Are You Going Back?
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Go and tell Jesus your backslidings. “My people are bent to backsliding from Me,” is the mournful language of God. “Our backslidings are many,” is the penitential acknowledgment of the Church. Backsliding, as the simple definition of the word intimates, is a going back. “They have gone backward and not forward,” says the Lord. How constantly do we recede in the ways of the Lord Jesus.
And if, through restraining grace, there are no outbreaks of sin, there yet may be the secret declension of the soul, the hidden backsliding of the heart, all concealed from human eye, yet “open to the eye of Him with whom we have to do.” Oh! How little vital religion, how little of the anointing of the Holy Spirit, of the power of real godliness, is there in the souls of many who yet at the Lord’s table solemnly profess themselves His!
Perhaps, my reader, you are awakened to a sense of your backsliding from the Lord. Startled by the discovery, alarmed at the symptoms, deploring the consequences, you exclaim: “Oh! That it were with me as in days that are passed, when the candle of the Lord shone round about me.” You think of the “love of your espousals”; of your “song in the days of your youth, in the day when you came up out of the land of Egypt”; of the “green pastures and the still waters,” and your heart dies within you.
Be it so—be it that you have wandered far from God, and that you have fallen by your iniquity; that you have pierced afresh the bosom of that Savior that has so often pillowed your head in weakness and grief; yet, go and tell Jesus! There is not in the universe a being who can so understand and sympathize with your case as He. Tell Him how your affections have strayed—how your love has chilled—how the spirit of prayer has waned in your soul, and what ascendancy the world, the creature, and self have obtained in your mind. Take with you words and turn to the Lord, say unto Him: “Take away all iniquity, and receive us graciously.”
In this connection of our remarks, we would venture upon an observation which relates closely to the happy and holy walk of the child of God. How many a believer in Jesus pursues his Christian course with a sad countenance, the reflection of a yet sadder heart, from the consciousness of the indwelling evil of his nature perpetually exhibiting itself in flaws, and failure, and dereliction, to which the eye of human affection is blind, but which to his own inspection are real, palpable and aggravated—not the less humiliating and abhorrent because unknown and unsuspected by all but himself.
The remedy, what is it? Going and telling Jesus! Oh! If there be one view of this privilege more precious, endearing, and sacred than another, it is the liberty of admitting Jesus to the deepest confidence of the heart, of unveiling to Him thoughts, imaginations, and emotions, which no inducement could persuade us to reveal to our most dear and intimate friend. Bending beneath the cross, the eye reposing in faith upon the Crucified, there is no heart-wandering, no mental emotion, no secret so profound, no sorrow so delicate, no perplexity so great, no guilt so aggravated which the lowly, penitent heart may not fully and freely tell Jesus.
It is the oversight of this truth that produces so much solitary grief in the minds of many of the Lord’s people. They forget what a Friend, what a Brother, what a Confidant, what a Savior they have in Jesus. They refuse to go and tell Him all; and thus, brooding over their failures and sins, nursing in loneliness their trials and sorrows, their “sore runs in the night, and their soul refuses to be comforted.”
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