Jeremiah 13:16-17 Give glory to the LORD your God, before he cause darkness, and before your feet stumble on the dark mountains, and… God is the eternal fountain of honour and the spring of glory; in Him it dwells essentially, from Him it derives originally; and when an action is glorious, or a man is honourable, it is because the action is pleasing to God, in the relation of obedience or imitation, and because the man is honoured by God, and by God's vicegerent: and therefore God cannot be dishonoured, because all honour comes from Himself; He cannot but be glorified, because to be Himself is to be infinitely glorious. And yet He is pleased to say that our sins dishonour Him, and our obedience does glorify Him. He that hath dishonoured God by sins, that is, hath denied, by a moral instrument of duty and subordination, to confess the glories of His power, and the goodness of His laws, and hath dishonoured and despised His mercy, which God intended as an instrument of our piety, hath no better way to glorify God than, by returning to his duty, to advance the honour of the Divine attributes, in which He is pleased to communicate Himself, and to have intercourse with man. He that repents confesses his own error, and the righteousness of God's laws; and, by judging himself, confesses that he deserves punishment; and therefore, that God is righteous if He punishes him; and, by returning, confesses God to be the fountain of felicity, and the foundation of true, solid, and permanent joys. And as repentance does contain in it all the parts of holy life which can be performed by a returning sinner, so all the actions of a holy life do constitute the mass and body of all those instruments whereby God is pleased to glorify Himself. 1. Repentance implies a deep sorrow, as the beginning and introduction of this duty: not a superficial sigh or tear, not a calling ourselves sinners and miserable persons: this is far from that "godly sorrow that worketh repentance": and yet I wish there were none in the world, or none amongst us, who cannot remember that ever they have done this little towards the abolition of their multitudes of sins: but yet, if it were not a hearty, pungent sorrow, a sorrow that shall break the heart in pieces, a sorrow that shall so irreconcile us to sin, as to make us rather choose to die than to sin, it is not so much as the beginning of repentance. But I desire that it be observed that sorrow for sins is not repentance; not that duty which gives glory to God, so as to obtain of Him that He will glorify us. Repentance is a great volume of duty; and godly sorrow is but the frontispiece or title page; it is the harbinger or first introduction to it: or, if you will consider it in the words of St. Paul, "Godly sorrow worketh repentance": — sorrow is the parent, and repentance is the product. Let us, therefore, beg of God, as Caleb's daughter did of her father: "Thou hast given me a dry land, give me also a land of waters," a dwelling place in tears, rivers of tears; "that," as St. Austin's expression is, "because we are not worthy to lift up our eyes to heaven in prayer, yet we may be worthy to weep ourselves blind for sin." We can only be sure that our sorrow is a godly sorrow, when it worketh repentance; that is, when it makes us hate and leave all our sin, and take up the cross of patience or penance; that is, confess our sin, accuse ourselves, condemn the action by hearty sentence: and then, if it hath no other emanation but fasting and prayer for its pardon, and hearty industry towards its abolition, our sorrow is not reprovable. 2. No confession can be of any use, but as it is an instrument of shame to the person, of humiliation to the man, and dereliction of the sin; and receives its recompense but as it adds to these purposes: all other is like "the bleating of the calves and the lowing of the oxen," which Saul reserved after the spoil of Agag; they proclaim the sin, but do nothing towards its cure; they serve God's end to make us justly to be condemned out of our own mouths, but nothing at all towards our absolution. Our sin must be brought to judgment, and, like Antinous in Homer, laid in the midst, as the sacrifice and the cause of all the mischief. 3. Well, let us suppose our penitent advanced thus far, as that he decrees against all sin, and in his hearty purposes resolves to decline it, as in a severe sentence he hath condemned it as his betrayer and his murderer; yet we must be curious that it be not only like the springings of the thorny or the highway ground, soon up and soon down: for some men, when a sadness or an unhand. some accident surprises them, then they resolve against their sin; but as soon as the thorns are removed, return to their first hardness, and resolve then to act their first temptation. They that have their fits of a quartan, well and ill forever, and think themselves in perfect health when the ague is retired, till its period returns, are dangerously mistaken. Those intervals of imperfect and fallacious resolution are nothing but states of death: and if a man should depart this world in one of those godly fits, as he thinks them, he is no nearer to obtain his blessed hope than a man in the stone-colic is to health, when his pain is eased for the present, his disease still remaining, and threatening an unwelcome return. That resolution only is the beginning of a holy repentance, which goes forth into act, and whose acts enlarge into habits, and whose habits are productive of the fruits of a holy life. 4. Suppose all this be done, and that by a long course of strictness and severity, mortification and circumspection, we have overcome all our vicious and baser habits; suppose that we have wept and fasted, prayed and vowed to excellent purposes; yet all this is but the one half of repentance, so infinitely mistaken is the world, to think anything to be enough to make up repentance. But to renew us, and restore us to the favour of God, there is required far more than what hath yet been accounted for (2 Peter 1:4, 5). We must not only have overcome sin, but we must, after great diligence, have acquired the habits of all those Christian graces, which are necessary in the transaction of our affairs, in all relations to God and our neighbour, and our own persons. It is not an easy thing to cure a long-contracted habit of sin. Let any intemperate person but try in his own instance of drunkenness; or the swearer, in the sweetening his unwholesome language: but then so to command his tongue that he never swear, but that his speech be prudent, pious, and apt to edify the hearer, or in some sense to glorify God; or to become temperate, to have got a habit of sobriety, or chastity, or humility, is the work of a life. (Bishop Jeremy Taylor.) Parallel Verses KJV: Give glory to the LORD your God, before he cause darkness, and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains, and, while ye look for light, he turn it into the shadow of death, and make it gross darkness. |
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