The Spurgeon Series 1857 & 1858. Charles H. Spurgeon

is the glorious gospel day,

      In which free grace abounds.

      Come to Jesus, sinner, come.

      On your knee weep out a sorrowful confession; look to his cross, and see the substitute; believe, and live. You who are almost demons, you who have gone farthest in sin, now, Jesus says, “If you know your need of me, turn to me, and I will have mercy upon you: and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.”

      Secret Sins

      No. 116-3:73. A Sermon Delivered On Sunday Morning, February 8, 1857, By C. H. Spurgeon, At The Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens.

      Cleanse me from secret faults. {Psalms 19:12}

      1. Self-righteousness arises partly from pride, but mainly from ignorance of God’s law. It is because men know little or nothing concerning the terrible character of the divine law, that they foolishly imagine themselves to be righteous. They are not aware of the deep spirituality, and the stern severity of the law, or they would have other and wiser notions. Once let them know how strictly the law deals with the thoughts, how it brings itself to bear upon every emotion of the inner man, and there is not one creature beneath God’s heaven who would dare to think he was self-righteous in God’s sight in virtue of his own deeds and thoughts. Only let the law be revealed to a man; let him know how strict the law is, and how infinitely just, and his self-righteousness will shrivel into nothing — it will become a filthy rag in his sight, whereas before he thought it to be a goodly garment.

      2. Now, David, having seen God’s law, and having praised it in this Psalm, which I have read in your hearing, he is brought, by reflecting on its excellency, to utter this thought, “Who can understand his errors?” and then to offer this prayer, “Cleanse me from secret faults.”

      3. In the Lateran Council of the Church of Rome, a decree was passed that every true believer must confess his sins, all of them, once in a year to the priest, and they affixed to it this declaration, that there is no hope of pardon but in complying with that decree. What can equal the absurdity of such a decree as that? Do they suppose that they can identify their sins as easily as they can count their fingers? Why, if we could receive pardon for all our sins by telling every sin we have committed in one hour, there is not one of us who would be able to enter heaven, since, besides the sins that are known to us and that we may be able to confess, there are a vast mass of sins, which are as truly sins as those which we do observe, but which are secret, and do not come to our knowledge. Oh! if we had eyes like those of God, we would think very differently about ourselves. The sins that we see and confess are but like the farmer’s small samples which he brings to market, when he has left his granary full at home. We have only a very few sins which we can observe and detect, compared with those which are hidden to ourselves and unseen by our fellow creatures. I do not doubt it is true of all of us who are here, that in every hour of our existence in which we are active, we commit tens of thousands of unholinesses for which conscience has never reproved us, because we have never seen them to be wrong, seeing we have not studied God’s laws as we ought to have done. Now, be it known to us all that sin is sin, whether we see it or not — that a sin secret to us is a sin as truly as if we knew it to be a sin, though not so great a sin in the sight of God as if it had been committed presumptuously, seeing that it lacks the aggravation of wilfulness. Let all of us who know our sins, offer the prayer after all our confessions: “Lord, I have confessed as many as I know, but I must add an etcetera after them, and say, ‘Cleanse me from secret faults.’ ”

      4. That, however, will not be the gist of my sermon this morning. I am going after a certain class of men who have sins not unknown to themselves, but secret to their fellow creatures. Every now and then we turn up a fair stone which lies upon the green grass of the professing church, surrounded with the verdure of apparent goodness, and to our astonishment we find beneath it all kinds of filthy insects and loathsome reptiles, and in our disgust at such hypocrisy, we are driven to exclaim, “All men are liars; there is not one in whom we can put any trust at all.” It is not fair to say so of all; but really, the discoveries which are made of the insincerity of our fellow creatures are enough to make us despise our kind, because they can go so far in appearances, and yet have so little soundness of heart. To you, sirs, who sin secretly, and yet make a profession; you break God’s covenants in the dark and wear a mask of goodness in the light — to you, sirs, who shut the doors and commit wickedness in secret — to you I shall speak this morning. Oh may God also be pleased to speak to you, and make you pray this prayer: “Cleanse me from secret faults.”

      5. I shall endeavour to urge upon all pretenders present to give up, to renounce, to detest, to hate, to abhor all their secret sins. And, first, I shall endeavour to show the folly of secret sins; secondly, the misery of secret sins; thirdly, the guilt of secret sins; fourthly, the danger of secret sins; and then I shall try to apply some words by way of remedy, that we may all of us be enabled to avoid secret sins.

      6. I. First, then, THE FOLLY OF SECRET SINS.

      7. Pretender, you are fair to look upon; your conduct is outwardly upright, amiable liberal, generous and Christian, but you do indulge in some sin which the eye of man has not yet detected. Perhaps it is private drunkenness. You do revile the drunkard when he staggers through the street; but you can indulge yourself in the same habit in private. It may be some other lust or vice; it is not for me just now to mention what it is. But, pretender, we say to you, you are a fool to think of harbouring a secret sin; and you are a fool for this one reason, that your sin is not a secret sin; it its known, and shall one day be revealed; perhaps very soon. Your sin is not a secret; the eye of God has seen it; you have sinned before his face. You have shut the door, and drawn the curtains, and kept out the eye of the sun, but God’s eye pierces through the darkness; the brick walls which surrounded you were as transparent as glass to the eye of the Almighty; the darkness which surrounded you was as bright as the summer’s noon to the eye of him who beholds all things. Do you not know, oh man, that “all things are naked and open to the eyes of him with whom we have to do?” As the priest ran his knife into the entrails of his victim, exposed the heart and liver, and whatever else lay within, so are you, oh man, seen by God, cut open by the Almighty; you have no secret chamber where you can hide yourself; you have no dark cellar where you can conceal your soul. Dig deep, indeed, deep as hell, but you cannot find earth enough upon the globe to cover your sin; if you could heap the mountains on its grave, those mountains would tell the tale of what was buried in their bowels. If you could cast your sin into the sea, a thousand babbling waves would tattle the secret. There is no hiding it from God. Your sin is photographed in high heaven; the deed when it was done was photographed upon the sky, and there it shall remain, and you shall see yourself one day revealed to the gazing eyes of all men, a hypocrite, a pretender, who sinned in fancied secret, observed in all your acts by the all seeing Jehovah. Oh what fools men are, to think they can, do anything in secret. This world is like the glass hives in which bees sometimes work: we look down upon them, and we see all the operations of the little creatures. So God looks down and sees all. Our eyes are weak; we cannot look through the darkness; but his eye, like an orb of fire, penetrates the blackness; and reads the thoughts of man, and sees his acts when he thinks himself most concealed. Oh; it would be a thought enough to curb us from all sin, if it were truly applied to us — “You, God, see me!” Stop thief! Drop what you have taken for yourself. God sees you! No eye of detection of earth has discovered you, but God’s eyes are now looking through the clouds upon you. Swearer! scarcely any for whom you care heard your oath; but God heard it; it entered into the ears of the Lord God of Sabaoth. Ah! you who lead a filthy life, and yet are a respectable merchant bearing among men a fair and goodly character; your vices are all known; written in God’s book. He keeps a diary of all your acts; and what will you think on that day when a crowd shall be assembled, compared with which this immense multitude is only a drop in a bucket, and God shall read out the story of your secret life, and men and angels shall hear it. I am certain there are none of us who would like to have all our secrets read, especially our secret thoughts. If I should select out of this congregation the most holy man, should bring him forward and say, “Now, sir, I know all your thoughts,