healing and light.

Brother! take it. And, if you do, begin where it begins, with your sins;
and be contented to be saved as a sinner in danger and sickness, who can
neither defend nor heal yourself. And thus coming, you will test the
rope and find it hold; you will take the medicine and know that it
cures; and, by your own experience, you will be able to say, 'This _is_
a faithful saying, Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.'

THE CHIEF OF SINNERS

'Of whom I am chief.'--1 TIM. i. 15.

The less teachers of religion talk about themselves the better; and yet
there is a kind of personal reference, far removed from egotism and
offensiveness. Few such men have ever spoken more of themselves than
Paul did, and yet none have been truer to his motto: 'We preach not
ourselves, but Christ Jesus.' For the scope of almost all his personal
references is the depreciation of self, and the magnifying of the
wonderful mercy which drew him to Jesus Christ. Whenever he speaks of
his conversion it is with deep emotion and with burning cheeks. Here,
for instance, he adduces himself as the typical example of God's
long-suffering. If _he_ were saved none need despair.

I take it that this saying of the Apostle's, 'Of whom I am chief,'
paradoxical and exaggerated as it seems to many men, is in spirit that
which all who know themselves ought to re-echo; and without which there
is little strength in Christian life.

I. And so I ask you to note, first, what this man thinks of himself.

'Of whom I am chief.' Now, if we set what we know of the character of
Saul of Tarsus before he was a Christian by the side of that of many who
have won a bad supremacy in wickedness, the words seem entirely strange
and exaggerated. But, as I have often had to say, the principle of the
Apostle's estimate is to be found in his belief that, not the outward
manifestation of evil in specific acts of immorality, or flagrant
breaches of commandment, but the inward principle from which the deeds
flowed, is the measure of a man's criminality, and that, according to
the uniform teaching of Scripture, the very root of sin, and that which
is common to all the things that the world's conscience and ordinary
morality designate as wrong, is to be found here, that self has become
the centre, the aim, and the law instead of God. 'This is the
condemnation,' said Paul's Master--_not_ that men have done so-and-so
and so-and-so, but--'that light i