SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 27 May 1922, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

“I BELIEVE IN THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS.” “Understand, therefore, brethren, that, through this Jesus, the forgiveness of sins is announced to you, and in Him every believer is absolved from all offences, from which you could not be absolved under the Law of Moses.” —Acts xiii., 38. (Waymouth's Translation). (By Rev. A. H. Collins, New Plymouth.) THE APEX OF MIRACLES. “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.” What a tremendous faith that is! For the forgiveness of sins is the greatest wonder in the moral universe, the crown and glory of all miracles. It was a wonderful thing to turn water into wine; it is a more wonderful thing to cancel sin. It was a great achievement to say "Take up thy mat and walk”; it is a greater achievement to say “Thy sins be forgiven thee.” The regeneration of the guilty soul is the apex of the miracles, and any man who has the experience of sin forgiven will not be etumbled by miracles wrought on eyes and hands and feet. But, as I have just said, it is a tremendous faith, for to say this with insight and seriousness means that we believe in sin, in holiness, in redemption, in God. Yet the Christian Gospel is par excellence the Gospel of Redemption, and its ringing and regnant note is the forgiveness of sins. Jesus Christ is not one in a row of Teachers and Saviours; He is the one only Redeemer and Lord. Read the four Gospels and you find yourself confronted by one who claimed "authority on earth to forgive Read the Book of the Acts and the New Testament Letters, and you find the writers not only preaching this doctrine, but exulting in a personal experience, of its reality and its power. Listen to the Song of the Saved in Glory Everlasting, and this is the subject of their song: “L'nto Him who love th us, and loosed us from our sins.” Turn to “the Holy Catholic Church,” and, notwithstanding pronounced differences in outward form and expression, the Church is one in saying that Jesus Christ deals with the problem of sin in a unique way. He never palliates or excuses, but creates a new sense of the horror and guilt and shame. He at the same time lifts the burden, removes the stain, and "breaks the power of cancelled sin.” OUR GREATEST NEED. Some years ago Dr. Van Dyke published a volume entitled "The Gospel for an Age of Doubt.” Later he issued a volume called "The Gospel for a World of Sin.” The contrasted titles are suggestive: “An Age of Doubt”; “A World of Sin.” We need both. We need a message for the critical, tlie sceptical, the confused, but the appeal of such is limited. It is a Gospel for a class and a period. If you want a Gospel for the world, you must speak, not to doubt, but to sin; not to the bewildered brain, but to the burdened conscience. It is not light, but sight, we need most: not more information, but deeper peace and fuller power. Martin Luther lay . tossing and restless in the monastery at Erfurt. "Oh! my sin, my sin,” he cried. An aged monk came to Luther’s cell, and repeated to his tortured soul this Article of the Creed: "T believe in the forgiveness of sins.” And the words soothed and comforted him, and he softly murmured: T believe in the forgiveness of sin.” “Ah!” said the aged monk, "you must not only believe in the forgiveness of David’s sin, and Peter’s sin; it is God’s command that we. believe in our own sins as forgiven. The testimony of the Holy Ghost in thy heart, is this: Thy sins are forgiven thee.”. It was the medicine Luther’s sick soul needed, and it is our greatest need. No man can be right until he is right with God, and he cannot be right with God until his sin has been dealt with somehow. Sin is no bogey set up by the hands of theologians no ghost created by a morbid fear of God. Sin is the most real and practical of all problems, as the great creative minds in literature have seen, and so you have Macbeth, Hamlet. Othello. Faust, Les Romala, and “The Scarlet Letter” outside the Bible, and you have the Penitential Psalms and the Parable of the Prodigal within its covers.

FORGIVENESS NOT EASY. But when we make this great affirmation. T believe in the forgiveness of sins,” do we realise what we are saying? Do we bethink us that this is one of the most complex subjects in the whole of "the Apostles’ Creed”; that it is beset by difficulties, and surrounded with false .conceptions. Bishop Westcott’s comment is worth remembering: “Nothing superficially seems easier and simpler than the forgiveness of sins; nothing, if we look deeply, is more difficult or mysterious. To reason,-the groat mystery of the future is not punishment, but forgiveness.” Forgiveness is as real as sin, and sin is as real as nails and screws, but forgiveness is not easy. It is so difficult that some have said it is impossible. Nature never forgives. The universe is ruled by laws inflexible. Cause and effect follow as night the day. “A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.” That is the logic of the situation. “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” That is the" teaching of Naturalism and Determinism. That is the teaching of Omar Khayyam in the oftquoted lines:— “The moving finger writes, and, having writ, Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line. Nor. all your tears blot out a word of it. With Earth’s first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest served the seed; And the First ?.lorning of Creation wrote What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read. That is fatalism. It confuses sin against Law, and sin against Love, and if that were the last word on the subject we should be prisoners in the dungeon of despair. But Jesus Christ can deal with sin. Jesus Christ can cleanse the guilty eon-cienee, can fix the fickle will, can quA n the soul that ia dead in teesjiy.tfc»vp .»ud Ai.15,.’

A GREAT MYSTERY. But we may take forgiveness too lightly. We may profess our beliefs in this 'miracle of grace with the off-hand air of one who is stating something quite obvious and simple, whereas it is neither obvious nor simple. We may rest content; with the haziest and the most superficial notion of what sin is and what forgiveness is, and so take as a matter of course what in reality is of the essential nature of a great mystery. What do we mean by forgiveness? Well, in not a few cases we mean "letting things slide," "hushing things up,” "being let off,” “playing the game of make believe,” and escaping deserved punishment. We “degrade Christ into a fire escape.” We turn the Cross into "a coward’s refuge from a culprit’s doom!” We are thinking more of the penalty than the crime. A child is illbehaved and troublesome, and, instead of reproof or the cane, he is given a sugar-cane! Is that forgiveness? Here is a lad who has pilfered from his employer's till, but for the sake of his decent home folk, he isn’t prosecuted. Is that forgiveness? Here is a son whose evil ways shame his mother and shadow her heart, but she hides his faults. Is that forgiveness? We may think so, but it is not. If that way of dealing with wickedness became universal, it would spell the moral ruin of the world. Any kind of pardon that leaves the sinner unchanged is ethically and practically bad. Forgiveness is not God saying something; it is God doing something—something in the hidden depths of the soul. Forgiveness is not a sipiple and easy thing; it is a miracle, the greatest of all miracles. One of the most poignant passages in modern fiction is the brief passage in Georg? Eliot’s “Amos Barton,” where Amos is described as visiting his wife’s grave. “Milly. Milly, dost thou hear me? I didn’t love thee enough. I wasn’t tender enough to thee, but I think of it all now.” It was the anguished cry of a man who. though forgiven of others, could not forgive himself. Macbeth says to the doctor: “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of the perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?” f The doctor answered: “Therein the patient must minister to himself.” PENALTY NOT ALWAYS REMITTED. Besides, our sins do not always, or even often, end with o,unselves. Our sin may be forgiven, but what of the influence it has had on other lives? How can we arrest and change that? “Take my influence and bury it with me,” cried one who had lived a vicious and foolish life. A man may see the effects of his sin in’ his children, his shopmates, his neighbors, and the damage may be quite beyond recall. Then I want you to notice that forgiveness does not always mean remission of the penalty. David was pardoned, but Bathsheba's child was dead. The prodigal was welcomed and forgiven, but his substance was wasted in riotous living. Maclaren has a powerful and searching sermon on the text "Thou weat a God who forgavest their iniquity, though Thou tookest vengeance on their sin.” And now, in the light of all this, do you not see that “forgiveness of sins” is not the ligh|; and easy matter it is sometimes represented to be. A cheap religion is no use. A street preacher put the matter roughly but truly when he cried “God is not all soft mush.” Samuel Rutherford, in his letters, says: “Some get Christ for as good as next to nothing. This makes light work.” The reason why so much of our modern religion is so unsatisfactory is that it is so cheap ami easy. People say, or sing with a lilt “T know my sins are all forgiven.” What do they mean? Do they mean they have forgiven themselves ? Do they never feel sorry or ashamed? Do they mean they are glad they have escaped doom or that they have been delivered from the dominion of sin? The Bible men did not believe in a cheap or easy forgiveness. Moses cried in an agony: "Oh! this people have sinned a great Bin and have made them gods of gold; yet now. if Thou wilt forgive their sin, and. if not, blot my name pray Thee out of Thy Book which Thou hast written.” “Is that,” says Professor Denney, “the voice of a man who thinks that of course God must forgive.” No; forgiveness is not impossible, neither is it a matter of course; it is a miracle of grace. It is true that Nature never forgives. It is true that Nemesis, with wool-shod feet, dogs the heels of the transgressor. It is true “the mill of God grinds slowly, but it grinds exceeding small.” It is true that forgiveness may not restore a shattered nervous system,* or recover a squandered fortune, or bring back a life we have cursed. It is true we may have to go softly all our days as we think of the guilty past. But our sin is against Love and Love can reach down to the conscience and purge it, to the will and stiffen it, to the heart and recreate it. Love can move us to repentance; Love can waken better desires; Love can start our feet on the new and better way, until, step by step, the old self sloughs off and we become “new creatures in Christ Jesus.” Forgiveness is not fancy, it is fact. “Through this Man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins.” “This is His grand prerogative, And in the none shall share.” “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.”