It has ruined him, body and soul

(J. C. Philpot, "REVIEWS")

"In Him we have redemption through His blood,
 the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches
 of His grace." Ephesians 1:7

As no heart can sufficiently conceive, so no tongue
can adequately express, the state of wretchedness
and ruin into which sin has cast guilty, miserable man.

In separating him from God, it has severed him from
the only Source and fountain of all happiness and all
holiness. It has ruined him, body and soul. The body
it has filled with sickness and disease. The soul it has
defaced, and destroyed the image of God in which it
was created. It has . . .
  shattered all his mental faculties;
  broken his judgment,
  polluted his imagination,
  alienated his affections.

It has made him love sin--and hate God.

It has filled him from top to toe with pride, lust, and
cruelty, and has been the prolific parent of all those
crimes and abominations under which earth groans,
the bare recital of some of which has filled so many
hearts with disgust and horror. These are the more
visible fruits of the fall.

But nearer home, in our own hearts, in what we are or
have been, we find and feel what wreck and ruin sin
has made! There can be no greater mark of alienation
from God than willfully and deliberately to seek pleasure
and delight in things which His holiness abhors.

But who of the family of God has not been guilty here?
Every movement and inclination of our natural mind,
every desire and lust of our carnal heart, was, in times
past, to find pleasure and gratification in something
abhorrent to the will and word of the living Jehovah.

There are few of us who, in the days of our flesh, have
not sought pleasure in some of its varied but deceptive
forms. The theater, the race-course, the dance, the sports,
the card-table, the midnight revel, "the pleasures of sin"
were resorted to by some of us.

Our mad, feverish, thirst after excitement--the continued cry
of our wicked flesh, "Give, give!"--our miserable recklessness
or headlong, daring determination to 'enjoy ourselves', as we
called it, cost what it would, plunged us again and again
into the sea of sin, where, but for sovereign grace, we
would have sunk to rise no more!

Or, if the 'restraints of morality' put their check upon gross
and sinful pleasures, there still was a seeking after such
"allowable amusements" (as we deemed them), as change
of scene and place, foreign travel, the reading of novels and
works of fiction, fine dress, visiting, building up airy castles
of love and romance, studying how to obtain human applause,
devising plans of self-advancement and self-gratification,
occupying the mind with cherished studies, and delighting
ourselves in those pursuits for which we had a natural taste,
as music, drawing, poetry, or, it might be, severer studies
and scientific researches.

We have named these middle-class pursuits as less obvious
sins, than such gross crimes as drunkenness and vile debauchery
in the lower walks of life. But, viewed with a spiritual eye, all
are equally stamped with the same fatal brand of death in sin.

The moral and the immoral,
the refined and the unrefined,
the polished few or the crude many,
are alike "without God and without hope in the world."

We are often met with this question, "What harm is there
in this pursuit, or in that amusement?" The harm is, that
the amusement is delighted in for its own sake; that it
occupies the mind, and fills the thoughts, shutting God out;
that it renders spiritual things distasteful; that it sets up an
idol in the heart, and is made a substitute for God.

Now this we never really know nor feel, until divine light
illuminates the mind, and divine life quickens the soul.
We then begin to see and feel into what a miserable
state sin has cast us; how all our life long we have done
nothing but what God abhors; that every imagination of
the thoughts of our hearts has been evil, and only evil
continually; that we have brought ourselves under the
stroke of God's justice, under the curse of His righteous
law, and now there appears nothing but death and
destruction before our eyes, and unless we poor slaves
of sin, Satan, and death were redeemed, we could not
be reconciled to God.

"In Him we have redemption through His blood,
 the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches
 of His grace." Ephesians 1:7