Evening, April 28

Charles Spurgeon · Morning and Evening: Daily Readings

"All the house of Israel are impudent and hardhearted."

  Ezekiel 3:7

   Are there no exceptions? No, not one. Even the favoured race are thus
   described. Are the best so bad?--then what must the worst be? Come, my
   heart, consider how far thou hast a share in this universal accusation,
   and while considering, be ready to take shame unto thyself wherein thou
   mayst have been guilty. The first charge is impudence, or hardness of
   forehead, a want of holy shame, an unhallowed boldness in evil. Before
   my conversion, I could sin and feel no compunction, hear of my guilt
   and yet remain unhumbled, and even confess my iniquity and manifest no
   inward humiliation on account of it. For a sinner to go to God's house
   and pretend to pray to him and praise him argues a brazen-facedness of
   the worst kind! Alas! since the day of my new birth I have doubted my
   Lord to his face, murmured unblushingly in his presence, worshipped
   before him in a slovenly manner, and sinned without bewailing myself
   concerning it. If my forehead were not as an adamant, harder than
   flint, I should have far more holy fear, and a far deeper contrition of
   spirit. Woe is me, I am one of the impudent house of Israel. The second
   charge is hardheartedness, and I must not venture to plead innocent
   here. Once I had nothing but a heart of stone, and although through
   grace I now have a new and fleshy heart, much of my former obduracy
   remains. I am not affected by the death of Jesus as I ought to be;
   neither am I moved by the ruin of my fellow men, the wickedness of the
   times, the chastisement of my heavenly Father, and my own failures, as
   I should be. O that my heart would melt at the recital of my Saviour's
   sufferings and death. Would to God I were rid of this nether millstone
   within me, this hateful body of death. Blessed be the name of the Lord,
   the disease is not incurable, the Saviour's precious blood is the
   universal solvent, and me, even me, it will effectually soften, till my
   heart melts as wax before the fire.