Secret Sins! # 2

Secret Sins! # 2

Sin is like a candle, where the shining is first within and then bursting out at the windows. Sin is like boils and ulcerous, corrupt, putrid sores below the skin. They are first inside the skin, and afterwards they break out to the view on the outside. So it is with sin. It is a malignant internal cancer, diffusing itself into several secret acts and workings within the mind. Often it breaks out and dares manifest itself to the eye of the world.

But why should we desire to be cleansed from secret sins, from either secret evil thoughts or secret evil desires? Because secret sins will become public sins, if they are not dealt with. If you do not suppress them in their root, you shall shortly see them break out in the fruit. 

Let a man set up any sin in delightful contemplation and meditation, and that same inward acting of his sins eventually casts him upon the outward actings of them. This is the least that it does. Sins nurtured in the mind, often ripen into open sin in the life.

Besides that, secret sin prepares him for a temptation that suits his evil thoughts. satan shall not need to tempt him much, who has already tempted himself. 

Secret sins are apt to deceive us most. They are most apt to prevail with us:

First, because we do not have that strict and spiritual judgment of inward sins, like we do of outward sins. Many times we conceive of them as no sins at all, or else as slight sins. To draw a sword and run a man through the heart - O this is a fearful murder! To draw a false word and to pierce through his good name slanderously - we also imagine that this may be bad. But to kill a man with malicious thoughts, with revengeful plots and desires, nay, this is scarcely thought as a sinful matter, or at least very excusable.

Beloved, it is the nature of sins of thought to imagine that they are a mere trifle, and not sins at all. 

Most sinners shun sin in outward respects. They do not live in and visibly commit such sins because they fear the shame and are afraid of punishment. No law of man can reach, and no eye of man can search, into our secret sinnings!

In secret sins, there are at least three horrible sins that you commit at once: First, perhaps that very sin which you would so conceal, may be a sin of the deepest dye. Yes, mark this: the most damnable sins are usually such that are committed in secret, as Sodom's adulteries, and such fearful kinds of pollutions, murders, and blasphemies, etc.

Second, hypocrisy, which is a screen to your sin - is a holy cover for an unholy heart! This makes the sinner so much the more vile in God's eyes, by how much the more that he not only sins against God, but wrests, as it were, something from God to cover and palliate his rebellion against Him.

A third is atheism. Even if he is not a formal atheist - yet he is a virtual atheist. It is as if God were not God in secret, but only in public. It is as if God could see in the light, and not in the darkness. It is as if God's eye is as the eye of a man - whereas He is a universal eye and sees everything.

Out occasions to sin, can incline to secret sinnings.  Beloved, there lies a snare against us in almost all society with men. We have such vile natures that as a spark of fire will easily kindle a box of dry tinder - just a word spoken, many times, kindles a world of evil passion, of malice, of revenge within us! Yes, a look often begets in us secret disdain and discontent! Yes, the casting of an eye may inflame the heart with excess of lust. Need we not then, putting all these things together, to search our inward frame to see what care we should have about and against secret sinnings?

~Obadiah Sedgwick~

(The End)