Sinner

“ All our good deeds and bad, weighty and trivial, aye, even every idle word, all our thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions, and the deeds of others in which we were either concerned or implicated — all are there recorded for or against us, and by them shall we be judged. And if the just man trembles for his fate and is barely saved, what shall we say of the sinner? ”

“ I wish to confine myself to one of its circumstances, which has always appeared to me as the most proper to make an impression on the heart: it is the manifestation of consciences.
Now, behold my whole design. On this earth the sinner never knows himself such as he is, and is only half-known to men; he lives, in general, unknown to himself, through his blindness, and to others through his dissimulation and cunning. In that grand day he will know himself, and will be known. The sinner laid open to himself, the sinner laid open to all creatures! ”

“ Who would ever tremble beneath the lash of a fiery reproach, and own, as it quivered over him, that there was justice in the terror of its look? Rather must the sinner feel himself the victim of a cruel doom ”

“ This in the hand of God and of those whom he hath sent, pierces through all the folds of a deceitful heart, and divides asunder even the soul and spirit, yea, as it were, the very joints and marrow. By this is the sinner discovered to himself. All his fig-leaves are torn away, and he sees that he is wretched and poor and miserable and blind and naked. The law flashes conviction on every side. He feels himself a mere sinner. He has nothing to pay. ”

“ The sinner's head with its politics conceives mischief, contrives it with a great deal of art, lays the plot deep, and keeps it close; the sinner's heart with its passions travails with iniquity, and is in pain to be delivered of the malicious projects it is hatching against the people of God. ”

“ Ah! sinner, sinner, it is he, our God, who shoots us through and through with the sharp sweetness of his power. It is our God who scatters the arrows of his wrath; but they are winged with the plumes of the dove, the feathers of softness, and the Gospel. Oh! the promises! the promises!—Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Yes, patriarch of white hairs, of wasted cheeks, and tottering step! the burden bears you down almost to the ground to-day—into the ground to-morrow. Here stands the Judge to give you rest. ”

“ From you, from your philanthropy! You brought the sinner with you in your head, therefore you found him, therefore you inserted him everywhere. Do not call men sinners, and they are not: you alone are the creator of sinners; you, who fancy that you love men, are the very one to throw them into the mire of sin, the very one to divide them into vicious and virtuous, into men and un-men, the very one to befoul them with the [Pg 482] slaver of your possessedness; for you love not men, but man. But I tell you, you have never seen a sinner, you have only—dreamed of him. ”

“ Thus, we always carry within us an incorruptible judge, who incessantly adopts the cause of virtue against our dearest inclinations; who blends with our most headstrong passions the troublesome ideas of duty; and who renders us unhappy even amidst all our pleasures and abundance.
Such is the state of an impure and a sullied conscience. The sinner is the secret and constant accuser of himself; go where he will, he carries a torment within which the hand of man cannot allay. ”

“ Oh, what horror! To offer to God a soul which has already been a thousand times prostituted to the Devil! Oh, my God, how blind the sinner is, and all the more blind in that he does not know himself nor even want to know himself! Was I not right at the beginning to tell you that the prayer of the sinner is nothing other than a tissue of lies and of contradictions? That is so true that the Holy Ghost tells us Himself that the prayer of the sinner who does not wish to renounce his sin is an execration in the eyes of the Lord. ”

“ Now, my dear girl, this is only an evidence of vanity. You are by no means the greatest sinner that ever lived, and you give yourself pleasure, and do not mortify yourself when you say so. If you face the situation you will realize that your sins are mean, nasty, petty little ones—that you do not commit great sins, that you are not tempted to, and that you are telling what is an absolute untruth when you call yourself the greatest sinner in the world. ”

“ A lady said to me the other day, ‘We all do so many things we know are wrong.’ Do we? That seems to me a cowardly way to live. Surely we do what we think right however mistaken we may be. Why go through those struggles with your conscience? why accept the sacrifice for yourself, the denial of your wishes, and yet think yourself a sinner? ”

“ O wretched and foolish sinner, who sometimes fearest the countenance of an angry man! What answer wilt thou make to God, who knoweth all thy wickedness?
Why dost thou not provide for thyself against that great day of judgment, when no man can excuse or answer for another, but every one shall have enough to answer for himself? ”

“ The sinner is like a man parched with thirst, and standing in the middle of a fountain: because the waters which surround him do not enter to satisfy his thirst, he remains in the midst of them more thirsty than before. ”

“ Hardened and impenitent sinner! the measure of your iniquity is full: the 321 price of crime has been paid: here shall your spirit dwell for ever, and for ever. You have dreamed away life’s joyous hour, nor made atonement for error, nor denied yourself aught that the fair earth presented you. ”

“ I still remain the sinner, fundamentally and potentially at every step the sinner. But Love and Grace surround the sinner. Love and Grace save the sinner from himself: Love and Grace can beautify and make the sinner shine. ”

“ Only the sinner has a right to preach. ”

“ Shall I dare, in the presence of Thy glance so infinitely pure, commit deeds which I dare not even show to man? Shall I dare to sin in Thy presence, knowing that sin and the sinner is hated by Thee, and to condemn the sinner Thou hast no wish? ”

“ There are, as it were, two things, man and sinner. That thou
art called man, is God’s doing; that thou art called sinner, is man’s own doing. Blot out what thou hast done, that God may save what He has done. ”

“ But whatever she thought, this is what I think; the poor harlot, the wretched sinner who is yet above the righteous, who is weighed down by the sins of the world, the poor outcast and her terrible accusation shall never die in my soul! ”

“ Indeed the poet says that when men disregard justice they injure the gods, and more than once sin is spoken of as a disease of the mind. The sinner is a vain creature, laboring under a delusion which oftentimes springs from o’erweening pride and is doomed to bear tears for its fruit. ”

“ But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his unregenerate state served but to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him, a little turned, to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men. ”

“ What first gives rise to the justification of the sinner?
God by grace enlightens the sinner, and excites him to turn to Him.
15. What must the sinner do on his part, in order to attain to justification? ”

“ In the picture of the expiring sinner, you will see in what the world, with all its glory and pleasures, terminates; from the recital of the last moments of the righteous man, you will learn to what virtue conducts, in spite of all its momentary checks and troubles. In the one, you will see the world from the eyes of a sinner in the moment of death ”

“ That sinner is thy most ignoble name,
And thy inheritance, eternal shame,
Because that sin has been thy wretched choiee,
And in it still thy wicked powers rejoiee.
Just as the duck, or speckled, black, or white,
In dirty water has its great delight,
So man, in station high, or mid, or low,
To sin’s foul puddle will be sure to go. (Job xv. 16.)
Now while thy powers of contemplation dwell
On that poor convict in yon dismal cell,
I pray thee to bestow a thought on one,—
A wretched convict few ere think upon,—
I mean thyself, O thou condemned of Heaven! ”

“ When grace recalls a common sinner, the fruit of his conversion is limited to himself; but when it singles out a grand sinner, a Lazarus, long dead and corrupted, ah! the designs of its mercy are then much more extensive; in one change it prepares a thousand to come; it raises up a thousand out of one; and the crimes of a sinner become the seed of a thousand just. You give way to despondency in feeling the extremity of your wretchedness ”

“ The reflections and reproaches of the sinner's own conscience are the worm that dieth not; which will cleave to the damned soul as the worms do to the dead body, and prey upon it, and never leave it till it is quite devoured. ”

“ So that for a sinner to pretend to appoint the atonement for his own sins, or to think himself able to tell what it ought to be, is as foolish and vain a presumption, as if man in innocence should have pretended to appoint his own method of being changed into a cherub. ”

“ Every one, they say, who is a sinner, who is devoid of understanding, who is a child, and, to speak generally, whoever is unfortunate, him will the kingdom of God receive. Do you not call him a sinner, then, who is unjust, and a thief, and a housebreaker, and a poisoner, and a committer of sacrilege, and a robber of the dead? What others would a man invite if he were issuing a proclamation for an assembly of robbers? ”

“ He persistently dwells in the sinner until the sinner wakes up in His likeness and is satisfied with it; He enters into the shadows and holds them until they become first as the morning clouds fingered by the earliest rays of the rising sun, and eventually as the brightness of the noonday light. ”

“ To put pressure on others to do wrong; to urge them to trifle with their consciences, or knowingly to violate them; to press them to give a vote against their convictions;—all such methods of disturbing conscience and drawing men into crooked ways, what sin they involve! And when a man of great influence employs it with hundreds and thousands of people in such ways, twisting consciences, disturbing self-respect, bringing down Divine displeasure, how forcibly we are reminded of the proverb, "One sinner destroyeth much good"! ”

“ But sin snapped the bond, and the word sinner stands for one who has broken away from the moral law of God; every sinner seeketh rebellion.
II. A sinner is a restless being. He seeks rebellion. These words seem to depict the restless character of the ungodly man. ”

“ J. Why, Mr. Richard what do you think? All are sinners, and surely you are not one of the best among us.
D. What do you mean by a sinner?
J. A sinner is one who does not fear God, who tells lies, who steals, who is disobedient to his parents, who delights to keep company with wicked persons, and who does not keep holy the Sabbath-day.
D. Why, if these are all sinners there is a fine lot of them in our neighbourhood, and perhaps after all you are one of them, Miss Jenny.
J. Yes, it is too true, I am a sinner, but—then—I know from the Bible what God has done for me. ”

“ But what if the sinner be blinded and hardened in his sin?
A. Nothing is more deplorable than the state of a blinded and hardened sinner. A blinded sinner is one who has taken up some false and dangerous opinions, and is so positive and fixed in them, that he shuts his eyes to everything that can undeceive him. ”

“ But must one always be a sinner to do a wicked thing? Can't a saint do a wicked thing, and a sinner do a good thing without being called the one or the other?"
"I don't think you need apologize for not being able to make phrases. I suppose you'd say there is neither absolute saintliness nor absolute wickedness, but that life is helplessly composite of both, and that black really may be white. ”

“ Law's Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life: “You may justly condemn yourself for being the greatest sinner that you know, 1. Because you know more of the folly of your own heart than of other people's, and can charge yourself with various sins which you know only of yourself and cannot be sure that others are guilty of them. ”

“ PRESUMPTION AS THE LAST CONSOLATION.—When we so interpret a misfortune, an intellectual defect, or a disease that we see therein our predestined fate, our trial, or the mysterious punishment of our former misdeeds, we thereby make our nature interesting and exalt ourselves in imagination above our fellows. The proud sinner is a well-known figure in all religious sects. ”

“ It is not only that you thank God that you are not as other men, but you are so bent on making the rest of us call out 'Miserable sinner!' very loudly and humbly. And we don't believe it. Why should we? ”

“ They might have done it, but they did not; they acknowledged their sin, but did not put it away. This is the general way of mankind. "God help us, we are all sinners!" is the general language of all people: but though to be a sinner is to be in the most solemn and awful circumstances, yet they are contented to bear the character, heedless of the consequences! ”

“ A sinner stands accused in his own conscience, and before God, therefore, to the end that we get no wrong, there is a twofold advocate given us, one in the earth, in our consciences, another in the heavens with God. ”

“ What an astonishing privilege, that a sinner should be permitted to cry, “Our Father!” Oh, still more stupendous mercy, that this poor ungrateful sinner should be exhorted, invited, nay, commanded, to pray—to pray importunately. That which great men most detest, namely, importunacy ”

“ Haste, ere the sinner shall expire!
Of all his guilt let him be shriven,
And smooth his path from earth to heaven. ”

“ It is natural for the evil to hate the good.—First, the sinner has an uneasy conscience, and it hurts him to come in contact with those whose character reminds him of what he ought to be, and might be, and perhaps once was. The diseased eye dreads the light. ”