ause
He says we have! Yet I feel sure that he was perfectly sincere in
what he said. He really did believe that he was innocent of these
things. Indeed, he is ascribing his imagined innocence to God,
saying, "I thank thee ..." God's word, however, still stood against
him. But he just had not seen it. The "penny had not dropped!" If the
Publican is beating upon his breast and confessing his sins, it is
not because he has sinned worse than the Pharisee. It is simply that
the Publican has seen that what God says is woefully true of him, and
the Pharisee has not. The Pharisee still thinks that outward
abstinence from certain sins is all that God requires. He has not yet
understood that God looks, not on the outward appearance, but on the
heart,[footnote7:1 Sam.16:7] and accounts the look of lust the
equivalent of adultery,[footnote8:Matt.5:27-28] the attitude of
resentment and hate the same as murder,[footnote9:1 John 3:15.] envy
as actual theft, and the petty tyrannies in the home as wicked as the
most extortionate dealings in the market.

How often have not we, too, protested our innocence on the many
occasions when God has been convicting others, and when He has wanted
to convict us too. We have said in effect, "These things may be true
of others, but not of me!" and we may have said so quite sincerely.
Perhaps we have heard of others who have humbled themselves and have
rather despised them for the confessions they have had to make and
the things they had to put right in their lives. Or perhaps we have
been genuinely glad that they have been blessed. But, whichever it
is, we don't feel that we have anything to be broken about ourselves.
Beloved, if we feel we are innocent and have nothing to be broken
about, it is not that these things are not there, but that we have
not seen them. We have been living in a realm of illusion about
ourselves. God must be true in all that He says about us. In one form
or another, He sees these things expressing themselves in us (unless
we have recognised them and allowed God to deal with them)--unconscious
selfishness, pride and self-congratulation; jealousy, resentment and
impatience; reserve, fears and shyness; dishonesty and deception;
impurity and lust; if not one thing, then another. But we are blind
to it. We are perhaps so occupied with the wrong the other man has done
us, that we do not see that we are sinning against Christ in not being
willing to take it with His meekness and lo