The following is the first of a series of posts taken from the book “From Death Unto Life” authored by James H. Brookes, an American Presbyterian pastor, Christian leader and author who lived from February 27, 1830 – April 18, 1897. I found these snippets within the very last chapter entitled “Stumbling Blocks Removed” which explores several questions and/or doubts we often find ourselves wrestling with regarding our faith and Christian walk.
This first in a series of many posts asks the question, “What If Don’t Think I’m a Sinner?” Here is the excerpt.
Well, you are a sinner, whether you feel it or not, and you are all called to deal, not with a question of feeling, but of fact. Many a man has been fatally ill, without feeling his danger, but his lack of feeling did not arrest for one moment the progress of disease and death. It is the most terrible count in the indictment brought against those who are “alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is them, because of the blindness [or hardness] of their heart,” that they were “past feeling.” Your insensibility, therefore, is no excuse for continued indifference to the peril of your soul, but an aggravation of your guilt.
“Sin is transgression of the law,” or as Rotherham, Young, or Darby properly render it in their translations, “sin is lawlessness.” It is the spirit of insubordination to the law of God, as that law is summed up in the words of our Saviour, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Judged by this law, you have sinned every second of your existence, so that if you lived thirty years, you are already charged with more nine hundred millions of sins.
But as shown in the preceding pages (of the book), your very nature is sinful, and if you could see yourself in the light of God’s presence, you would exclaim as Job did, “Behold, I am vile;” you would cry out as Isaiah did, “Woe is me for I am undone.” In addition to the unnumbered sins committed against God’s law, and flowing from a corrupt source, you are justly unanswerable for the crowning and damning sin of unbelief.
The Lord Jesus Christ says, “He that believeth not is condemned [or judged] already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God;” and again He says, the Holy Spirit will reprove “of sin, because they believe not on me.” While therefore you continue in unbelief, you are guilty of the sin of sins.
