Without Me Ye Can do Nothing

"It seems as if we must try fifty times before we will learn that simple truth,—'Without me ye can do nothing.'"

"Our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away." There is a sere-leaf hanging alone on that tree; all its companions have long ago fallen and are gone. Sere-leaf, thou wilt not long hold thy place, for thou dependest for thy connexion with the tree upon a very slender thread. Hark! the north-wind howls; now shall all the trees be clear. Where is the sere-leaf now? Hurried away to join the rotting heap upon the ground. So, when men find that their vows wither, yet they will still hang to their hopes, and to their moralities; but some strong temptation comes unexpectedly upon them just at the moment when their mind is susceptible of its power, and where are they? The devil catches their tinder dry and then strikes the spark. He knows how to time his temptations; he does not assail his victims when they are ready to resist him, but waylays them in the dark corner of some cut-throat lane, and smites the unguarded passenger with a deadly blow. The thief never lets you know when he intends to break in, for "if the good man of the house had known in what hour the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up."

The temptation comes like a howling north wind at an unexpected moment, and where is your man now? Unable to resist, carried away by the very vice which he thought he had renounced. "Our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away." Every Christian man here knows this. He knows that the grace of God is stronger than all the winds of temptation, but he knows also that apart from that, he can no more resist sin than the chaff from the hand of the winnower can stand against the blast of a hurricane. He feels that if he be put into the furnace he can abide the fire through grace, but that apart from grace he is as tow before the flame or like wax before the fire. The well-instructed believer is very much afraid of himself; he dares not go into temptation, for he feels that a man who carries a bomb-shell within him ought to mind that he keeps away from the sparks, and that he who has a powder-magazine in his heart ought not to play with fire. He knows that in himself considered, apart from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, he would as certainly go back to his old sins, and fall again into his past lusts, as do those who crucify the Lord afresh, and put him to an open shame.   Continue at C. H. Spurgeon