Indeed, it is enough to wound one’s heart to think how yours will be wounded – how all your comforts, all your evidences, all your hopes, will be clouded, what thick darkness will spread itself on every side, so that neither sun nor moon nor stars will appear in your heaven. Your spiritual consolations will be gone, and your temporal enjoyments will, also, be rendered tasteless and insipid. And, if afflictions be sent, as they probably may in order to reclaim you, a consciousness of guilt will sharpen and envenom the dart. Then will the enemy of your soul, with all his art and power, rise up against you, encouraged by your fall and laboring to trample you down in utter hopeless ruin. He will persuade you that you are already undone beyond recovery. He will suggest that it signifies nothing to attempt it any more, for that every effort, every amendment, every act of repentance, will but make your case so much the worse and plunge you lower and lower into hell. Thus, he will endeavor, by terrors, to keep you from that sure remedy which yet remains.
But, yield not to him. Your case will, indeed, be sad and, if it be now your case, it is deplorably so, and to rest in it would be still much worse. Your heart would be hardened yet more and more, and nothing could be expected but sudden and aggravated destruction. Yet, blessed be God, it is not quite hopeless. Your wounds are corrupted because of your foolishness (Psalm 38:5), but the gangrene is not incurable. “There is balm in Gilead, there is a physician there” (Jeremiah 8:22). Do not, therefore, render your condition hopeless by now saying, “There is no hope” (Jeremiah 2:25) and drawing a fatal argument from that false supposition for going after the idols you have loved. Let me address you in the language of God to His backsliding people when they were ready to apprehend that to be their case, and to draw such a conclusion from it: “Only return to Me, saith the Lord” (Jeremiah 3:23). Cry for renewed grace and, in the strength of it, labor to return. Cry, with David, under the like guilt, “I have gone astray like a lost sheep. Seek Thy servant, for I do not forget Thy commandments” (Psalm 119:176), and that remembrance of them is, I hope, a token for good. But, if thou wilt return at all, do it immediately. Take not one step more in that fatal path to which thou hast turned aside…
From: The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, Illustrated in a Course of Serious and Practical Addresses Suited to Persons of Every Character and Circumstance, with a Devout Meditation and Prayer Added to Each Chapter, to All Which is Subjoined a Funeral Sermon on “The One Thing Needful” by Philip Doddridge, D.D.; reprint (Newburyport: Caleb Cross, 1804), pp. 196-197. Originally published in 1745.
