AI-assisted analysis for orientation; read the source transcript or listen to the sermon to evaluate the interpretation.
The sermon presents sin as especially heinous when committed by people who have received God’s mercy, forgiveness, spiritual gifts, and covenant love. Spurgeon grounds conviction primarily in grace: believers should hate sin because Christ has loved, cleansed, and adorned them, not because they are merely threatened by the law. Christ’s atoning blood provides full pardon, but grace never makes sin trivial or acceptable. The proper response is grateful humility, mourning over continuing sin, repentance, and the consecration of every divine gift to God’s glory.
Theological center: God saves and cleanses undeserving sinners through Christ’s atoning blood, and this grace intensifies rather than diminishes the believer’s obligation to hate sin.
Applications: Hate sin because of grace · Repent before the Lord · Use God’s gifts for His glory · View sin through grace
Primary texts: Ezekiel 16:2 · Ezekiel 16:5 · Ezekiel 16:11
“Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations.” Ezekiel 16:1-2 AND how think you the prophet proceed in order to accomplish the solemn commission which had been thus entrusted to him? Did he begin by reminding the people of the law which was delivered to Moses on the top of Sinai? Did he picture to them the exceeding fearfulness and quaking of the leader of Israel’s host when he received that stony law in the midst of thunders and lightning? Or did he, do you think, proceed to point out to them the doom which must inevitably befall them, because they had broken the divine law, and violated God’s holy statutes? No, my brethren, if he had been about to show to the then unprivileged gentiles their iniquity, he might have proceeded on legal grounds, he was now however about to deal with Jerusalem, the highly favored city, and here he does not bring to their mind the law, he does not begin dealing out lawthunders to them at all, he fetches obligations as his arguments to convince them of sin from the grace of God, rather than from the law of God. And my brethren, as I am about this evening to address you who profess to be followers of the Son of God, and who by faith have “fled for refuge to the hope set before you in the gospel”—as my business is to convince you of sin, I shall not begin by taking you to Sinai—I shall not attempt to show you what the law is, and what that penalty is which devolves upon every man that breaks it. But feeling that you are not under the law, but under grace, I shall draw arguments from the grace of God, from His Gospel, from the favor which He has shown to you—arguments more powerful than any which can be fetched from the law, to show you the greatness of your sin, and the abomination of any iniquity which you have committed against the Lord your God. I shall take Ezekiel’s method as my model, and proceed to copy it thus—first, let us consider the abomination of our sin, aggravated as it is by the remembrance of what we were when the Lord first looked upon us, secondly, let us see our sins in another light—in the light of what the Lord has made us since those happy days, and then, let us proceed to notice what our sins have themselves been, and we shall have, I think, three great lamps which may cast a terrible light on the great wickedness of our sins. I. First then, let us consider our iniquities—I mean those committed since conversion, those committed yesterday, and the day before, and today—and let us see their sinfulness in the light of what WE WERE WHEN THE LORD FIR…