Dear Friends,
I was reading just recently the death-bed scenes of Ebenezer Erskine and was struck by the balance of one of his replies to a friend who had come to visit him. “Are you not afraid of your sins?” his friend asked him; “indeed no,” he answered, “ever since I knew Christ I have never thought highly of my frames and duties, nor am I slavishly afraid of my sins.” There is a tremendous equilibrium in that answer, and the maturity of it should not be lost on any of us.
The devil normally employs two tactics with us to get our eyes off the all-sufficiency of Christ’s redeeming work for our souls. On the one hand, he endeavours to get us all caught-up with our “frames and duties,” while on the other, he endeavours to get us all cast-down with our sins and shortcomings.
When he gets us all caught up with our frames and duties, of course, it is not long before he is leading us by the nose on to the boggy ground of self-sufficiency and self-righteousness. What he has caused us to do in that case is to apportion a good part of our hope and trust in how we feel - our frames; or in what we do – our duties.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that we are not to “feel.” Indeed, no:
Something must be known and felt."
Nor does it mean that we must ever rest on a faith that is not productive of good works and efforts to the glory of Jesus Christ our Lord. But both our feelings and our works – our “frames” and our “duties” – must never be viewed or estimated outwith the shadow of the Cross of Calvary.
The same thing also applies when it comes to our sins and shortcomings. There is nothing more dangerous or debilitating for a Christian’s well-being and usefulness than the inability to rise above their sin to the place of forgiveness in Jesus Christ the Lord. It is one thing to sin; and we all sin, and fall short of the glory of God, on numerous occasions. But it must always be remembered that there is no sin more sinful than the sin of refusing to take God’s means of forgiveness for our sins through the sufficiency of our Redeemer’s blood. “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us; but if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins …”
For professing Christians to labour under the guilt of sin when God has provided a ready means of forgiveness is to simply ape their unregenerate days when they refused that means of forgiveness in the first place. It is a sad thing when the “principle” of Christ’s words to the unbelievers can be applied to His own people as well – “Ye will not come unto me, that ye might have life!”
Old Ebenezer Erskine was right in refusing to think over-highly of his frames and duties; and he was just as right in refusing to be slavishly cast down and afraid of his sins. His good duties never brought him near to God, in the first place, nor need his bad duties (his sins) necessarily keep him from God, all the days of his life. He knew himself “accepted in the beloved” from the beginning to end, and was of the same mind as Mr Luther before him – “Beware, not only of thy sins, but of thy good duties.” Beware of anything that takes your eyes off the all-sufficiency of Christ.
Beware of those “frames and duties” that would erode in your thinking even by a fraction, the total necessity that we have of Christ to bring us to God. Beware of the bondage of sins committed that would erode in your thinking, even by a fraction, the total willingness that we have in Christ to bring us back to God.
We might well pray – “Lord, forbid that I should think that I have done so well, or feel so well, that I don’t need Christ so much in my life: Lord, forbid that I should think that I have done so bad, or feel so bad, that I can’t have Christ any more in my life.”