“Simul Justus et Peccator.” The Bible gives us many evidences to examine our life; and of all the evidences there has always been one that jumped off the pages of divine writ and spoke directly to my heart. The sense of my own sin. What I was saved from. How great is the depth of the depravity of my sinful flesh. The prince of preachers, Charles Spurgeon sums it up so well with this comment:
“Evangelical repentance is repentance of sin as sin: not of this sin nor of that, but of the whole mass. We repent of the sin of our nature as well as the sin of our practice. We bemoan sin within us and without us. We repent of sin itself as being an insult to God. Anything short of this is a mere surface repentance, and not a repentance which reaches to the bottom of the mischief. Repentance of the evil act, and not of the evil heart, is like men pumping water out of a leaky vessel, but forgetting to stop the leak.
Some would dam up the stream, but leave the fountain still flowing; they would remove the eruption from the skin, but leave the disease in the flesh.”
The Christian lives in a dichotomy of sorts...while he is still a sinner, he is at the same time a saint. We struggle with our fallen nature daily. We live in a battle. We die daily to our sin. We die daily to our own self wills.
Our deep awareness of our sin drives us to the cross. We don't wallow in our sin, just the opposite, we run as fast as we can to the endless sea of God's redemptive love and grace.
One of my favorite authors puts it like this:
“For every look at self, take ten looks at Christ” Robert Murray M'Cheyne.
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