The Efficacy and Joy of Repentance
Bishop Wm. Alexander. Luke 15:11-32 And he said, A certain man had two sons:… I. THE PARABLE. It can stand the two tests which Byron declared to be decisive upon the merit of literary creations. It pleases immediately, and it pleases permanently. The rose needs no essay to prove that it is a rose. This is fragrant with the breath of Christ, and coloured with the summer of His touch. 1. The prodigal's sin. (1) In its origin it is selfishness. (2) In its progress it is dissipation. (3) In its result, sin is famine and degradation: in action, the life of the stye, which is sensuality; in thought, the system of the stye, which is materialism. One of the citizens of that country sends him "into the fields to feed swine."(4) But the essence of his sin is the miserable determination to remove as far as possible from his father's presence. 2. The prodigal's repentance. "He came to Himself." He had been outside his true self before. When a man finds himself, he finds God. 3. The reception of the lost son. For every step the sinner takes towards God, God takes ten towards him. We will not dwell upon the particulars of that great reception. Enough to mention "the first stole"; the ring of honour; the shoes forbidden to slaves; the sacrificial feast; the father's voice passing into the chant of a wondrous liturgy; and seen and heard across the darkening fields by the elder brother as he unwillingly faces homeward the long line of festal light, the symphony of instruments, and the choirs of dancers. II. CHARACTERISTICS OF REPENTANCE. 1. Its efficacy. Not in the nature of things; not inherent in it. The sinner is in an awful land, where every rock is literally a "rock of ages"; where the facts which some men call spiritual are bound by a fatal succession quite as much as the facts which all men call material; where God is frozen into an icicle, and no tender touch of miracle can come from His law-stiffened fingers; where two and two always make four, and your sin always finds you out. To remove this impotence and inefficacy of repentance, Jesus lived and died. Repentance is His indulgence, flung down from the balcony by our great High Priest. Repentance is His gift; the efficacy of repentance is His secret. 2. Its joy. (1) There are two considerations which have always been urged by masters of the spiritual life. (a) To judge the inner life only by the joy of which it is conscious is a sort of spiritual epicureanism. "The tears of penitents are the wine of angels"; but they were not intended to intoxicate those who shed them. (b) Past sin, even when its guilt is pardoned, has penal consequences upon the inner life. It continues in the memory with its poisoned springs and in the imagination with its perilous susceptibilities. (2) Yet they know not the mind of God to whom penitence is only bitter. There are "Tears that sweeter far Than the world's mad laughter are."There is a triumphant, a victorious delight, which leads the will along the narrow way, and will not be gainsaid. It is a mutilated Miserere which omits the verse "Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the hones which Thou hast broken may rejoice." By one of those apparent contradictions which lies at the root of the Christian life, a perpetual yearning after pardon is consistent with a perpetual serenity of hope. God would mould His penitents that they may combine sorrow with joy; that they may hear at once a sigh in the depths of their souls, and a music far away. There must be in the renewed nature something of the iron that has been moulded in His furnace, and something of the rose which has been expanded in His sunshine. The life of Frederick the Great, by a writer of transcendent genius, contains incidentally a record of the death of an English general defeated in Canada. Twice only did the unhappy officer rouse himself out of the mortal stupor into which he fell from a broken heart. Once he sighed heavily — "Who would have thought it?" Many days after he said with more animation — "Another time we will do better." And then " the cataracts of soft, sweet sleep" rushed down upon the weary man. Do not these two sentences give us this view of the twofold aspect of repentance? — the first, the humiliation of the beaten soldier as he comes to himself; the second, his hope through Christ as he catches the music of the march of victory. (Bishop Wm. Alexander.) Parallel Verses KJV: And he said, A certain man had two sons: WEB: He said, "A certain man had two sons.