THE PLEA FOR MERCY
‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’
Why is it so hard to repent? Why is it so hard to get back? Does God repel His wandering sons? Does the wilderness swallow them up? Do the dust and turmoil of the seeking Church smother and crush? Has the prodigal lost the strength which is to bring him back, as he finds that the food of swine is a sorry supply? Is the publican learning the bitter truth—sin is the punishment of sin? Is he struggling in the grip of habit, which is trying to wrench from him his freewill? It is an awful moment when the sinner who has been floating along in motionless ease, on the face of a smooth and easy current, wishes to turn, and begins to fear that he cannot. The stream is against him—has he gone too far? His companions, his habits, his cravings, all drag him back; he makes no progress, he is exhausted, and already there sounds in his ear the faint roar, where the cataract, smoother and swifter than ever, leaps down the precipice and breaks in foaming waves on the rocks below, into which he seems to be drawn with an irresistible strength.
I. We should anxiously watch the banks of life.—Are we going backwards, are these things which we passed at our Confirmation now reappearing? Things which we left behind at our first Communion, now asserting themselves with startling clearness? Is the point for which we were then making high up on the river, more distant and more dim? Are there things in your life which are not necessaries, of which you say, ‘I cannot resist them,’ ‘I cannot do without them’? If so you are in the grip of currents which at any moment may whirl you into the midstream of death, and which must in any case retard all progress forwards. It is the bitter cry of the sinner who feels that he is forfeiting freedom. ‘Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.’ He is finding out that which he never realised before, what a tremendous power sin is. He realises, as he never realised before, what is implied by the doctrine of the Atonement—all that suffering was caused by sin.
II. Do we know how we stand before Almighty God?—Do we know what the Recording Angel has in his book against us? Are we trusting to that miserable delusion that the things which we hide from our neighbours, and even from ourselves, can be hidden from the face of Almighty God? ‘Some men’s sins are open beforehand, going before to judgment; and some they follow after.’ Our Lord represents, as one of the terrors of the last day, the element of surprise when at last the soul finds out its true condition. We want to be more business-like in the affairs of our soul than we are. ‘God be merciful to me a sinner’ may be a very useful confession, if we mean it, but not if it is only another way of saying, ‘I am a sinner, and I know it; I am a sinner and I don’t suppose I shall ever be anything else, and I hope God won’t be hard upon me, because, after all, there are plenty worse than I am, and man, after all, is frail.’
III. Repentance crowned by amendment.—And our Lord would exhibit the publican as one who would crown his repentance by amendment. ‘He goes down to his house justified rather than the other.’ Don’t let us make a mistake. Just as some people think they imitate the poor widow if they give a farthing at a collection, so they think they imitate the publican if they say they are sinners, while they look upon good works as a dangerous form of sin. To ask God to be merciful to us sinners does not mean that He should let us go on sinning, and kindly overlook it, in consideration of a touching posture or a humble word. But it does mean that He accepts the sorrowful sighing over a shameful past as an earnest of a good life for the future, and of a conversation which, looking at the merits of Jesus Christ, in all humility may say, ‘I am not ashamed of what I have been, being by God’s grace what I am.’
Rev. Canon Newbolt.
Illustration
‘The sense of sin, we are sometimes told, is absent largely from this generation; if so, it is a serious thing, for it means the negation of all progress and the absence of all excellence. A man can never be a musician who has lost the delicate sense of tone, so that he does not know what is meant by being out of tune. A man can never be a great painter who has lost all sense of anatomical fitness and proportion. A man can never be a great scholar who has lost all ear for delicate distinctions and all love for accuracy. And so to have no sense of sin means that life has lost its correcting standard and its steadying sense of excellence. The German tragedian has taken the genesis of deadly sin, and shown its fearful working in the lives of those affected by it. We see the dying out of sunlight from life, the comfort from religion, the dignity from character, the wrecking of all finer instincts, and the gradual gathering up of the unrelieved misery which follows its consummation.’