promises

The Lord Meets You Where the Truth Is

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, confession of sin, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. – 1John 1:9

When a sinner feels he has no natural fitness for receiving the grace of God; when a broken spirit cries, “Oh, what a wretch I am! Not only my past sin but my present feelings disqualify me for the love of God; I seem to be made of hell-hardened steel,” he is confessing that sin is in him…If you feel you are desperately bad, remember you are worse than you think you are. Your case is in itself desperate, hopeless, damnable! If you feel that you are lost, you do not feel it too strongly, you are in the true light where God will meet with you. The Lord will not consent to parley with you on the ground that you are not much of a sinner, and that after all your sin is not a great evil. No, He will meet you where the truth is and nowhere else; when you confess that you are unworthy of His pity, you are owning the truth, and when you feel guilty, you feel what is really fact; on this footing of truth, sad truth though it be, the Lord will meet with you through the atoning blood. It is in your vileness that sovereign grace o’er sin abounding will come to you and cleanse you, and therefore the sooner you come to the honest truth the better for you, for the sooner will you obtain joy and peace through believing in Christ. The text means just this—Treat God truthfully, and He will treat you truthfully. Make no pretensions before God, but lay bare your soul, let Him see it as it is, and then He will be faithful and just to forgive you your sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. Mark the beauty of that expression; God will deal with you in faithfulness. His nature is mercy, and you naturally expect that if you confess your sin to a merciful God, He will deal mercifully with you and be faithful to His nature; and He will be so…The blood of Jesus Christ has made a full atonement, and God will be faithful to that atonement. He will deal with you on the grounds of the covenant of grace, of which the sacrifice of Jesus is the seal, and therein also He will be true to you.

Honest Dealing with God by C. H. Spurgeon

Feeling a Falsehood

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, confession of sin, promises, repentance, Sovereignty of God

…we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. – 1John 1:8

Let not him that is deceived trust in vanity: for vanity shall be his recompence. – Job 15:31

Awakened sinners often say, “If I could feel my heart was right towards God, then I could believe that He would look upon me in mercy.” How wrong is this! If you did feel that all was right, it would be an untruthful feeling, for by nature all is wrong. “Oh, sir,” say you, “if I could but feel that now at last, I am as I ought to be before God, as tender and as penitent as He would have me to be, then I could have hope.” No, but my dear friend, such a feeling would not be according to truth, for no man is as tender and as penitent as he ought to be; and if you felt you were, you would be feeling a falsehood, and so the truth would not be in you. I do not want you to feel that you are what you ought to be: I pray that you may own that you are not what you ought to be; I would have you feel unrest, and absence of anything like satisfaction, for such feelings will be according to the truth. I beseech you never claim to experience feelings which you do not feel, nor make hypocritical confessions of sin which you have never committed, nor pretend to a repentance which is not in you, for the Lord hates all shams, and will only deal with you according to truth. If you are conscious of impenitence, go to the Lord and tell Him you have a hard heart, which will not feel either the terrors of His law or the meltings of His love: in fine, go to Him just as you are, and confess what you are, and ask Him to deal with you in Christ Jesus as He sees you to be. That is the only way, and the plan of pretending that we are now free from sin will not work and bring us blessing; for “we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”

Honest Dealing with God by C. H. Spurgeon

God Sees Sin in Us

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, confession of sin, prayer, promises, Sovereignty of God

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. – 1John 1:8

Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived… – 1Corinthians 6:9

Be not deceived; God is not mocked… – Galatians 6:7

While the man who has deceived himself says, “I have no sin,” he has not deceived the Lord. God sees sin in us if we do not. The ostrich is reported to bury her head in the sand, and then to suppose herself safe, but she is the more speedily taken; and we may shut our eyes and say, “I have no sin,” but in so doing instead of securing eternal salvation we shall as practically give ourselves up to the destroyer as the bird of the desert is fabled to do. Let a man say, “I have no sin,” and he has condemned himself out of his own mouth, for the text says of such a man the truth is not in him, and he who hath not truth in him is not saved. The absence of confession of present sin means the absence of the light of truth, and sincerity. All sorts of people God saves, however black their sins, but the man of a false spirit, the Pharisaic washer of the outside of the cup, while the inside is foul, is the last person who is likely to be saved. A main point in conversion consists in a man’s being honest, for it is the honest and good ground which receives the seed. If you preach the gospel among the roughest and most profane of men, there is more hope of success among them than among hypocritical professors. Open enmity and opposition are better than that pretended friendship which begins and ends with the shallow compliments of empty formalism. Outward religiousness, unattended by heart piety, does a man serious injury, by rendering him superficial and unreal in all that he does in reference to God, and as God desires truth in the inward parts He will not parley with dishonest men. Pretend and profess and boast what ye will, but this know, that the living God abhors everything which is not according to the strictest truth.

Honest Dealing with God by C. H. Spurgeon

A Mere Say, A Delusion

Sherry Attributes of God, Christian Life, promises

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. – 1John 1:8

Whatever shape our denial of our sinful nature and state may take, please remember that that denial is a mere say, and nothing more, —”If we say we have no sin.” You know how little value we attach to evidence of the nature of “I say,” and “they say.” There may be no truth whatever in such evidence, and in the present case there is nothing whatever to warrant the proud saying—”We have no sin.” There will come a day when the righteous will have no sin, as a matter of fact; but now, whether saint or sinner, if you say, “I have no sin,” you say it, and that is all. The words sound very prettily, but there is no fact to correspond with them.

Moreover, the idea of having no sin is a delusion; you are altogether deceived if you say so; the truth is not in you, and you have not seen things in the true light; you must have shut your eyes to the high requirements of the law, you must be a stranger to your own heart, you must be blind to your own conduct every day, and you must have forgotten to search your thoughts and to weigh your motives, or you would have detected the presence of sin. He who cannot find water in the sea is not more foolish than the man who cannot perceive sin in his members. As the salt flavours every drop of the Atlantic, so does sin affect every atom of our nature. It is so sadly there, so abundantly there, that if you cannot detect it you are deceived.

Honest Dealing with God by C. H. Spurgeon

Sin Daily Confessed and Pardoned

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, confession of sin, prayer, promises, salvation, Sovereignty of God

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. – 1John 1:8-10

But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin. – 1 John 1:7

Our only safe course—and may the Spirit of God grant us grace to follow it—is to come to God as we actually are, and ask Him to deal with us, in Christ Jesus, according to our actual condition. If we are to walk with God at all it must be in the light, and if we once walk in the light with Him our condition will tally with the description of verse seven; we shall see sin in ourselves and daily feel the blood of Jesus Christ cleansing us therefrom. Only on the footing of sin daily confessed and pardoned can there be any fellowship between us and the eternal God this side heaven, for that footing is the only one consistent with the facts of the case. Let us daily ask the Lord to keep us in a truthful spirit, admitting the truth, both concerning ourselves and our Lord, feeling its power, and desiring to be taught still more of it. Let us pray Him to deal with us not according to our suppositions but according to the fact and let us entreat Him never to allow us to rejoice in fancied blessings, such as might satisfy our proud, half-stupified conscience, but to give to us the real blessings of genuine forgiveness, and effectual cleansing from all unrighteousness.

Honest Dealing with God by C. H. Spurgeon

Our Tendency to be False

Sherry Attributes of God, Christian Life, confession of sin, promises, Sovereignty of God

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. – 1 John 1:8-10

Dear friends, the natural tendency of our heart is to try and appear to be what we are not, and we all have more or less to struggle against this tendency, for it assails the most truthful. That love of approbation which, rightly checked and kept in order, has its uses, very readily pushes men on to pretend to be better than they are. Fear of censure is an equally powerful means of producing hypocrisy. We must by all means strive against the very beginnings of this frightful evil, for if it should ever get the mastery over us, it will make us altogether untruthful, and consequently we shall be far removed from all power to walk with God…Our tendency to be false is illustrated in the text before us, for we find three grades of it there. There is first the man who lies: “If we say we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth.” We say and do that which is untrue if while abiding under the influence of sin and falsehood we claim to have fellowship with God. If this tendency is let alone and unchecked, you will find the man growing worse and doing according to the eighth verse, wherein it is written, “We deceive ourselves.” Here the utterer of the falsehood has come to believe his own lie; he has blinded his understanding and befouled his conscience till he has become his own dupe. Falsehood has saturated his nature, so that he puts darkness for light and light for darkness. This is at once his sin and his punishment; he closed his eyes so long that at length he has become stone blind. He will soon reach the complete development of his sin, which is described in the tenth verse, when the man, who first lied, and then secondly, deceived himself, becomes so audacious in his falseness as to blaspheme the Most Holy by making Him a liar.

Honest Dealing with God by C. H. Spurgeon

God is Light

Sherry Attributes of God, Character of Jesus, Christian Life, confession of sin, prayer, promises, Sovereignty of God

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. – 1 John 1:8-10.

God is Light, and in Him is no darkness at all:” and consequently He cannot have fellowship with darkness. God is light, that is purity: and as the thrice Holy One He can hold no communion with iniquity. God is light, that is knowledge, for all things are known unto the Lord, and with ignorance He has no affinity. God is light, that is truth, for He can neither err, nor break His word, and therefore He cannot smile on anything that is false. We are constantly erring, first on this side and then on that, for there is darkness in us; God is light essentially, and it is not possible for His nature to be affected by either impurity or error. Out of this attribute of His nature arises the fact that the Lord always deals with things as they are. Man invents fictions, but God creates facts. We conceive of things as they appear, but God sees them as they exist. “Man looketh at the outward appearance, but God looketh at the heart.” The dress of things impresses us, but all things are naked and open before Him. The Lord never misrepresents, nor has fellowship with misrepresentation. We are for ever hurrying about with our paint and varnish and tinsel, laboring to make the meaner thing appear equal to the more precious, and spending our skill in making the sham seem as brilliant as the reality, but all this is contrary to the way of the Lord. Everything is true in God, and everything is seen in its reality by His all-discerning eye. Because He is light, He deals with things in the light, treating them as they are. If God is to deal graciously with us, we must each one stand in the light and present ourselves before Him as we are. “If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth.”

Honest Dealing with God by C. H. Spurgeon