amends. 'This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world,
and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were
evil.'

It is the indwelling badness, ready to produce bad actions, that we need
to be delivered from. Against this badness if a man will not strive, he
is left to commit evil and reap the consequences. To be saved from these
consequences, would be no deliverance; it would be an immediate, ever
deepening damnation. It is the evil in our being--no essential part of
it, thank God!--the miserable fact that the very child of God does not
care for his father and will not obey him, causing us to desire wrongly,
act wrongly, or, where we try not to act wrongly, yet making it
impossible for us not to feel wrongly--this is what he came to deliver
us from;--not the things we have done, but the possibility of doing such
things any more. With the departure of this possibility, and with the
hope of confession hereafter to those we have wronged, will depart also
the power over us of the evil things we have done, and so we shall be
saved from them also. The bad that lives in us, our evil judgments, our
unjust desires, our hate and pride and envy and greed and
self-satisfaction--these are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more
terrible than the bodies of our sins, namely the deeds we do, inasmuch
as they not only produce these loathsome things, but make us loathsome
as they. Our wrong deeds are our dead works; our evil thoughts are our
live sins. These, the essential opposites of faith and love, the sins
that dwell and work in us, are the sins from which Jesus came to deliver
us. When we turn against them and refuse to obey them, they rise in
fierce insistence, but the same moment begin to die. We are then on the
Lord's side, as he has always been on ours, and he begins to deliver us
from them.