wliness. Seeing so clearly
how the other man wants his own way and rights, we are blind to the
fact that we want ours just as much; and yet we know there is something
missing in our lives. Somehow we are not in vital fellowship with God.
We are not spiritually crisp. Our service does not "crackle with the
supernatural." Unconscious sin is none the less sin with God and
separates us from Him. The sin in question may be quite a small
thing, which God will so readily show us, if we are only willing to
ask Him.

There is yet another error we fall into, when we are not willing to
recognise the truth of what God says of the human heart. Not only do
we protest our own innocence, but we often protest the innocence of
our loved ones. We hate to see them being convicted and humbled and
we hasten to defend them. We do not want them to confess anything. We
are not only living in a realm of illusion about ourselves, but about
them too, and we fear to have it shattered. But we are only defending
them against God--making God a liar on their behalf, as we do on our
own, and keeping them from entering into blessing, as we do ourselves.

Only a deep hunger for real fellowship with God will make us willing
to cry to God for His all-revealing Light and to obey it when it is
given.

Justifying God.

That brings us to the Publican. With all that God says about the
human heart in our minds, we can see that his confession of sin was
simply a justifying of God, an admission that what God said of him
was true. Perhaps like the Pharisee, he used not to believe that what
God said about man was really true of him. But the Holy Spirit has
shown him things in his life which prove God right, and he is broken.
Not only does he justify God in all that he has said, but he
doubtless justifies God in all the chastening judgments God has
brought upon him. Nehemiah's prayer might well have been his,
"Howbeit Thou art just in all that is brought upon us; for Thou hast
done right and we have done wickedly."[footnote10:Neh.9:33]

This is ever the nature of true confession of sin, true brokenness.
It is the confession that my sin is not just a mistake, a slip, a
something which is really foreign to my heart ("Not really like me to
have such thoughts or do such things!"), but that it is something
which reveals the real 'I'; that shows me to be the proud, rotten,
unclean thing God says I am; that it really is like me to have such
thoughts and do such thin