MAIN HOMILETICS OF Proverbs 28:13
CONFESSION AND FORGIVENESS
I. Sin tends to produce shame. Even a child often tries to hide an act of disobedience to a good mother’s law, and this not from fear of punishment merely, but from an undefined sense of shame. And this feeling clings to all men through life who are not entirely hardened in iniquity. So long as the conscience is not entirely stifled, men try to hide their wrong actions from their fellow-men even when no human punishment would follow the discovery, and they even try to cover them from themselves by inventing excuses for them. They often endeavour to cloak their sin before their fellow-creatures by putting on the garb of special sanctity, and so add hypocrisy to their other transgressions, and they will try to palliate their guilt at the bar of their own conscience by lowering the standard of morality which God has set up within them, or by persuading themselves that He is a hard taskmaster, requiring them to render Him an unreasonable and a burdensome service. There are other motives which induce men to cover their sins beside this one of shame, and other methods by which they try to do it, but whatever impels them, and whatever means they use, the truth taught in the proverb is always verified, viz., that all such makeshifts are worse than useless.
II. The only prosperous method of dealing with sin. This method consists of two acts which God has joined together, and which man may not put asunder, because neither of the two by itself would give evidence that the sinner was fit to receive full absolution. If a man confesses his sin without forsaking it, he seems almost to aggravate his transgression, for he acknowledges that he sins knowing that it is sin, and that it is useless to pardon him to-day, because he will do the same thing to-morrow. And if he forsakes sin without confessing his guilt he shows that he does it from some other motive than abhorrence of evil. Certain sins are sometimes forsaken from expediency, or from self-righteous motives, but in such cases there is no guarantee that there will not be a return to them. Our Lord describes such when he speaks of the unclean spirit going out of a man, but returning to find an empty house—a soul with none of the newborn hopes and desires and aims which always come with true repentance—and of such He says that “the last state of that man is worse than the first.” (Luke 11:26.) But when hearty and sincere acknowledgment of sin is joined with earnest endeavour to forsake it, God sees a soul which will know how to value His pardon, and will find strength in it to fight against evil and finally to overcome it. And to such a soul it is given to know the blessedness of the man whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered, unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile. (Psalms 32:1-2.)
OUTLINES AND SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS
There are various ways of endeavouring to cover sins. By denying them. A lie is a cover which men put over their sins to conceal them from others. They sin and deny the fact, they wrap up their crimes in falsehood. Thus Cain, Rachel, Joseph’s brethren, Peter, Ananias and Sapphira, endeavoured to hide their sins. By extenuating them. Men plead excuses. The influence of others, the power of circumstances, the moral weakness of the constitution. Extenuation is a common cover. By forgetting them. They endeavour to sweep them from the memory by revelry and mirth, by sensuality, worldliness, and intemperance.—Dr. David Thomas.
A child of God will confess sin in particular; an unsound Christian will confess sin by wholesale; he will acknowledge he is a sinner in general, whereas David doth, as it were, point with his finger to the sore: “I have done this evil” (Psalms 51:4); he doth not say I have done evil, but this evil. He points at his blood-guiltiness.—Watson.
Confession of sin will work a holy contrition and a godly sorrow in the heart. (Psalms 38:18.) Declaration doth breed compunction. Confession of sin is but the causing of sin to recoil on the conscience, which causeth blushing, and shame of face, and grief of heart.… Secret confession gives a great deal of glory to God. It gives glory to God’s justice. I do confess sin, and do confess God in justice may damn me for my sin. It gives glory to God’s mercy. I confess sin, yet mercy may save me. It gives glory to God’s omnisciency. In confessing sin I do confess that God knoweth my sin.—Christopher Love.
It is fearful for a man to bind two sins together when he is not able to bear the load of one. To act wickedness and then to cloak it, is for a man to wound himself and then go to the devil for a plaster. What man doth conceal God will not cancel. Iniquities strangled in silence will strangle the soul in heaviness. There are three degrees of felicity:—the first is, not to sin; the second, to know; the third, to acknowledge our offences. Let us, then, honour Him by confession whom we have dishonoured by presumption.… Sinfulness is a sleep, confession a sign that we are waked. Men dream in their sleeps, but tell their dreams waking. In our sleep of security we lead a dreaming life, full of vile imaginations; but if we confess and speak our sins to God’s glory, and our own shame, it is a token that God’s spirit hath wakened us.… This is true, though to some a paradox; the way to cover our sins is to uncover them.—T. Adams.
Sin is in a man at once the most familiar inmate and the greatest stranger.… Although he lives in it, because he lives in it, he is ignorant of it. Nothing is more widely diffused or more constantly near us than atmospheric air; yet few ever notice its existence and fewer consider its nature. Dust, and chaff, and feathers, that sometimes float up and down in it, attract our regard more than the air in which they float; yet these are trifles that scarcely concern us, and in this we live, and move, and have our being.… Such, in this respect, is sin. It pervades humanity, but, in proportion to its profusion, men are blind to its presence. Because it is everywhere, we do not notice it anywhere.… But the chief effort of the alienated must ever be to cover his sins from the eye of God.… All the wiles of the tempter, and all the faculties of his slave, are devoted to the work of weaving a curtain thick enough to cover an unclean conscience from the eye of God. Anything and everything may go as a thread to the web; houses and lands, business and pleasure, family and friends, virtues and vices, blessings and cursings—a hideous miscellany of good and evil—constitute the material of the curtain; and the woven web is waulked over and over again with love and hatred, joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, to thicken the wall without, and to deepen the darkness within, that the fool may be able, with some measure of comfort, to say “in his heart, No God.”—Arnot.
Sin and shifting came into this world together. Sin and Satan are alike in this, they cannot abide to appear in their own colour.… We must see our sin to confession, or we shall see it to our confusion … No man was ever kept out of heaven for his confessed badness; many are for their supposed goodness.—Trapp.
St. Gregory speaketh, “He that covereth his sin, doth not hide himself from the Lord, but hideth the Lord from himself, and that which he doth, is that himself may not see God, who seeth all things, not that he be not seen.”—Jermin.
For Homiletics on Proverbs 28:14 see on chaps. Proverbs 12:15, and Proverbs 14:16, pages 271 and 365