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The sermon teaches that God’s law reaches the thoughts and motives of the inner person, leaving no basis for self-righteousness. Hidden sin is still fully known and condemned by God, and attempts to conceal it produce misery, hypocrisy, and eventual exposure. Spurgeon urges hearers to forsake sin, count the cost of following Christ, and respond immediately to the gospel. He presents Christ as the refuge for sinners who believe, while warning that those who remain outside Christ will face terrifying judgment.
Theological center: God’s holy law exposes the guilt of inward and outward sin, while salvation and cleansing are found only through turning to Christ and believing in Him.
Applications: Examine your hidden sins · Abandon secret sin · Choose Christ deliberately · Believe in Christ
Primary texts: Psalm 19:12 · Mark 16:16
“Cleanse thou me from secret faults.” Psalm 19:12 SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS arises partly from pride but mainly from ignorance of God’s law. It is because men know little or nothing concerning the terrible character of the divine law that they foolishly imagine themselves to be righteous. They are not aware of the deep spirituality and the stern severity of the law, or they would have other and wiser notions. Once let them know how strictly the law deals with the thoughts, how it brings itself to bear upon every emotion of the inner man, and there is not one creature beneath God’s heaven who would dare to think himself self-righteous in God’s sight in virtue of his own deeds and thoughts. Only let the law be truly revealed to a man, let him know how strict the law is, and how infinitely just, and his selfrighteousness will shrivel into nothing—it will become a filthy rag in his sight, whereas before he thought it to be a goodly garment. Now, David, having seen God’s law and having praised it in this Psalm, which I have read in your hearing, he is brought, by reflecting on its excellency, to utter this thought, “Who can understand his errors?” and then to offer this prayer, “Cleanse thou me from secret faults.” In the Lateran Council of the Church of Rome, a decree was passed that every true believer must confess his sins, all of them, once each year to a priest, and they affixed to it this declaration, that there is no hope of pardon but in complying with that decree. What can equal the absurdity of such a decree as that? Do they suppose that they can tell their sins as easily as they can count their fingers? Why, if we could receive pardon for all our sins by telling every sin we have committed in one hour, there is not one of us who would be able to enter heaven, since, besides the sins that are known to us and that we may be able to confess, there are a vast mass of sins which are as truly sins as those which we observe, but which are secret and come not beneath our eyes. Oh if we had eyes like those of God, we should think very differently of ourselves. The sins that we see and confess are but like the farmer’s small samples which he brings to market, when he has left his granary full at home. We have but a very few sins which we can observe and detect, compared with those which are hidden to ourselves and unseen by our fellow creatures. I doubt not it is true of all of us who are here, that in every hour of our existence in which we are active, we commit tens of thousands of unholinesses for which conscience has never reproved us, because we have never se…