict you, but we are glad to hear you say it and to know that you feel it, because now we see in you that which will prepare you to value a precious Christ! A man who says, “I am well clothed,” is not likely to accept Christ’s righteousness. But when he cries, “How naked I am, how useless are these fig leaves,” He is the man for Christ’s robes! When you meet a man who says, “I am full. I feast on my own righteousness,” what is the good of inviting him to the Gospel banquet? You must invite him, for you are commanded to do so, but he will refuse to come. But when you meet another who is hungry, faint, and ready to die—ah, there is the man for your money! Bid him come where the oxen and the fatlings are killed and all things are ready! His mouth is watering while you speak to him, and he will come with you and sit down at the banquet of the King!
We are glad, poor Sinner, to hear your tale and, therefore, the next time you meet with a Christian, I would advise you to tell him a little of it. But still, that is not what you most need. You need to lay bare your deep sorrow before your God and, oh, if you do it, there stands the promise, “He that confesses and forsakes his sins shall find mercy.” Confession before God was never sincerely offered but absolution from the Most High was sure to follow! Remember, even though you do not go and tell the Lord, He knows already, and, therefore, concealment is in vain! He needs not your confession for His information, but for your benefit. And if you do not confess to Him, you certainly will never obtain pardon, for there is not between the covers of the holy Bible a single intimation that God will ever pardon unconfessed sin! If you cover and cloak it—and feel no repentance about it and do not bring it to Christ—you cannot expect to receive mercy from the offended Lord.
THE DANGER OF REFUSING CONFESSION
Now, it happens with some, that, though they are conscious of sin, they do not confess it. And what is the result? Why, it increases their misery! It is impossible that you should find peace while sin continues to gather in your soul. It is a festering wound—the surgeon’s knife must be let in; there cannot be rest until it is so. I have known a sinner, before confession of sin, feel as if he could lay violent hands upon himself, so intense was his anguish. Well do I remember repeating to myself the words of the Prophet, “My soul chooses strangling rather than life,” for of all the tortures in this world, an awakened conscience, pressed down with a sense of guilt, is the worst! The Spanish Inquisition invented cruel racks and thumbscrews, but there is no inquisitor like a man’s own conscience, for it can put the screw upon the soul to the uttermost degree. Let a man’s conscience loose upon him and at once the worm commences to gnaw and the fire begins to burn. They used, in olden times, to ascribe the torment of Hell to the devil—but we do not need any devil for that—conscience can measure out an infinite misery. Let but remorse lay its thongs of wire upon a man and it will scar him and gash him to the very soul!
So long as a man continues silent before God and does not admit his sin—if the Lord has really begun to deal with him—he will have to suffer more and more from the pangs of conscience. But then, the increase of sorrow accompanied by this silence is a very dangerous piece of business. I spoke cheerfully just now of those of you who are under a sense of sin, but it was only in the hope that you would go to God, through Jesus Christ, and confess your sin. But if you refuse to do so, your position is one of very great danger. “What danger?” you ask. Why, if sin remains festering within you and your sorrow increases, you will come to despair altogether—and that is an awful prospect indeed. You remember John Bunyan’s picture of the man in the iron cage? There is not, in the Pilgrim’s Progress, an incident more terrible!
Now, you are forging the bars of a cage for yourself as long as you refuse to acknowledge your guilt before God. Those who are in the iron cage of despair will tell you that they delayed to acknowledge sin, that they refused to accept Christ, that they suppressed their feelings and so brought themselves into bondage. They were pleased to hear ministers preach about conviction of sin and speak of deep sorrow and the like—but they did not care to be told that it was their duty, then and there, to believe in Jesus! They could not endure that doctrine! They liked to be comforted in the notion that there was something good in feeling a sense of sin, apart from believing—whereas, if a soul will not believe in Christ, its sense of sin may be an evil instead of a benefit to it! Nothing can be good that is unsalted with faith. “With all your sacrifices you shall offer salt.” And if the salt of faith is absent, the sacrifice is unacceptable.
We have known some who, through getting into despair, have afterwards fallen into utter hardness of heart. They used to be malleable. They used to feel the strokes of the Divine hammer. Now they feel nothing and are as hard as the blacksmith’s anvil. They have got into such a condition that they wickedly say, if God will save them they will be saved, but they have nothing to do with it. They once were tender—now they are presumptuous. They say, “There is no hope,” and, therefore, on the theory of the old proverb that they may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, in all probability they will go on to commit worse sins than ever. Some of the biggest sinners that have ever disgraced the name of humanity have been persons who were once tender of conscience and were on the point of conversion—but they did violence to conviction, came to despair of ever entering Heaven—and in the end determined that as they must go to Hell, they would go there with a high hand and an outstretched arm!
THE PERIL OF DESPAIR AND ATHEISM
He who has seen Heaven’s gate open before him, but has not stepped in, is the man who, above all others, is likely to find the hottest place in Hell! You may think it strange for me to say so, but I know it is so, for such persons go by the way of despair into hardness of heart and then into the grossest transgression. Yes, and this is the back door to atheism, for when a man feels that God and he can never be at peace—when he has made up his mind that he never will confess his sin—what is the first thing that he does to comfort himself? He says—“There is no God.” And what does the declaration, “There is no God,” mean? It means this—that the man feels that he would be much more happy if there were no God! That is what it means and nothing more. It is the man’s wish, rather than his creed, and he wishes it because he despairs and his heart has grown hard.
Oh, when God makes your heart soft as wax, mind who puts the seal upon it! If the Spirit of the living God sets not the seal of deep repentance and holy faith upon the softened soul, there is another that will put the seal of despair and perhaps of atheism and of defiant sin upon it! And then woe was the day to you that you ever were born! Refusal to confess is a perilous thing for your soul!
THE URGENCY OF CONFESSION
I am sure that when a man begins to be awakened to a sense of sin, if he tarries long in that condition, he is being entangled, moment by moment, in the Satanic web. The devil cares little about careless sinners. “Let them alone,” he says, “they will come to me by-and-by!” And as for very religious people who possess no true godliness, the devil does not bother them, either. He says, “No, let the hypocrites be in peace. They are going my way as nicely as possible. Why should I awaken them by causing them mistrust as to their state?” But the moment that souls are startled into a sense of sin, the devil says to himself, “I shall lose them,” and so he plies all his arts and uses all his craft, if by any means he may prevent their escape. Man, now is your time to flee away to the City of Refuge without tarrying even for an hour, for even now all the devils in Hell are after you!
They did not trouble about you before, but they are after you now with sevenfold energy! Close in with Christ, then, and at once escape them all! Oh, may the Spirit of God enable you to find eternal mercy through the confession of your sin to God and looking to Christ for mercy—the mercy which He is so willing to give now!
THE ONLY PATH TO COMFORT AND SALVATION
This is the last point. There is no hope, then, of any comfort to a bruised heart except by its confessing its guilt. I would earnestly urge upon everyone conscious of sin to go with troubled heart and heaving bosom and confess his transgression to the Lord at once. I would do it in detail if I were you. I find it sometimes profitable to myself to read the Ten Commandments and to think over my sins against each one of them. What a list it is—and how it humbles you in the dust to read it over! When you come to that Commandment—“You shall not commit adultery,” “Ah,” you say, “I have never been guilty there.” But when you are told by the Savior that a lustful glance breaks that command, how it alters all! Then you perceive that fleshly desires and imaginations are all sins and you humble yourself in the dust. You read, also, “You shall not kill.”—“Well,” you say, “I never killed anyone.” But you change your tune when you hear that, “He that is angry with his brother without a cause is a murderer.” When you see the spirituality of the Law and the way in which you have broken all the Commandments 10,000 times over, be sure to confess it all right sorrowfully!
I find it good to look all round, sometimes, and think, “I am a father. There are my sins against my children. Have I trained them up for God as I should? I am a husband. There are sins in that relationship. I am an employer. There are sins in that position. How have I acted towards my servants? I am a pastor. How many sins occur in that relationship?” Why, you will not look around you, if God opens your eyes, without being helped to see what you ought to confess!
Take the very limbs of your body and they will accuse you—sins of the brain in evil thoughts! Sins of the eyes in idle glances! Sins of this little naughty member, the tongue, which does more mischief than all the rest! There is no member without its own special sins. There are sins of the ear—how often have we heard the Gospel, but heard it in vain? On the other hand, have we not too often lent a willing ear to unholy words and to wicked stories against our neighbors? I need not read over the calendar of our offenses from this pulpit—go and write it out in your closet—and pour out a flood of tears over it. If you are willing to confess, everything will help you to confession, and there is good reason for doing it at once. May the Holy Spirit work with His most tender influences to melt your heart into contrition!
Remember, while you are confessing, that each one of your sins has a world of evil in it. There is a mine of sin in every little sin. You have taken up a spider’s nest sometimes—one of those little money-spinner’s nests—and you have opened it. What thousands of spiders you find hanging down and hastening away in many directions! What a myriad of them! So in every sin there is a host of sins. There is a conglomeration of many kinds of evil in every transgression, therefore be humbled on account of each one. Confess your iniquities before God and accept the consequences as being your righteous due. There stands the block and there is the place for your neck—put it down, and say, “Lord, I submit to my sentence and if You bid the headsman strike, I cannot complain.”
Go before God as the citizens of Calais came before the English king, with ropes about their necks! Submit yourselves to the chastisement due to your offense and then make an appeal ad misericordiam, to the mercy of God alone, and say, “For Christ’s sake—for His blood’s sake—have mercy upon me!” There is no man, woman, or child in this Tabernacle who shall do that tonight who shall be rejected, for, “Him that comes to Me,” says Christ, “I will in nowise cast out.” And this is the right way of coming—the way of confessing your sin and acknowledging the evil of it—and turning to the great Substitute for deliverance!
Say that you deserve to be sent to Hell and cast yourself upon the mercy of God in Christ Jesus, trusting in the great Surety and Sacrifice, and you shall be accepted in and through Him! This is the way of life and he who runs therein shall find salvation! May the Lord, by His Holy Spirit, lead every one of you without exception to mourn your sin and rest in Jesus. Amen.