TEXT. — “Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Prove yourselves. Do you not know yourselves that Jesus Christ is in you? Unless indeed you are disqualified.” — (II CORINTHIANS 13: 5)
Using
this text, I plan to pursue the following:
I.
Show what this passage requires.
II.
Why this requirement is needed.
III.
That examining and proving ourselves makes sense.
IV.
Give some directions as to how we should examine and prove ourselves.
I.
I will show what the passage, “Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the
faith. Prove yourselves”, requires.
This
passage requires that we should understand our own hearts, that we should take
the proper steps to prove our real characters as they appear in the sight of
God. It does not refer to a test or
proof of our strength or knowledge, but our moral character. We should thoroughly test our character, so
we can understand it as it is. It
implies that we should know how God sees us, and what He thinks of us, whether
He considers us saints or sinners. This
is nothing less than a positive command, that we should discover our own true
character, and settle the question for ourselves whether we are saints or sinners,
heirs of heaven or heirs of hell.
II.
Why is this requirement necessary?
1.
It is indispensable to our own peace of mind, that we should see ourselves
exactly as God sees us.
The
individual, who does not know his real character, cannot have true peace of
mind. He may have apathy to one degree
or another, but apathy is very different from peace. And very few professing Christians, or people who continue to
hear the gospel for any length of time, can have the kind of apathy that will
suppress all uneasy feelings about their uncertainty concerning their true
character and destiny. I am not
speaking about hypocrites who have seared their consciences, or scoffers who
may have given up on God. But others
must have this question settled in order to enjoy peace of mind.
2.
This requirement is essential for Christian Honesty.
A
person who is not truly settled in his or her mind as to his own character is
hardly honest in religion. If he professes
to be a Christian when he does not honestly believe that he is a saint, he is
not honest with himself. He is half a
hypocrite in his heart. So when he
prays, he is always in doubt whether his prayers are acceptable, like the
prayers that come from a child of God.
3.
A true knowledge of one's own character is indispensable to one’s usefulness.
If
a person is always questioning in his mind whether or not he is a Christian; if
he is always anxiously looking at his own spiritual situation and doubts where
he stands, it will be a great hindrance to his usefulness. If he isn’t sure whether he is a Christian
when he speaks to sinners, he cannot exhort them with the confidence and
simplicity that he could if he felt his own feet on solid rock. It is a popular idea with some people that
it is best for saints to be always in the dark, in order to keep them humble. As if it is going to make a child of God
proud to know that he is a child of God.
In fact, one of the most important considerations in the universe to
keep someone from dishonoring God is to know that he is a child of God. When a person is in an anxious state of
mind, he can’t have very much faith, and his usefulness can’t be extensive
until this question is settled.
III.
Why this requirement is practical.
It
is a favorite idea with some people that, in this world, no one can ever truly
settle the question of whether or not one is truly saved. It is amazing how many people alive today
who seem to make a virtue out of their great many doubts. These people always doubt whether they are
Christians. For hundreds of years, many
have felt that something is wrong if a professing Christian is not filled with
doubts. It is almost considered as a
sign that one is a Christian if he knows nothing about the true condition of
his own heart. One of the universal
questions put to candidates for admission into the church has been, “Do you
have any doubts about your salvation?”
And if the candidate answers, “O, yes, I have a lot of doubts,” they are
pleased and take his response as evidence that he is spiritual, has a deep
acquaintance with his own heart, and has a great deal of humility. But if he has no doubts, they take it as
evidence that he knows little about his own heart, and is most probably a hypocrite. Against all this, I maintain that the duty
required in today’s passage is practical, and Christians can put themselves
into such a position that they can know themselves, and they can have a satisfactory
assurance of their real character.
1.
This is clear from the command in this passage, “Examine yourselves as to
whether you are in the faith. Prove
yourselves”. Can anyone believe that
God requires us to examine ourselves, prove ourselves, and see what is our true
character, if He knows that it is impossible for us to ever learn what our true
character is?
2.
We have the best possible medium of proof to test ourselves and prove our character,
and that is our conscience.
Our
conscience gives us the highest possible certainty to the facts we need to know
to determine what our true characters are.
Therefore the great question, “where do we stand before God”, is settled. We should have the same kind of evidence of
our moral state before God as we have of our existence. In fact, we can’t help having that
evidence. Our conscience continually
testifies to the condition of our hearts, and all we have to do is pay
attention to what our conscience is telling us, and we can settle the question
as certainly as we can settle the question of our own existence.
3.
God gives us so many opportunities to act out what is in our hearts, that
nothing but negligence can prevent us from coming to a decision on this matter.
If
you were locked up in a dungeon, where you had no opportunities to act, no
chances of being influenced by outside circumstances, and no way to develop the
state of your hearts, you wouldn’t be so much to blame for not knowing
yourselves. But God has purposely
placed us in so many circumstances during our lifetime, to prove us, so that we
may know what is in our hearts, and whether we will keep His commandments or
not. The things around us must produce
an impression on our minds, and lead us to feel and act in some way. And this gives us opportunities to know
ourselves, when we see how we feel and how we act in so many different circumstances.
4.
We are further qualified to trust our own true characters when we have a
perfect rule to test them by.
The
law of God is a true standard to test our characters. We know exactly what the law is, and we therefore have an infallible
and an unchanging rule that we can use to judge ourselves. We can bring all our feelings and actions to
this rule, and compare them with this standard, and know exactly what our true character is in the sight of God,
for God himself tries us by the same standard.
5.
Our circumstances are such that nothing but dishonesty can possibly lead us to
self-deception.
The
self-deceived individual is not only careless and negligent, but also decidedly
dishonest, or he would not deceive himself.
He must be highly prejudiced by pride and blinded by self-will, or he
would know that he is not what he claims to be. There are so many various circumstances that cause him to stop
and think, and reveals his heart, that his blindness and deception must be
willful. If he never had any
opportunities to act, or if there were no circumstances that revealed his
feelings, he might be honestly ignorant.
A person, who had never seen a beggar, might not know his true feelings
towards beggars. But place him where he
meets beggars everyday, and he must be willfully blind or dishonest if he does
not know how he truly feels towards beggars.
IV.
I will mention a few things as to how we perform this duty.
First. Negatively.
I.
We cannot test our hearts by waiting for evidence to come to us.
Many
people seem to wait in a passive attitude for the evidence to come to them, to
decide whether they are Christians or not.
They appear to be waiting for certain feelings to come to them. Perhaps they pray about it; perhaps they
pray very earnestly, and then wait for the feelings to come that will give them
evidence that they are right with God.
Often they will not do anything religious until they get this evidence,
and they sit and wait, and wait, in vain expecting that the Spirit of God will
come some time or another, and lift them out of the passive and silent pit that
they have placed themselves into. They
can wait until doomsday and they will never receive the Spirit of God this way.
2. This duty is not accomplished by any direct
attempt to force feelings into existence in order to produce some evidence.
The
human mind is so constituted, that it never will feel by simply trying to
feel. You may try as hard as you please
to feel in a particular way. Your
efforts to put forth feelings are totally un-philosophical and absurd, because
at this point, there is nothing before your mind to produce any emotions or feelings. Feelings are always awakened in your mind
when your mind is fixed on some object that is designed to arouse feelings. For example, when your mind is fixed, not on
a joyful object, but on direct attempts to manufacture this feeling of joy, you
will not manufacture any feeling. It is
impossible. Your attention must focus
on that joyful object and then you will stir up feelings of joy, otherwise
there will be no feeling of joy at all.
You might as well shut your eyes and try to see, or go into a dark room
to look around. In a dark room, there
is no object to stimulate your sense of sight, and you can exert yourself, strain
your eyes to see, but you will see nothing.
When your mind's attention is focused on looking inward, and trying to
examine the nature of your present emotion, that emotion at once ceases to
exist, because your attention is no longer fixed on the object that causes the
emotion. I hold my hand before this
lamp, it casts a shadow; but if I take the lamp away, there is no shadow. There must be light to produce a
shadow. It is just as certain that, if
your mind turns away from the object that stirs up an emotion, that emotion
ceases to exist. Your mind must be
fixed on the object, not on the emotion, or there will be no emotion, and
consequently no evidence.
3.
You will never get evidence by spending time in mourning over the state of your
heart.
Some
people spend their time complaining, “Oh, I don't feel, I can't feel, my heart
is so hard.” What are they doing? They are mourning and crying because they
don't feel. Perhaps they are trying to
work themselves up into feeling! This
is just as philosophical as trying to fly.
As long as they are mourning all the time, thinking about their hard
hearts, and doing nothing, they are the ridicule of the devil. Suppose a man should shut himself out from
his nicely heated home and then he goes around complaining how cold he is, even
children would laugh at him. He should
expect to freeze, if he shuts himself out from his only means of warmth. And all his mourning and feeling bad will
not help the matter.
Second. Positively.
How do we test our hearts?
If
you want to test the true state of your heart concerning any object, you must
focus your attention on that object. If
you want to test the power or accuracy of your eyesight, you must use your eyes
to focus on an object, and then you will test the power and state of your
eyes. You surround yourself with objects
to test your eyes, or you surround yourself with sounds to test your
hearing. And the more you shut out
objects that excite your other senses, and the more strongly you focus your
mind on this one, the more perfectly you test the keenness of your vision, or
the clarity of your hearing. Too many
objects may distract your mind. When we
focus on one object that is designed to stir up certain feelings, it is
impossible not to feel. Our mind is so
constituted that it cannot but feel. It
is not necessary to stop and ask, “Do I feel?”
Suppose you put your hand near a fire, do you have to stop and ask the
question, “Does my hand really feel warm”?
You know that your hand is warm.
If you pass your hand rapidly by a candle, the sensation may be so
slight that you hardly notice it, but nonetheless, it is real, and if you paid
close attention, you would know it.
Where the impression is slight, it requires you to pay close attention
to notice your own conscience. So the
passing feeling of your mind may be so slight that you hardly give it a thought
and thus it may escape your notice, but nevertheless, it is real. But hold your hand over a candle a minute,
and the feeling will force you to notice, no matter what occupies your
mind. If your mind is fixed on an
object designed to excite emotions of any kind, it is impossible not to feel
those emotions to some degree; and if the mind is intensely fixed, it is
impossible not to feel the emotions to such a degree that you become aware that
they exist. These principles will show
you how we come to prove our characters, and to know the real state of our
feelings towards any object. It is by
fixing our attention on that object until our emotions are so excited that we
become aware of what those feelings are.
I
will mention one more thing that you should remember. Be sure those things that you fix your mind on to test the state
of your heart are real.
There
is a lot of imaginary religion in the world, and those who follow their
imaginary religion think that it is real.
They have high feelings, their minds become very excited, and their
feelings correspond with their religious concepts. But the source of their deception, the object that stirs their
feelings up, is imaginary. It is not
that their feelings are false or imaginary.
What they feel is real. It is
not that their feelings do not correspond with what they are thinking
about. They correspond perfectly. But the objects they are thinking about are
false. The individual has formed
certain ideas about God, about Jesus Christ, or about salvation that is
completely different from the truth, and his feelings in view of these
imaginations are just like they would be towards real objects, if he had true
religion. This person is deceived. Here we undoubtedly have a tremendous source
of many of the false hopes and false professions that flood the world today.
V.
Let me now mention a few things on which it is your duty to examine yourselves.
1.
Sin. I’m not talking about your own
particular sins, but sin itself as an outrage committed against God.
Don’t
think that you will discover the true state of your heart by discovering that
you have a strong feeling of disapproval towards sin. This is part of the nature of every intelligent being. Everybody disapproves of sin when sin is
viewed abstractly, and without reference to his or her own selfish gratification. Even the devil has feelings of disapproval
against sin. Satan has feelings of
disapproval towards sin when viewed abstractly, just like Gabriel. Satan blames sinners, condemns their
conduct, and whenever he has no selfish reason for being pleased at what they
do, he hates them. (Rev 12:10) You will often find a strong hatred for sin
in the wicked. There is not one wicked
sinner on earth that would not condemn and abhor sin in the abstract. Our minds are so constituted that sin must
be universally and naturally repulsed by our right reason and conscience. Every power of our mind naturally revolts at
sin. A person has pleasure in those who
commit iniquity only when he has some selfish reason for wanting them to commit
it. No rational being approves of sin
as sin.
However,
there is a striking difference between the constitutional disapproval of sin as
something abstract, and that hearty hatred and opposition to sin that is based
on our love of God. Let me illustrate
this thought. It is one thing for a
child to feel that a certain act is wrong, and quite another thing to view that
act as harmful to his father. Here we
have something added to his first feeling.
He not only opposes the act as wrong, but his love for his father
produces a feeling of grief that is peculiar.
So the individual who loves God feels not only a strong disapproval of
sin as wrong, but he also has a feeling of grief mingled with indignation when
he views sin as committed against God.
If,
then, you want to know how you feel towards sin, ask yourselves how you feel
when you mingle with sinners, and watch them break God's law, when you hear
them swear profanely, or watch them break the Sabbath, or get drunk, how do you
feel? Do you feel as the Psalmist did
when he wrote, “I see the treacherous (transgressors), and am disgusted,
because they do not keep Your word”?
(Ps 119:158) He says, “rivers of
water run down from my eyes, because men do not keep Your law”. (Ps 119:136) Again, “Indignation has taken hold of me because of the wicked,
who forsake Your law”. (Ps 119:53)
2.
Test the state of your hearts towards your own sins.
Look
back on your past sins, recall your past conduct and see whether you cordially
condemn your past sins and loathe them, and feel as an affectionate child would
feel, when he remembers how he has disobeyed or dishonored a loving
parent. It is one thing to feel a strong
conviction that your former conduct was wicked. It is another thing to have this feeling accompanied with strong
emotions of grief because you have sinned against God. Most Christians look back on their former
conduct towards their parents with deep emotion, and think how their beloved
father and mother had been disobeyed and wronged. Most Christians feel, in addition to a strong disapproval of
their conduct, a deep emotion of grief that tends to manifest itself in
weeping, and perhaps gushes forth in unstoppable tears. Now this is true repentance towards a
parent. And repentance towards God is
the same thing. If it is genuine, it
will correspond in degree to the intensity of attention with which the mind is
fixed on the subject.
3.
Test your feelings towards unrepentant sinners.
Go
among sinners, talk with them concerning their souls, and warn them. See what they say and how they feel, and get
a feel for the real state of their hearts, and then you will know how you feel
towards the impenitent. Do not shut
yourself up in your closet and try to imagine an impenitent sinner. You may bring up a picture in your imagination
that will affect your sympathies, and make you weep and pray. But go and bring your heart in contact with
the living reality of a sinner, reason with him, exhort him, find out his
objections, obstinacy, and insincerity.
Pray with him if you can. You
cannot do this without stirring up emotions within you, and if you are a
Christian, it will wake up the same mingled emotions of grief, compassion, and
indignation that Christ Jesus felt, and it will leave you no room to doubt
where your heart lies on this subject.
Bring your mind in contact with sinners, fix it there, and your feelings
will reveal your heart.
4.
Prove the state of your mind towards God.
Fix
your thoughts intently on God. Please
don’t sit down and imagine a God after your own foolish hearts, but take the
Bible and learn what is the true idea of God.
Do not fancy a shape or appearance, or imagine how He looks, but fix
your mind on the Bible’s description of how He feels, what He does, and what He
says, and you cannot but feel. Here you
will detect the real state of your heart.
In fact, this will constitute the real state of your heart, which you
cannot mistake.
5.
Test your feelings toward Christ.
You
are required to know whether you love the Lord Jesus Christ or not. Go over the circumstances of His life, and
see whether they appear real to your mind.
Examine His miracles, sufferings, lovely character, death, resurrection,
ascension, and His intercession now at the right hand of the Father. Do you believe all these things? Are they real to you? What are your feelings about them? When you think of His willingness to save,
His ability to save, His atoning death, and His power, if these things are real
to you, you will have feelings. You
will be aware of these feelings and you will not mistake them.
6.
What are your feelings towards the saints?
If
you want to test your heart to see if you love the saints, don’t let your
thoughts run to the ends of the earth.
Instead, fix your mind on the saints close to you, and see whether you
love them. See whether you desire their
sanctification, whether you really long to have them grow in grace, or whether
you can carry them in your heart to the throne of grace in faith, and ask God
to bestow blessings on them.
7.
What are your feelings towards revivals?
You
want to know how you feel toward revivals, then read about them, think about
them, fix your mind on them, and you cannot but have feelings that will reveal
the state of your heart. The same is
true of the heathen, of slaves, of drunkards, of the Bible, or of any object to
seriously consider. The only way to
know the state of your heart is to fix your mind on the reality of those
things, until you feel so intensely that there is no mistaking the nature of
your feelings.
If
you are having trouble paying enough attention to any of these objects to
produce feelings, it is because of one of two reasons. Either your mind is occupied with something
else, so you can’t focus your attention on what you want to, or your thoughts
wander all over the place. Sometimes,
it happens that the mind is focused on something else, and I have known some
Christians to become very distressed because they did not feel as intensely as
they think they should on some subjects.
Take their sins for example. A
person's mind may be so occupied with anxiety, labor, and prayer for sinners,
that it requires an effort to think enough about his own soul to feel
deeply. When he prays about his own
sins, that sinner he has been witnessing to keeps popping into his mind, and he
can hardly pray for himself. Don’t
think that this is evidence against you, if the reason why you don’t feel on
one subject in religion is because your feelings are engrossed in another
subject that is equally important. But
if the reason you don’t feel deeply enough to know your true character is because
your thoughts wander all over the place.
If your mind will not focus on the Bible, and focus on any object of
religious feeling, get a strong grip on yourself, and fix your thoughts as
firmly as you can, until you can feel.
You can command your thoughts: God has put the control of your mind in
your own hands. And in this way, you can
control your own feelings by turning your attention to the object you want to
feel about. Bring yourself, then,
powerfully and resolutely, to focus on that object, don’t give up until you
fasten your mind on the subject until the deep fountains of feelings pour from
your soul, and you know what is the state of your heart, and understand your
real character in the sight of God.
REMARKS.
1.
Religious activities are indispensable to self-examination.
An
individual can never know what is the true state of his heart, unless he is
active in religious affairs. Shut up in
his closet, he never can tell how he feels towards objects that are outside,
and he never can feel right towards them until he goes out and gets involved. How can he know his real feelings towards
sinners, if he never brings himself in contact with sinners? He goes into his closet, and his imagination
may make him feel, but it is a deceitful feeling, because not produced by a
reality. If you want to test the reality
of your feelings towards sinners, go out and warn sinners, and then the reality
of your feelings will manifest itself.
2.
Unless people test their hearts by the reality of things, they are constantly
subject to delusion, and are always managing to delude themselves.
An
individual who is shut up in a cloister or a monastery is shut out from the
world of reality, and living in an imaginary world created by a group of
individuals. He becomes a perfect
creature of imagination. The same is
true in religion with those who do not bring their mind in contact with
realities. Such people think they love
their neighbor, and yet they don’t do anything good for them. They imagine they hate sin, and yet they do
nothing to destroy it. For example, how
many people deceive themselves, by getting their imaginations all excited about
missions,. It is common for people to
stir up many feelings, and hold prayer meetings for missions, who really do
nothing to save souls. Women will spend
a whole day at a prayer meeting to pray for the conversion of the world, while
their impenitent servant in the kitchen isn’t spoken to all day, and perhaps
not all month, to save her soul. People
will go to a public meeting, and talk about feeling for the heathen, while they
are doing nothing to help sinners around them.
This is all a figment of their imagination. There is no reality in this kind of religion. If they really love God, and souls, and they
have real piety, any pictures drawn by their imagination about the distant
heathen would not create so much more feeling than the reality around them.
Don’t
tell me that it is because their attention is not turned towards the sinners
around them. They hear them swearing
every day, they see them ignoring and breaking the Sabbath, they observe their
drinking and lewd behavior every day.
And if these things don’t produce any feelings, it is foolish to pretend
that they feel as God feels for sinners in heathen lands, or anywhere. In fact, take this same person who is now so
full of feeling for the heathen, as he imagines, and place him among the heathen,
transport him to the Philippine Islands, or someplace else, far away from the
fictions of his imagination. In the
midst of the cold and naked reality of heathenism, all his deep feeling
disappears. He may write letters home
about the abominations of the heathen, and all that, but his feeling about
their salvation is gone. You hear people
talk about the heathen who have never converted one soul at home. Trust me, their religion is all
imagination. If they do not promote
revivals at home, where they understand the language, and where they have
direct access to their neighbors, you will not be able to depend on them to
promote the real work of religion on heathen ground. The churches ought to understand this, and keep this in mind when
they select men to go to the foreign mission field. They should know that if the naked reality at home does not
excite a person into action, the devil will only laugh at a million such
missionaries.
The
same delusion often manifests itself concerning revivals. Take someone who is a great friend of
revivals. But notice, they are always
friends of past revivals, or revivals in the abstract, or distant revivals, or
revivals that are yet to come. As to
any present revival, he is always aloof and doubtful. He can read about the revivals in President Edward’s day, or in
Scotland, or Wales, and be greatly excited and delighted. He can pray, “O Lord, revive thy work, O
Lord, let us have such revivals, let us have a season of Pentecost, when
thousands will be converted in one day.”
But bring him into the reality of things, and he never sees a revival
that he is interested in, or feels complacent about. He is friendly to the fictitious imaginings of his own mind. He can create a state of things that will
excite his feelings, but no naked reality ever brings him out to cooperate in
actually promoting a revival.
In
the days of our Savior, the people said, and no doubt really believed, that
they abhorred the doings of those who persecuted the prophets. They said, “If we had lived in the days of
our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them of the blood of the
prophets”. No doubt, they wondered how
people could be so wicked to do such things.
But they had never seen a prophet; they were moved simply by their
imagination. And as soon the Lord Jesus
Christ appeared, the greatest of prophets, on whom all the prophecies are
centered, they rejected Him, and finally put Him to death with as much
cold-hearted cruelty as their fathers had who killed the prophets. “Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers'
guilt,” our Savior says, “that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on
the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of
Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.” (Matt 23:32,35)
Mankind
has always, in every age of the world, fallen in love with figments of their
own imagination, over which they have stumbled into hell. Look at the Universalist. He imagines a God that will save everybody,
no matter what they do, and a heaven that will accommodate everybody; and then
he loves the God he has created and the heaven he imagines, and perhaps he will
even weep with love. His feelings are
often deep, but he is completely deceived, because he is excited by fiction and
not by truth.
3.
The more an individual goes out from himself, and makes things not belonging to
himself the subject of thought, the more piety he will have, and the more
evidence of his piety can be seen.
Religion
consists in love, in feeling right and doing right, or doing good. Therefore, if you want to have a lot of
piety, don't think of trying to cultivate it in a way that has never caused
piety to grow; that is, by retiring into a monastery and withdrawing from contact
with humanity. If the Lord Jesus Christ
thought such circumstances would improve their piety, He would have directed
them to build and populate monasteries.
But He knew better. He has
therefore appointed circumstances as they are, so that His people may have a
thousand objects of unselfish love to focus on, a thousand opportunities to do
good. And if they go out of themselves
and turn their hearts on these things, they cannot fail to grow in piety, and
to have their evidences increasing and satisfactory.
4.
The only time we should shut ourselves up in our closet to examine ourselves is
when we want to look back and calmly examine the reasons for our past
conduct. In these situations, it is
often necessary to control our thoughts and to keep other things out of our
minds, to turn our minds back and look at things we have done and the reasons
why we did them. To do this effectively,
it is often necessary to resort to seclusion, fasting, and prayer. Sometimes it is impossible to focus on what
we want to examine, without the help of associations. We try to remember past experiences, and everything seems to be
confusing and dark, until we remember some associated idea that gradually
brings the whole experience fresh before us once again. Suppose I am called as a witness in court
concerning a transaction, I can sometimes refresh my memory of what took place,
by going to the place where it happened, and then all the circumstances come
back into my memory as if it happened yesterday. So we may find while re-examining some part of our past life,
that no shutting ourselves up will bring the memory back; no lengthy
meditation, fasting, or prayer, until we place ourselves in some circumstances
that will wake up the associated ideas, and thus bring back the feelings we
once had.
Suppose
a minister wants to look back and see how he felt, and the spirit with which he
had preached years ago. He wants to
know how much real piety there was in his labors. He might get a good idea of how he felt in his closet on his
knees with the aid of the strong influences of the Spirit of God. But he will get it more effectively by going
to the place, and preaching there again.
The exact attitude that his mind was in before may vividly come back to
him.
5.
In examining yourselves, don’t expect to find every Christian emotion exercised
at the same time.
This
is contrary to the nature of your mind. You should be happy if you find your
feelings are right on the subject that is before your mind. If you have wrong feelings at the time, that
is another thing. But if you find that
your emotions at the time are right, please do not draw the wrong conclusion
because another emotion is not being experienced at the same time. The mind is so constituted, that it can only
have one train of emotions at a time.
6.
From this subject you see why people often do not feel more than they do.
They
are taking a course that isn’t calculated to produce feelings. They feel, but not on the right subjects. Mankind always has feelings on some subjects,
and the reason why they do not feel deeply on religious subjects is because
their attention is not deeply fixed on these subjects.
7.
You see the reason why there is such a strange diversity in the behavior of
real Christians.
There
are some Christians whose feelings are always happy. There are other Christians whose feelings are always sad and
distressing. They are in almost constant
agony for sinners. The reason is that
their thoughts are directed to different objects. The first group of Christians are always thinking of those
objects that make them happy; the second group thinks of the state of the
church, or the state of sinners, and are burdened down, as if they had a
mountain on their shoulders. Both may
be religious, both groups of feelings are right, in view of the objects that
they are focused on. The apostle Paul
had constant heaviness and sorrow of heart because of his brethren. No doubt, he felt right. The situation of his brethren, who had
rejected the Savior, occupied his thoughts; the dreadful wrath that they had
brought on themselves, the doom that hung over them, was constantly before his
mind. How could he be otherwise than
sad?
8.
Notice the influence that these two different feelings have in the usefulness
of individuals.
Show
me a very joyful and happy Christian, and he is generally not a very useful
Christian. Generally, they are so taken
up with enjoying the sweets of religion that they do very little. You find ministers of this type, who preach
a great deal on these subjects and make their pious hearers very happy in religion. But such ministers are seldom instrumental
in converting many sinners, no matter how much they may have refreshed,
edified, and gratified the saints. On
the other hand, you will find Christians who are habitually filled with deep
agony of soul in view of the state of sinners, and these people will be largely
instrumental in converting others. The
reason is simple. Both preach the
truth, both preach the gospel in different proportions, and the feelings they
awaken correspond with the views they preach.
The difference is, that one comforted the saints, the other converted
the sinners.
You
may see a group of professing Christians, who are always happy, and they are
lovely companions, but they are seldom engaged in pulling sinners out of the
fire. You find others always full of agony
for sinners, looking at their state, and longing to have souls converted. Instead of enjoying the fruits of heaven on
earth, they are sympathizing with the Son of God when He was on earth, groaning
in His spirit, and spending all night in prayer.
9.
The real revival spirit is a spirit of agonizing desires and prayers for
sinners.
10.
You see how you may account for your own feelings at different times.
People
often wonder why they feel the way they do.
The answer is simple. You feel
the way you do, because you think so.
You direct your attention to those objects that are calculated to
produce those feelings.
11.
You see why some people's feelings are so changeable.
There
are many whose feelings are always variable and unsteady. That is because their thoughts are
unsteady. If they would fix their
thoughts, they would regulate their feelings.
12.
You can now see how you can produce any desired state of feeling in your own mind,
and how to produce any desired state of feeling in others.
Focus
your thoughts on the subject that is designed to produce those feelings, and confine
them there, and the appropriate feelings will not fail to follow.
13.
Many pious people dishonor religion by their doubts.
They
are perpetually talking about their doubts, and they take up a hasty conviction
that they have no religion. Whereas, if
instead of dwelling on their doubts, they would fix their minds on other
objects, on Christ for example, or go out and seek sinners, and try to bring
them to repentance, I guarantee you, they will feel, and feel right, and their
right feelings will dissipate their doubts.
Remember;
don’t wait until you feel right before you do this. Perhaps you don’t properly understand some of the things that I
have said in this church today. I said
you could do nothing for God unless you felt right. Therefore, do not conclude that you can sit still and do nothing
until you are satisfied that you feel right.
But place yourself in circumstances that will make you feel right, and
go to work. On one hand, to bustle
about without any feeling is not the right way, and on the other hand, to shut
yourself up in your closet and wait for some feeling to come, is not the right
way. Be sure to always be active. Otherwise, you will never feel right. Then, keep your mind constantly under the
influence of those objects that are designed to create and keep alive Christian
feelings.