Verse 13
I. What is sin? Rebellion the resistance of a human mind against the sovereignty of its Creator. It little matters, in comparison, what may be the act by which a rebel shows that he is a rebel; the fact is the important thing that he is in a state of rebellion. Man measures sin by the degree of the injury which a sin inflicts on society, or upon the man who does it. God measures sin by the degree of the rebellion which He sees in that sin against Himself. What we call the sin is in His sight only the index of the sinfulness which lies deep down in the heart.
II. No sin is single, no sin is solitary, there are no islands in sin. The principle of obedience is a single thing; the man that has broken one law has violated the principle of obedience, and therefore he is as much a breaker of the law as if he had broken a thousand things. Again, all God's law is one law. It resolves itself into one Thou shalt love the Lord thy God. He that hath done one sin did not love God; therefore by his want of love he has brought himself guilty to the count of all the law for the law is love.
III. Every sin which a man does, lies in a series in which that one sin is a link, and none can calculate what will be the chain of repetitions and the chain of consequences, which shall stretch on and on from sin to sin, from person to person, from circle to circle, from age to age beyond time into eternity. The sins that we do very soon pass out of our memory, in the crowd of new and pressing engagements and thoughts which come around us; we perhaps very little realise now the sins which once pressed very heavily and were very vivid to our consciences. But with God's view each one sin is as green and fresh as at the moment when it was done. Let us try then to look on sin as God looks on it, and we shall better appreciate the infinite grace of Him who was made sin for us.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 2nd series, p. 319.
References: Romans 7:13 . Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix., No. 1095; Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 71; Preacher's Monthly, vol. iii., P. 103.
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