Dear Friends,

While Christians in general are to be people of peace, there is one
thing they are not to be at peace with and that is sin! Today’s attached
devotional explains. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,

John Janney

• Psalm 119:104 (ESV)

  104 Through your precepts I get understanding;
  therefore I hate every false way.

“But let me ask myself, Have I detected the false way of my own heart? Little is done in spiritual religion, until my besetting sins are searched out. And let me not be satisfied with forbearance from the outward act. Sin my be restrained, yet not mortified; nor is it enough that I leave it for the present, but I must renounce it forever. Let me not part with it as with a beloved friend, with the hope and purpose of renewing my familiarity with it at a ‘more convenient season’ (Acts xxiv.25): but let me shake it from me, as Paul shook off the viper into the fire (Acts xxviii.5), with determination and abhorrence. What! can I wish to hold it? If through the precepts of God have got understanding, must not I listen to that solemn, pleading voice, ‘Oh! do not this abominable thing that I hate?’ (Jer. xliv.4.) No, Lord! let me ‘pluck it out’ of my heart, ‘and cast it from me.’ (Matt. v.29.) Oh, for the high blessing of a tender conscience! such as shrinks from the approach, and ‘abstains from all appearance of evil’ (1 Thess. v.22); not venturing to tamper with any self-pleasing way; but hating it as false, defiling, destructive! I have marked the apple of my eye ― that tenderest particle of my frame ― that it is not only offended by a blow or a wound; but that, if so much as an atom of dust find an entrance, it would smart, until it had wept it out. Now such may my conscience be ― sensitive to the slightest touch of sin ― not only fearful of resisting, rebelling, or ‘quenching the Spirit,’ but grieving for every though of sin that grieves that blessed Comforter ― that tender Friend! to hate every false way, so as to flee from it, is the highest proof of Christian courage. For never am I better prepared to ‘endure hardness as a gold soldier of Jesus Christ’ (2 Tim. ii.3), than when my conscience is thus set against sin. Would not I then submit to the greatest suffering, rather than be convicted of unfaithfulness to my God?

“Lord! turn my eyes, my heart, my feet, my ways, more and more to thy blessed self. Shed abroad thy love in my heart, that sin may be the daily matter of my watchfulness, grief, resistance, and crucifixion.” [Charles Bridges, Psalm 119, (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1857), p. 260-261]