Secret Sins

"Cleanse me from secret faults." Psalm 19:12

Self-righteousness arises partly from pride, but mainly from ignorance of God’s Law. It is because men know little or nothing concerning the solemn 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 himself self-righteous in God’s sight in virtue of his own deeds and thoughts.

Only let the Law be truly 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. David, having seen God’s Law and having praised it in this Psalm, which I have read in your hearing, 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."

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 each year to a 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 tell 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.

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 come not beneath our eyes. Oh if we had eyes like those of God, we would think very differently of 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 but 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 doubt not 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 sins 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 willfulness. Let all of us who know our sins offer this 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.’ "

That, however, will not be the essence 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 sward 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 are none 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 who 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. O may God also be pleased to speak to you and make you pray this prayer—"Cleanse me from secret faults."

I shall endeavor 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 endeavor 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.

I. First, then, the FOLLY of secret sins.

Pretender, you are fair to look upon. Your conduct is outwardly upright, amiable, liberal, generous and Christian. But you indulge in some sin which the eyes of man have not yet detected. Perhaps it is private drunkenness. You do revile the drunkard when he staggers through the street. But you can yourself indulge 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 unto you, you are a fool to think of harboring a secret sin and you are a fool for this one reason—that your sin is not a secret sin—it is knownand shall one day be revealed. Perhaps very soon.

Your sin is not a secret! The eyes of God have 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 did gird you was as bright as the summer’s noon to the eye of Him who beholds all things. Know you not, O 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, discovered the heart and liver and what else did lie within, so are you, O 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, yes, deep as Hell but you can not find earth enough upon the globe to cover your sin. If you should 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 tell the secret out.

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 did sin in fancied secret, observed in all your acts by the all-seeing Jehovah. O what fools men are, to think they can do anything in secret. This world is like the glass hives wherein 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 thought of man and sees his acts when he thinks himself most concealed.

Oh, it were a thought enough to curb us from all sin, if it were truly applied to us—"You, God, see me!" Stop thief! Drop that which you have taken! 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! Though none at whom you swore heard your oath, God heard it. It entered into the ears of the Lord God of Sabbath. And those who lead a filthy life and yet are respectable among men— your vices are all known.

They are 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 but a drop in a bucket and God shall read out the story of your secret life and men and angels shall hear it? Certain I am 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. If I should bring him forward and say, "Now, Sir, I know all your thoughts and am about to tell them," I am sure he would offer me the largest bribe that he could gather if I would be pleased to conceal at least some of them.

"Tell," he would say, "of my acts—of them I am not ashamed. But do not tell my thoughts and imaginations—of them I must ever stand ashamed before God." What, then, Sinner, will be your shame when your private lusts, your closet transgressions, your secret crimes shall be heralded from God’s Throne, proclaimed by His own mouth and with a voice louder than a thousand thunders preached in the ears of an assembled world? What will be your terror and confusion then, when all the deeds you have done shall be proclaimed in the face of the sun, in the ears of all mankind? O renounce the foolish hope of heresy, for your sin is this day recorded and shall one day be advertised upon the walls of Heaven.

II. In the next place, let us notice the MISERY of secret sins.

Of all sinners the man who makes a profession of religion and yet lives in iniquity is the most miserable. A downright wicked man, who takes a glass in his hand and says, "I am a drunkard, I am not ashamed of it," he shall be unutterably miserable in worlds to come. But brief though it is, he has his hour of pleasure. A man who curses and swears and says, "That is my habit, I am a profane man," and makes a profession of it, he has, at least, some peace in his soul. But the man who walks with God’s minister, who is united with God’s Church, who comes out before God’s people and unites with them and then lives in sin—what a miserable existence he must have!

Why, he has a worse existence than the mouse that is in the parlor, running out now and then to pick up the crumbs and then back again to his hole. Such men must run out now and then to sin. And, oh, how fearful they are to be discovered! One day, perhaps, their character turns up. With wonderful cunning they manage to conceal and gloss it over but the next day something else comes and they live in constant fear, telling lie after lie, to make the last lie appear truthful— adding deception to deception—in order that they may not be discovered—

"Oh, ‘tis a tangled web we weave,
When once we venture to deceive,"

If I must be a wicked man give me the life of a boisterous sinner who sins before the face of day. If I must sin let me not act as a hypocrite and a coward. Let me not profess to be God’s and spend my life for the devil. That way of cheating the devil is a thing which every honest sinner will be ashamed of. He will say, "If I serve my master I will serve him out and out, I will have no sham about it. If I make a profession, I will carry it out but if I do not, if I live in sin, I am not going to gloss it over by cant and hypocrisy." One thing which has hamstringed the Church and cut her very sinews in two has been this most damnable hypocrisy.

Oh, in how many places have we seen men whom you might praise to the very skies if you could believe their words— but whom you might cast into the nethermost pit if you could see their secret actions? God forgive any of you who are so acting! I had almost said I can scarce forgive you. I canforgive the man who riots openly and makes no profession of being better. But the man who fawns and cants and pretends and prays and then lives in sin—that man I hate—I cannot bear him. I abhor him from my very soul. If he will turn from his ways, I will love him but in his hypocrisy he is to me the most loathsome of all creatures.

‘Tis said the toad does wear a jewel in her head but the hypocrite has none but bears filthiness about him—while he pretends to be in love with righteousness. A mere profession, my Hearers, is but painted pageantry to go to Hell in. It is like the plumes upon the hearse and the trappings upon the black horses which drag men to their graves—the funeral array of dead souls. Take heed above everything of a waxen profession that will not stand the sun. Take care of all that needs to have two faces to carry it out. Be one thing, or else the other. If you make up your mind to serve Satan, do not pretend to serve God. And if you serve God, serve Him with all your heart.

"No man can serve two masters." Do not try it, do not endeavor to do it, for no life will be more miserable than that. Above all beware of committing acts which it will be necessary to conceal. There is a singular poem by Hood, called "The Dream of Eugene Aram"—a most remarkable piece it is, indeed, illustrating the point on which I am now dwelling. Aram has murdered a man and cast his body into the river—"a sluggish water, black as ink, the depth was so extreme." The next morning he visited the scene of his guilt—

"And sought the black accursed pool,
With a wild misgiving eye;
And he saw the dead in the river bed,
For the faithless stream was dry."

Next he covered the corpse with heaps of leaves but a mighty wind swept through the wood and left the secret bare before the sun—

"Then down I cast me on my face,
And first began to weep,
For I knew my secret then was one
That earth refused to keep.
On land or sea though it should be
Ten thousand fathoms deep."

In plaintive notes he prophesies his own discovery. He buried his victim in a cave and trod him down with stones but when years had run their weary round the foul deed was discovered and the murderer put to death. Guilt is a "grim chamberlain," even when fingers are not bloody red. Secret sins bring fevered eyes and sleepless nights until men burn out their consciences and become in very deed ripe for the pit. Hypocrisy is a hard game to play at, for it is one deceiver against many observers. And for certain it is a miserable trade, which will earn at last, as its certain climax, a tremendous bankruptcy.

Ah, you who have sinned without discovery, "Be sure your sin will find you out." And remember, it may find you out before long. Sin, like murder, will come out—men will even tell tales about themselves in their dreams. God has sometimes made men so pricked in their consciences that they have been obliged to come forward and confess the crime. Secret sinner! If you want the foretaste of damnation upon earth, continue in your secret sin, for no man is more miserable than he who sins secretly and yet tries to preserve a character.

Yonder stag, followed by the hungry hounds with open mouths, is far more happy than the man who is followed by his sins. Yonder bird, taken in the fowler’s net and laboring to escape, is far more happy than he who has weaved around himself a web of deception and labors to escape from it day by day by making the toils more thick and the web more strong. Oh, the misery of secret sins! Truly, one may pray, "Cleanse me from secret faults."

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