CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 11
Difficulties Concerning Failures
The very title of this chapter may perhaps startle some. “Failures…,” they will say. “We thought there were no failures in this life of faith!”
There ought not to be and need not be; but, as a fact, there sometimes are, and we must deal with the facts and not with theories. No safe teacher of this interior life ever says that it becomes impossible to sin; they only insist that sin ceases to be a necessity, and that a possibility of continual victory is opened before us. And there are very few, if any, who do not confess that, as to their own actual experience, they have at times been overcome by at least a momentary temptation.
In speaking of sin here, I mean conscious, known sin, not sins of ignorance or what is called the inevitable sin of our nature, which are all met by the provisions of Christ and do not disturb our fellowship with God. A little baby girl was playing about the library one warm summer afternoon, while her father was resting on the lounge. A pretty inkstand on the table took the child’s fancy, and unnoticed by anyone, she climbed on a chair and secured it. Then, walking over to her father with an air of childish triumph, she turned it upside down on the white expanse of his shirt bosom and laughed with glee as she saw the black streams trickling down on every side.
This was a very wrong thing for the child to do, but it could not be called sin, for she knew no better. When a believer enters upon the highway of holiness, he finds himself surprised into sin. He is tempted either to be utterly discouraged and to give everything up as lost, or else in order to preserve the doctrines untouched, he feels it necessary to cover up his sin, calling it an infirmity and refusing to be candid and aboveboard about it. Either of these courses is equally fatal to any real growth and progress in the life of holiness. The only way is to face the sad fact at once, call the thing by its right name, and discover, if possible, the reason and the remedy. This life of union with God requires the utmost honesty with Him and with ourselves.
A sudden failure is no reason for being discouraged and giving up all as lost. Neither is the integrity of our doctrine touched by it. We are not preaching a state, but a walk. The highway of holiness is not a place, but a way. Sanctification is not a thing to be picked up at a certain stage of our experience and forever after possessed, but it is a life to be lived day by day and hour by hour. We may for a moment turn aside from a path, but the path is not obliterated by our wandering and can be instantly regained. The great point is an instant return to God. Our sin is no reason for ceasing to trust but only an unanswerable argument why we must trust more fully than ever. From whatever cause we have been betrayed into failure, it is very certain that there is no remedy to be found in discouragement. A child who is learning to walk may lie down in despair when he has fallen and refuse to take another step; a believer who is seeking to learn how to live and walk by faith may give up in despair because of having fallen into sin. The only way in both cases is to get right up and try again. When the children of Israel had met with that disastrous defeat, soon after their entrance into the land, before the little city of Ai, they were all so utterly discouraged that we read: “Wherefore the hearts of the people melted, and became as water. And Joshua rent his clothes, and fell to the earth upon his face before the ark of the LORD until the eventide, he and the elders of Israel, and put dust upon their heads. And Joshua said, Alas, O, Lord GOD, wherefore hast thou at all brought this people over Jordan, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us? would to God we had been content, and dwelt on the other side Jordan! O LORD, what shall I say, when Israel turneth their backs before their enemies!”
What a wail of despair this was! And how exactly it is repeated by many a child of God in the present day, whose heart, because of a defeat, melts and becomes as water. He cries out, “‘Would to God we had been content, and dwelt on the other side Jordan!’” and predicts for itself further failures and even utter discomfiture before its enemies. No doubt Joshua thought then, as we are apt to think now, that discouragement and despair were the only proper and safe condition after such a failure. But God thought otherwise. “And the LORD said unto Joshua, Get thee up; wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face?”
A little girl once expressed this feeling to me with a child’s outspoken candor. She asked whether the Lord Jesus always forgave us for our sins as soon as we asked Him, and I had said, “Yes, of course He does.”
“Just as soon?” she repeated doubtingly.
“Yes,” I replied, “the very minute we ask, He forgives us.”
“Well,” she said deliberately, “I cannot believe that. I should think He would make us feel sorry for two or three days first. And then I should think He would make us ask Him a great many times and in a very pretty way, too, not just in common talk. And I believe that is the way He does, and you need not try to make me think He forgives me right at once, no matter what the Bible says.”
She only said what most Christians think, and what is worse, what most Christians act on, making their discouragement and their very remorse separate them infinitely further off from God than their sin would have done. Yet it is so totally contrary to the way we like our children to act toward us that I wonder how we ever could have conceived such an idea of God. How a mother grieves when a naughty child goes off alone in despairing remorse and doubts her willingness to forgive; and how, on the other hand, her whole heart goes out in welcoming love to the repentant little one who runs to her at once and begs her forgiveness! The fact is that the same moment that brings the consciousness of sin ought to bring also the confession and the consciousness of forgiveness. We can only walk this path by “looking continually unto Jesus,” moment by moment. And if our eyes are turned away from Him to look upon our own sin and our own weakness, we shall leave the path at once. The believer who has entered upon this highway must flee with it instantly to the Lord, if he finds himself overcome by sin. But he must do as the children of Israel did, rise up “early in the morning,” and “run” to the place where the evil thing is hidden and take it out of its hiding place, and lay it “out before the LORD.” He must confess his sin. And then he must stone it with stones and burn it with fire and utterly put it away from him and raise over it a great heap of stones that it may be forever hidden from his sight. He must claim by faith an immediate forgiveness and an immediate cleansing and must go on trusting harder and more absolutely than ever.
As soon as Israel’s sin had been brought to light and put away, God’s word came again in a message of glorious encouragement: “Fear not, neither be thou dismayed … see, I have given into thy hand the king of Ai, and his people, and his city, and his land.” Our courage must rise higher than ever, and we must abandon ourselves more completely to the Lord that His mighty power may the more perfectly work in us “all the good pleasure of His will.” We must forget our sin as soon as it is thus confessed and forgiven. We must not dwell on it and examine it and indulge in a luxury of distress and remorse. An earnest Christian man, an active worker in the church, had been living for several months in an experience of great peace and joy. He was suddenly overcome by a temptation to treat a brother unkindly. He spent three years of utter misery going further and further away from God and being gradually drawn off into one sin after another until his life was a curse to himself and to all around him. His health failed under the terrible burden, and his reason threatened to fail him. Later a Christian lady who understood this truth about sin that I have been trying to explain found out his trouble in a few minutes’ conversation. At once she said, “You sinned in that act. There is no doubt about it, and I do not want you to try to excuse it. But have you never confessed it to the Lord and asked Him to forgive you?”
“Confessed it!” he exclaimed. “Why, it seems to me I have done nothing but confess it and beg God to forgive me, night and day, for all these three dreadful years.”
“And you have never believed He did forgive you?” asked the lady.
“No,” said the poor man, “how could I, for I never felt as if He did.”
“But suppose He had said He forgave you—would not that have done as well as for you to feel it?”
“Oh yes,” replied the man. “If God said it, of course I would believe it.”
“Very well, He does say so,” was the lady’s answer. She turned to the verse we have taken above (1 John 1:9) and read it aloud. “Now,” she continued, “you have been all these three years confessing and confessing your sin, and all the while God’s record has been declaring that He was faithful and just to forgive it and to cleanse you, and yet you have never once believed it. You have been ‘making God a liar’ all this while by refusing to believe His record.”
The poor man saw the whole thing and was dumb with amazement and consternation. When the lady proposed that they should kneel down and he should confess his past unbelief and sin and should claim, then and there, a present forgiveness and a present cleansing, he obeyed like one in a maze. But the result was glorious. The light broke in, his darkness vanished, and he began aloud to praise God for the wonderful deliverance. In a few minutes his soul was enabled to traverse back by faith the whole long weary journey that he had been three years in making, and he found himself once more resting in the Lord and rejoicing in the fullness of His salvation.
The truth is, the only remedy, after all, is to trust in the Lord. And if this is all we ought to do and all we can do, is it not better to do it at once? It is a life and walk of faith we have entered upon; and if we fail in it, our only recovery must lie in an increase of faith, not in a lessening of it.
Let every failure then, if any occur, drive you instantly to the Lord with a more complete abandonment and a more perfect trust. If you do this, you will find that, sad as it is, your failure has not taken you out of the land of rest nor broken for long your sweet communion with Him.
Having shown the way of deliverance from failure, I would now say a little as to the causes of failure in this life of full salvation. The causes do not lie in the strength of the temptation, nor in our own weakness, nor above all in any lack in the power or willingness of our Savior to save us. The promise to Israel was positive: “There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life.” And the promise to us is equally positive: “God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” Anything cherished in the heart which is contrary to the will of God, let it seem ever so insignificant or be ever so deeply hidden, will cause us to fall before our enemies. The moment, therefore, that a believer who is walking in this interior life meets with a defeat, he must at once seek for the cause, not in the strength of that particular enemy, but in something behind—some hidden want of consecration lying at the very center of his being. I believe our blessed guide, the indwelling Holy Spirit, is always secretly discovering these things to us by continual little checks and pangs of conscience so that we are left without excuse. But it is very easy to disregard His gentle voice and insist upon it to ourselves that all is right while the fatal evil continues hidden in our midst, causing defeat in most unexpected quarters.
We had moved into a new house, and in looking over it to see if it was all ready for occupancy, I noticed in the cellar a very clean-looking cider cask headed up at both ends. I debated with myself whether I should have it taken out of the cellar and opened to see what was in it but decided to leave it undisturbed. I did not feel quite easy but reasoned away my scruples and left it. Every spring and fall, when housecleaning time came on, I would remember that cask with a little twinge of my housewifely conscience, feeling I could not quite rest in the thought of a perfectly clean house while it remained unopened. For two or three years the innocent-looking cask stood quietly in our cellar. Then, most unaccountably, moths began to fill our house. I used every possible precaution against them and made every effort to eradicate them but in vain. They increased rapidly and threatened to ruin everything we had. I suspected our carpets as being the cause and subjected them to a thorough cleaning. I suspected our furniture and had it newly upholstered. I suspected all sorts of impossible things. At last the thought of the cask flashed on me. At once I had it brought up out of the cellar and the head knocked in, and I think it safe to say that thousands of moths poured out. In the same way, some innocent-looking habit or indulgence, some apparently unimportant and safe thing, about which, however, we have now and then little twinges of conscience—something which is not brought out fairly into the light and investigated under the searching eye of God—lies at the root of most of the failure in this interior life. All is not given up. Some secret corner is kept locked against the entrance of the Lord. Some evil thing is hidden in the recesses of our hearts, and therefore we cannot stand before our enemies but find ourselves smitten down in their presence.
In order to prevent failure or to discover its cause if we find we have failed, it is necessary to keep continually before us this prayer: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
Let me beg of you, however, dear Christians, do not think because I have said all this about failure that I believe in it. There is no necessity for it whatever. The Lord Jesus is able, according to the declaration concerning Him, to deliver us out of the hands of our enemies that we may “serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life.”