ready to produce bad actions, that we need
to be delivered from. Against this badness if a man will not strive, he
is left to commit evil and reap the consequences. To be saved from these
consequences, would be no deliverance; it would be an immediate, ever
deepening damnation. It is the evil in our being--no essential part of
it, thank God!--the miserable fact that the very child of God does not
care for his father and will not obey him, causing us to desire wrongly,
act wrongly, or, where we try not to act wrongly, yet making it
impossible for us not to feel wrongly--this is what he came to deliver
us from;--not the things we have done, but the possibility of doing such
things any more. With the departure of this possibility, and with the
hope of confession hereafter to those we have wronged, will depart also
the power over us of the evil things we have done, and so we shall be
saved from them also. The bad that lives in us, our evil judgments, our
unjust desires, our hate and pride and envy and greed and
self-satisfaction--these are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more
terrible than the bodies of our sins, namely the deeds we do, inasmuch
as they not only produce these loathsome things, but make us loathsome
as they. Our wrong deeds are our dead works; our evil thoughts are our
live sins. These, the essential opposites of faith and love, the sins
that dwell and work in us, are the sins from which Jesus came to deliver
us. When we turn against them and refuse to obey them, they rise in
fierce insistence, but the same moment begin to die. We are then on the
Lord's side, as he has always been on ours, and he begins to deliver us
from them.

Anything in you, which, in your own child, would make you feel him not
so pleasant as you would have him, is something wrong. This may mean
much to one, little or nothing to another. Things in a child which to
one parent would not seem worth minding, would fill another with horror.
After his moral development, where the one parent would smile, the other
would look aghast, perceiving both the present evil, and the
serpent-brood to follow. But as the love of him who is love, transcends
ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, so must he desire in his
child infinitely more than the most jealous love of the best mother can
desire in hers. He would have him rid of all discontent, all fear, all
grudging, all bitterness in word or thought, all gauging and measuring
of his own wi