Who is the "Me"? It is Wisdom. Who is the Wisdom? It is Christ; Christ is the Wisdom of God. What is the particular truth of the text? It is this, that sin is not only an offence to God, whom no man hath seen or can see, but it is a distinct and irreparable injury to the man, the sinner himself. It may be difficult to show men that they ought not to sin against a being whom they have never seen, or against spiritual, moral laws which they had no share in determining. Man may, under these circumstances, get up a kind of metaphysical defence against such obedience; but this unhappy possibility is met and overruled by the unalterable and appalling fact that not to obey is to suffer, to sin is to decline and perish, to go away from truth and purity and honour is to go into darkness and shame and intolerable torment. That is the tremendous hold which God has over you.
I. You have a strong emotional nature; you allow that. My question is, What are you going to make of it? Suppress it? Then you will wrong your own soul. Turn it towards low objects? Then you will debase one of the highest gifts of your nature. You must use it. Christ's great appeal is to our feeling, our emotion, our homage, our loyalty. "He that sinneth against Me wrongeth his own soul;" tears the stops out of the great organ of his being.
II. You have a great imaginative nature. What are you going to do with it? He that sinneth against that wrongeth his own soul. The whole material universe is a bird's small cage compared with the infinite resources of Him who fainteth not, neither is weary, and of whose understanding there is no searching. Whoso sinneth against Me wrongeth his own soul, belittles himself, trivializes his own nature, wastes his powers, shuts himself up in a cell, when he might be enjoying the liberty of an ever-expanding firmament.
III. You have a profound moral nature. What are you going to make of it? The Lord brings us to practical judgments, to distinct personal consequences of our action, and we who would shrink from any merely metaphysical divinity, from any philosophical conception of right, are bound to feel in our own flesh and blood and bones that we have done wrong. What are you going to do? The good man makes the best of his powers; the Christian man gets the best out of himself; righteousness makes a man realise the grandest of his powers, the widest of his capacities, and imparts to him as he goes along such instalments of heaven as are harmonisable with a life on earth.
Parker, Fountain,Oct. 18th, 1877.