The First Blow in Conversion.
THE work of the law in the process of conversion is well set forth by T. DeWitt Talmage in the following article:— Men must have their sins cut down, or you can do nothing with them. In this day an attempt is made to popularize religion by taking out the repenting element. According to the notion of some, change of heart is only a “removal of the cloth” after the banquet is closed, and you are ready for “the toasts.” It has been a course of pride, and a course of worldliness, and a course of sinful indulgence. Now religion comes in, removes the ordinary viands, and puts on the table a little rarer wine, and calls out a little finer exhilaration. Now my idea is that the first thing religion does is to upset the table, and dash to pieces the poisoned cups, and tell the guests, “Away with this swine-trough and come to banquet with King Jesus!” A skeptic, after reading one of my sermons the other day, attempted to put upon me an extinguisher by telling me that those were the doctrines that he read forty years ago in Richard Baxter’s “Call to the Unconverted.” I did not feel at all insulted. The first thing to do with the grain is to cut it down. When revivals came in the time of Edwards and Wesley, it was after they had been preaching the law and its penalties. We have in this day a namby-pamby religion, manufactured to suit ourselves, instead of the faith that made the Christian heroes of other days. You could not make martyrs out of such stuff. Satan would not need to come at its professors with racks, and gibbets, and inquisitions, to overcome them. A swarm of mosquitoes would do the work. We seem to think that God has thrown overboard one-half of his Bible to please the humanitarian critics. We seem to say, “O Lord! we cannot stand this smell of brimstone! Give us musk. Give us cologne!” I believe from what I hear that there are hundreds of members in Calvinistic churches who are Universalists, but are too great cowards to say so. But unless you make the world feel its guilt and danger it will never repent. The first thing to do is to cut down the grain. Be kind, be gentle, be sympathetic in this presentation of truth, but be thorough, no mincing the matter. By the law is the knowledge of sin! The next step is binding the sheaves. There is a vast amount of material around loose. It needs to be combined in Sabbath-schools, in prayer-meetings, in missionary associations, in churches. Let members of session be busy with their rakes and gather up this material into sheaves. There are, I think, attending our church three or four hundred people who are followers of Christ who have never been brought out. Men of God! go out and bind up these sheaves! The great lack of the church all over Christendom is organization. The army of God needs to be divided into companies, regiments, battalions, sharpshooters, artillerymen, infantry, sappers and miners. We have too many in the reserve corps. What is the use of saving these idle troops any longer? If we do not need them now we never will. If all the troops of God were in action we could take all the castles of sin, and sweep the earth for King Immanuel. It is not enough in the harvest-field of Boaz that some cut down the grain, there must be others to bind it. The third thing to be done is gleaning. However careful the men of Boaz may be with the rake, at the corners of the field, and here and there behind the reapers, there will be handfuls of grain that were missed. They must not stay there to be pelted of the rain, or picked up by the fowls of the air. So here and there in the world you find those who have been missed. When the barns of the church in 1857 were filled, these persons were left on the field. They say, “No man careth for my soul!” Some of them are rich, and they have been missed. Some of them are poor, and they have been passed by. Some of them have shrunk back in shyness when any one approached. Where are the gleaners for my Lord’s harvest-field? Who is there willing to do small work for God? There are plenty who would be willing to preach at a Pentecost, plenty who would feel competent to speak on Mars’ Hill, plenty willing to drive a load of golden sheaves into the barn, but where are the Ruths who would consider it a privilege to gather up a handful of grain for the eternal garner? I accost you to-night in the words of Naomi to Ruth as in the evening she came home with a sack full of barley, “Where hast thou gleaned to-day?” By what river of promise? By what poor man’s cot? By what troubled soul? What prayer hast thou offered? What good deed hast thou done? What inviting word hast thou spoken? May the God of Ruth bless thee! The God of the harvest-field reward thee! He that goeth forth bearing precious seed shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him!