Evening, April 28
Go To Morning Reading
“All the house of Israel are impudent and hardhearted.”
Ezekiel 3:7
Are there no exceptions? No, not one. Even the favoured race are thus
described. Are the best so bad?—then what must the worst be? Come, my heart, consider how far thou
hast a share in this universal accusation, and while considering,
be ready to take shame unto thyself wherein thou mayst have been guilty.
The first charge is impudence , or hardness of forehead, a want of holy shame, an unhallowed boldness
in evil. Before my conversion, I could sin and feel no compunction,
hear of my guilt and yet remain unhumbled, and even confess my iniquity
and manifest no inward humiliation on account of it. For a sinner
to go to God’s house and pretend to pray to him and praise him argues a brazen-facedness
of the worst kind! Alas! since the day of my new birth I have doubted
my Lord to his face, murmured unblushingly in his presence, worshipped
before him in a slovenly manner, and sinned without bewailing myself
concerning it. If my forehead were not as an adamant, harder than
flint, I should have far more holy fear, and a far deeper contrition
of spirit. Woe is me, I am one of the impudent house of Israel. The
second charge is hardheartedness , and I must not venture to plead innocent here. Once I had nothing
but a heart of stone, and although through grace I now have a new
and fleshy heart, much of my former obduracy remains. I am not affected
by the death of Jesus as I ought to be; neither am I moved by the
ruin of my fellow men, the wickedness of the times, the chastisement
of my heavenly Father, and my own failures, as I should be. O that
my heart would melt at the recital of my Saviour’s sufferings and death. Would to God I were rid of this nether millstone
within me, this hateful body of death. Blessed be the name of the
Lord, the disease is not incurable, the Saviour’s precious blood is the universal solvent, and me, even me, it will
effectually soften, till my heart melts as wax before the fire.