Lamentations 5:16

I. The secret of man's perfection may be summed up in these short words: Love to God. The secret of man's sin may be stated as shortly: Defect of love to God. As the former implies truth and holiness, and purity of motive, and unity of will with His will; so this latter implies the departure of all these graces. But not only this: the heart allows no vacuum. Sin is not a negative only, but a positive condition. Where love has departed there the opposite of love enters, viz., selfishness, with all its baneful consequences. And the essence of selfishness is, that a man lives, not for and in another, be that other his neighbour or his God, but for and in himself.

II. This selfishness, arising out of defect of love to God, and, in God, to others, is not an act, or a series of acts in man, but a state, out of which spring, as the symptoms out of a disease, those sinful acts of selfishness which we call sins. Selfishness has turned love into lust, dignity into pride, humility into meanness, zeal into ambition, charity into ostentation; has turned family and friendly love into partizanship, patriotism into faction, religion itself into bigotry. It penetrates into and infiltrates every thought, every desire, every word, every act; so that whatsoever is of it, and not of faith, is sin.

III. Man placed under love, though in bond and covenant to God and his neighbour, was really and essentially free, a child of God's family; his will and God's will being one, law became to him liberty. But under selfishness, though he has broken loose from covenant with God and his neighbour, he is to all intents and purposes a slave; in bondage to his own desires and passions, which he ought to be, and wishes to be, ruling.

IV. Sin is no work, no creation, of God. It is essentially a departure from God—a departure in the root of our being; a departure begun in our parent stock, and thence propagated down through all us, the branches. And this departure can only have begun by an act of the will of man. God created us free, gave our first parents a command to keep, which very fact implied that they had power to break it. Sin had its practical beginning in the will of man. And this beginning we read of in Scripture in the history of the Fall.

H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. iv., p. 5.