Remember Who You Were
We must not forget both who we were and who we are.
When the apostle says that we “were by nature the children of wrath,” he means that we were born so. David expressed what is true of us all when he said, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Our first parent, Adam, sinned and fell as the representative of the whole human race. “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men.” If any object to this principle of representation, that does not affect its truth, and I would also remind them that, by this very principle of representation, a way was left open for our restoration.
At first, we fell not by our own fault; so now, by grace, we rise not by our own merit. Death by sin came to us through Adam ere we were born, so did life come to us through Christ Jesus. Thus our first text sets before us this terrible fact,—as true as it is terrible, and as terrible as it is true,—that we were by nature under the wrath of God from the very first. The whole race of mankind was regarded by God as descended from an attainted traitor; we were all born “children of wrath.”
Education may restrain it, imitation of a good example may have some power in holding the monster down; but the very best of us, apart from the grace of God, placed under certain circumstances which would cause the evil within us to be developed rather than restrained, would soon prove to a demonstration that our nature was evil, and only evil, and that continually. You may take a bag of gunpowder, and play with it if you care to do so, for it is quite harmless as long as you keep the fire from it; but put just one spark of fire to it, and then you will discover the force for evil that was latent in that innocent-looking powder.
Can you look back with complacency upon the days of your unregeneracy? I feel sure that you cannot think of the sins that you committed then without weeping over them; and especially sorrowing over that sin which so many forget,—the sin of not believing on the Son of God, the sin of so long rejecting the Saviour, the sin of not yielding to the gentle calls of his grace, the sin of bolting and barring the door of your heart while he stood without, and cried, “Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.” But we would not rise, and let him in. What a horrible sin it was not to see the loveliness of Christ, and not to admire the infinitude of his love! Had we not been sinful by nature and by practice too, our opposition or our indifference would have been melted by the coming of Jesus, and we should at once have opened our hearts to receive him.
Do not forget that you also were a child of wrath, even as she is. You have a friend who ridicules the gospel, even though he comes with you to listen to it. Yet you were an heir of wrath, even as he is; and if it had not been for the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, you also would have been only a hearer and not a doer of the Word; you would have been like so many others in this congregation, and you might have said, with Cowper,—
“I hear, but seem to hear in vain.
Insensible as steel.”
As you pass along the street, you see such sights and hear such language that you are shocked and horrified that men and women can so grievously sin against the God who made them, and who still permits them to live; yet do not look down upon them with an affectation of superior holiness and say, “What shameful sinners those people are in comparison with us!” but rather say, “We, too, were by nature the children of wrath, even as others still are.”
It does us good to remember what we used to be. There was no reason in us, by nature, why we should be made the children of God. There were in us no distinguishing traits of character by which we were separated from our fellow-sinners. We ran in the same course; we were possessed by the same spirit; we wrought the same works; we had the same nature; we were under the same condemnation: “children of wrath, even as others.”