as William Law
has it: 'All our natural evil ceases to be our own evil as soon as our
will turns away from it. Our natural evil then changes its nature and
loses all its poison and death, and becomes an holy cross on which we die
to self and this life and enter the kingdom of heaven.' My dear
brethren, tell me, is your sin your cross? Is your sinfulness your
cross? Is the evil that is ever present with you your holy cross? For,
every other cross beside sin is a cross of straw, a cross of feathers, a
paste-board and a painted cross, and not a real and genuine cross at all.
The wood and the nails and the spear all taken together were not our
Lord's real cross. His real cross was sin; our sin laid on His hands,
and on His heart, and on His imagination, and on His conscience, till it
was all but His very own sin. Our sin was so fearfully and wonderfully
laid upon Christ that He was as good as a sinner Himself under it. So
much so that all the nails and all the spears, all the thirst and all the
darkness that His body and His soul could hold were as nothing beside the
sin that was laid upon Him. And so it is with us; with as many of us as
are His true disciples. Our sin is our cross; not our actual
transgressions, any more than His; but our inward sinfulness. And not
the sinfulness of our will; that is no real cross to any man; but the
sinfulness of our hearts against our will, and beneath our will, and
behind our will. And this is such a cross that if Christ had something
in His cross that we have not, then we have something in ours that He had
not. He made many sad and sore Psalms His own; but even if He had lived
on earth to read the seventh of the Romans, He could not have made it His
own. His true people are beyond Him here. The disciple is above his
Master here. The Master had His own cross, and it was a sufficient
cross; but we can challenge Him to come down and look and say if He ever
saw a cross like our cross. He was made a curse. He was hanged on the
tree. He bore our sins in His own body on the tree. But his people are
beyond Him in the real agony and crucifixion of sin. For He never in
Gethsemane or on Calvary either cried as Paul once cried, and as you and
I cry every day--To will is present with me! But the good that I would I
do not! And, oh! the body of this death!

6. Now, if any total stranger to all that shall ask me: What good there
is in all that? and, Why I so labour in such a wo