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Self-examination
Spurgeon, "THE SAINT AND HIS SAVIOR"
Self-examination is clearly the most important
and most neglected of all religious exercises.
If we are in Christ, all that heaven knows of unimaginable
bliss, of inconceivable glory, of unutterable ecstasy, shall
be ours most richly to enjoy.
But if death shall find us without Christ, horrors surpassing
thought, terrors beyond the dreams of despair, and tortures
above the guess of misery, must be our doleful, desperate doom.
Do not believe yourself to be truly converted unless you abhor
sin in all its stages, from the embryo to the ripe fruit, and
in all its shades, from the commonly allowed lust down to the
open and detested crime.
Christ does not allow even the most insignificant spider of lust
to spin its cobweb on the walls of his temple.
All heinous sins and private sins, youthful sins and manhood's
sins, sins of omission and of commission, of word and of deed,
of thought and of imagination, sins against God or against man-
all will combine like a nest of serpents in the desert to frighten
the newborn child of heaven; and he will desire to see the head
of every one of them broken beneath the heel of the destroyer of
evil, Jesus, the seed of the woman.
Do not believe yourself to be truly awakened unless you abhor
sin in all its stages, from the embryo to the ripe fruit, and
in all its shades, from the commonly allowed lust down to the
open and detested crime.
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