Godliness | Page 6

I can be in thy family and have thy smile. That is
repentance--Jesus Christ's own beautiful illustration of true penitence.
Have you done that? Have you forsaken the accursed thing? Have you
cut off that particular thing which the Holy Spirit has revealed to you?
Is the _"but"_ the hindrance that keeps you out of the Kingdom? You
know what it is, and you will never get saved until you renounce it.
Submission is the test of penitence. My child may be willing to do a
hundred and fifty other things, but, if he is not willing to submit on the
one point of controversy, he is a rebel, and remains one until he yields.
Now, here is just the difference between a spurious and a real
repentance. I am afraid we have thousands in our churches who had a
spurious repentance: they were convinced of sin--they were sorry for it;
they wanted to live a better life, to love God in a sort of general way;
but they skipped over the real point of controversy with God; they hid
it from their pastor, perhaps, and from the deacons, and from the people
who talked with them.
Now, I say, Abraham might have been willing to have given up every
other thing that he possessed; but, if he had not been willing to give up
Isaac, all else would have been useless. It is your Isaac God wants. You
have got an Isaac, just as the young ruler had his possessions. You have
got something that you are holding on to, that the Holy Spirit says you

must let go, and you say, "I can't." Very well; then you must stop
outside the kingdom. I beseech you, do not deceive yourselves by
supposing that you repent, for you do not; but, oh! my dear friends, let
me beseech you to repent. The apostle says, "Knowing therefore the
terror of the Lord, we persuade men;" and this is, I believe, the greatest
work of the ministry. To do what? To persuade men to submit. We are
constantly talking to thousands of people who know just what God
wants of them. We cannot bring many of them any new light or new
Gospel. They know all about it. They used to tell me that so often, that
I longed for a congregation of heathen, which I have found since then.
Consequently, when they hear the Gospel, like the publicans and
sinners of old, they go into the kingdom, while such as some of you
who are the natural children of the kingdom, are shut out, because
when they hear they receive, and submit, and obey, while you stand
outside and hold on to your idols, and reason, and quibble, and reject!
My dear friends, let me persuade you to trample under foot that idol, to
tear down that refuge of lies, and to come to God honestly, and say,
"Lord, here I am, to be a servant, to be nothing, to do anything, to
suffer anything. I know I shall be happier with Thy smile and Thy
blessing than all these evil things now make me without Thee." When
you come to a full surrender, my friends, you will get what you have
been seeking, some of you, for years.
But then another difficulty comes in, and people say, "I have not the
power to repent." Oh! yes, you have. That is a grand mistake. You have
the power, or God would not command it. You can repent. You can this
moment lift up your eyes to Heaven, and say, with the prodigal, "Father,
I have sinned, and I renounce my sin." You may not be able to
weep--God nowhere requires or commands that; but you are able, this
very moment, to renounce sin, in purpose, in resolution, in intention.
Mind, don't confound the renouncing of the sin, with the power of
saving yourself from it. If you renounce it, Jesus will come and save
you from it. Like the man with the withered hand--Jesus intended to
heal that man. Where was the power to come from to heal him? From
Jesus, of course. The benevolence, the love, that prompted that healing,
all came from Jesus; but Jesus wanted a condition. What was it? The
response of the man's will; and so He said, "Stretch forth thy hand." If

he had been like some of you, he would have said, "What an
unreasonable command! You know I cannot do it--I cannot." Some of
you say that; but I say you can, and you will have to do it, or you will
be lost. What did Jesus want? He wanted that, "I will, Lord," inside the
man--the response of his will. He wanted him to say, "Yes, Lord;" and,
the moment he said that, Jesus