Sermons of Robert Murray MCheyne 6. Formality not Christianity

Extract

Formality not Christianity
Rober M’Cheyne

“He is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God” Romans 2:28-29.

Formality is, perhaps, the most besetting sin of the human mind. It is found in every bosom and in every clime; it reigns triumphant in every natural mind; and it constantly tries to re- usurp the throne in the heart of every child of God. If we were to seek for proof that fallen man is “without understanding,” that he hath altogether fallen from his primitive clearness and dignity of intelligence and that he hath utterly lost the image of God in knowledge after which he was created, we would point to this one strange, irrational conceit by which more than one-half of the world are befooled to their eternal undoing: that God may be pleased with mere bodily prostrations and services, that it is possible to worship God with the lips, when the heart is far from him.

It is against this error, the besetting error of humanity, and preeminently the besetting error of the Jewish mind that Paul directs the words before us. And it is very noticeable, that he does not condescend to argue the matter. He speaks with all the decisiveness and with all the authority of one who was not a whit behind the very chiefest of the apostles, and he lays it down as a kind of first principle to which every man of ordinary intelligence, provided only he will soberly consider the matter, must yield his immediate assent — that “he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.” In the following discourse I shall show very briefly, first, …