the work of the Holy Spirit to
convict men of sin_. That is, to so convince of their error in respect to
sin as to produce a deep sense of personal guilt. We have the first
recorded fulfillment of this promise in Acts ii. 36, 37, "Therefore let
all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same
Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ. Now when they heard
this, _they were pricked in their heart, and said_ unto Peter and to the
rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, _what shall we do_?" The Holy
Spirit had come just as Jesus had promised that He would and when He came
He convicted the world of sin: He pricked them to their heart with a sense
of their awful guilt in the rejection of their Lord and their Christ. If
the Apostle Peter had spoken the same words the day before Pentecost, no
such results would have followed; but now Peter was filled with the Holy
Spirit (v. 4) and the Holy Spirit took Peter and his words and through the
instrumentality of Peter and his words convicted his hearers. The Holy
Spirit is the only One who can convince men of sin. The natural heart is
"deceitful above all things and desperately wicked," and there is nothing
in which the inbred deceitfulness of our hearts comes out more clearly
than in our estimations of ourselves. We are all of us sharp-sighted
enough to the faults of others but we are all blind by nature to our own
faults. Our blindness to our own shortcomings is oftentimes little short
of ludicrous. We have a strange power of exaggerating our imaginary
virtues and losing sight utterly of our defects. The longer and more
thoroughly one studies human nature, the more clearly will he see how
hopeless is the task of convincing other men of sin. We cannot do it, nor
has God left it for us to do. He has put this work into the hands of One
who is abundantly able to do it, the Holy Spirit. One of the worst
mistakes that we can make in our efforts to bring men to Christ is to try
to convince them of sin in any power of our own. Unfortunately, it is one
of the commonest mistakes. Preachers will stand in the pulpit and argue
and reason with men to make them see and realize that they are sinners.
They make it as plain as day; it is a wonder that their hearers do not see
it; but they do not. Personal workers sit down beside an inquirer and
reason with him, and bring forward passages of Scripture in a most
skillful way, the very passages that are calculated to produce t