The terror of your circumstances has wrung from you a natural cry for justice, but mark this well, the repentance that terror forces from the heart of a man is rarely of the saving sort. The Ethiopian is scrubbed but his skin is as black as ever. This repentance is the outcome of nature under terror and not the fruit of Divine Grace. The thunders and the storms and the hail and the noisome sores can produce in men nothing more than a fleshly repentance. Such a repentance is superficial. It only affects the surface of the man. It does not go to the heart, it is hardly more than skin deep. You ask that his conscience be stirred, yet an unenlightened conscience cannot be the standard. If a man's conscience is unenlightened, he may be sinning and reaping the ill consequences of his sin, not less surely because he is not conscious that his misfortunes are due to his folly rather than his fate! His conscience cannot be the standard.
Set your own house in order first, for this is the order of the Great Landlord. My conscience will help to tell me that. An enlightened conscience tells us in what kind of order our heart, our family and our business should be. By its teachings, we may learn how all the departments of the house should be ordered. We are never right till we are right with conscience and conscience tells us that we are never right till we are right with God! There is this clause in the lease, which I am afraid some have never observed, namely, that the Landlord has at all times the right to enter and leave His own property. You speak of the landlord who will not repay his debts, but there is a greater Landlord to whom you owe everything. I desire, in closing this thought, that all of us may offer the key of our house to the Great Landlord and acknowledge that we live on sufferance as His tenants.
Your skin bears the marks of this affliction, and you fear the years it may take to heal. Yet know there is an abundance of healing power in Jesus Christ and His salvation. Not only is His fruit sweet and nourishing, but the leaves, the little things, as it were, about Christ, are full of healing virtue. The very leaves are healing, from which I gather that the least thing about Christ is healing. A word of His, being His, and recognized as His and coming home to the heart as His, brings healing to head and heart, conscience and imagination, desire and affection! A leaf of the Tree of Life is a medicine fitted to raise the dead! Do you not know its power by a joyful experience? These healing leaves change the life blood, affect the spirits and make the nature other than it was before.
You have been asking for two months and seeing no remorse. The vain regrets in which we sometimes indulge, we often mistake for true repentance, but let us remember that, "Repentance is to leave The sins we loved before, And show that we in earnest grieve By doing so no more." True repentance will yield works meet for repentance; it will be practical. You may know whether your repentance is practical by this test: does it last or does it not? But see that you do not make a mistake common among seekers. If it is a cause of repentance to you that your heart is very hard and that you cannot repay, why you do repay. My dear hearer, let me assure you for your comfort, that when you go down on your knees and say “Lord, I groan before thee, because I cannot groan; I cannot feel; Lord help me to feel;” why, you do feel, and you have got the repentance that you are asking for. At least you have got the first degree of it; you have got the mustard seed of repentance in tiny grain. Let it alone, it will grow; foster it with prayer and it will become a tree.
Do not put your repenting into the place of Christ. If Christ is first, last, midst and everything to you, He will give you repentance, He will give you the heart of flesh, He will give you a sensitive conscience, He will give you the pure and cleansed life! He is exalted on high to give repentance and remission of sins; not merely the remission, but the repentance too. He gives his grace not merely to those who seek it, but even to those that seek it not. He gives repentance not to those who repay themselves, but to those who cannot repay. Where there is no repentance, there can be no remission. But where there is true repentance, that godly sorrow for sin that needs not to be repented of, there is the full and free forgiveness of all sins of the one who has thus sincerely repented! Sweet Sister Repentance is such charming company that we shall regret to part with her even at the gates of pearl, for repentance lives as long as faith, and it is repentance after a godly sort, the kind that makes a rainbow with her tears of grief for sin and her glances of hope at the love of Christ and His great finished work.
Prayer Focus: God, Thank You for loving me. Thank You for loving me, Jesus. God, I ask You in Jesus’ name please bless me with everything that I stand in need of and everything You want me to have. 
