HH, Sir Godfrey Gregg D.Div

“Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.” Psalm 19:12

Our Utter Need of Christ

As I close this message, I am eager to suggest to you that our secret sins have one peculiar benefit. Above all other sins which we commit, they lead us to feel our utter need of Christ. Let me make that plain with a simple illustration. If some beautiful garden that you love is only disfigured by a weed or two, it is quite within your power to pull those weeds out though they may be tough as crabgrass or as venomous as poison ivy. But if the soil is bad and filled through and through with seeds–tangled with root-stocks of pestilential things–then cleaning it out is quite another matter.

My fellow Ministers, brothers and sisters, when you come to think of it, that is like the garden of your heart. If all that needs to be rooted out are a few habits, then do it in God’s Name, for you have the power to do it. But when you awake to the appalling certainty that down in your heart there is a world of sin, in that hour you realize your utter helplessness. Not what we know, but what we do not know, is the deepest cry of the human soul to Christ and that world unfathomed beneath the range of consciousness out of which spring sin and wickedness, adulteries and murders. You cannot reach that world which lies unseen, away deep down in your mysterious being, and yet unless it is reached and cleansed by somebody, you know there can never be a victory for you. It is just there that Jesus Christ draws near. He is able to save even to the uttermost. He is able and willing this very day to work a radical cleansing within you.