Cleansing from Secret Faults

Sanctification is a thoroughgoing work.  When the Holy Spirit is working in us, He enables us to die to sin more and more (as the Shorter Catechism puts it), and to live unto righteousness. This includes our “secret faults.”  The difficulty, at times, regarding our “secret faults” is that we are ourselves unaware of them.  It is without doubt that each of us has “secret faults.”  They are secret in two ways; first, they are often well hidden from the knowledge of others; and second, they may be such that we are not aware ourselves as to what they are.  That they do exist is testimony to the depth of our moral depravity.  It also testifies to the fact that in the spiritual life of the godliest of saints “there remaineth yet very much land to be possessed.”

If David, to whom God referred as “a man after my own heart,” found that he had to entreat the Lord to enable him to understand his errors and be cleansed from secret faults, how much must we appeal to our Saviour to do the same for us.  Except that God do such a work in this area of our lives, we will blunder on in the same old errors.  Rightly the Psalmist says, “Who can understand His errors?”  God must reveal to us those “secret faults.”  He must show us those inner recesses of darkness and sin in order that we might confess them.  Wisdom to truly understand ourselves can only come as God reveals Christ unto us.  Hence, we see the value of the means of grace.  The reading, preaching, meditation, discussion, and application of the Word of God is indispensable in showing us our secret faults.  It must be God who cleanses us of those “secret faults.”  The blood of Christ has cleansed us from sin, and it keeps on cleansing us.  As these “secret faults” become apparent to us through the Holy Spirit’s work we can take them to the Lord in repentance to have them placed under the blood where they belong.  Let us retire to the secret place today with the prayer upon our hearts and lips, “Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.”