Morning & Evening Devotional Reading

January 8–Morning

by C. H. Spurgeon, Revised and Edited by W. C. Neff

“The sins of the holy things.”

—Exodus 28:38

The sins of our public worship are many! They include hypocrisy, formality, lukewarmness, irreverence, and a wandering heart! Our work is a form of worship, but we too often find selfishness, carelessness, slackness, and unbelief. Even in our private devotions there is laxity, coldness, neglect, sleepiness, and vanity; what a mountain of dirt this is! And, the more carefully we examine this mountain, the larger it becomes.

One minister, writing to his brother, says, “My parish, as well as my heart, resembles the garden of the sluggard, overgrown with weeds; and what is worse is that I find my desire to get rid of the weeds doesn’t come from righteousness but from further pride, vanity, and laziness. I want the weeds to be taken away, but why do I wish this? It may be that I want to say to myself, ‘How wonderful my garden looks!’ But this is pride! Or, it may be that my neighbors may look over the wall and say, “Your garden is so lovely!” But this is vanity. Or I may just be tired of pulling them out, but this is laziness.

The fact is that even our desires after holiness are often polluted by improper motives. Under the greenest sod worms hide themselves, and we don’t have to look hard to find them. But how comforting it is to know that Jesus, our High Priest, took upon himself even our sins of attempted worship. Thankfully, he doesn’t offer to the Father our holiness but his own. O that God would give us grace to look upon Jesus, our High Priest, with the eye of faith in all things! [M&E]