Cherished evil feeling is sin before God.
It is not possible to deal, in a general audience, with the precise subject introduced in this text; but it is possible to treat it as illustrating the searching character of God's Law, which goes in behind all acts of sin, and recognizes the states of mind and feeling out of which acts of sin would surely come if opportunity offered. "Man looketh on the outward appearance, but God looketh on the heart." And yet we have to make a very precise distinction. It is not the evil that comes into our heart which Christ declares to be sin; it is the evil that is cherished in our heart. In the cherishing lies the sin, because that cherishing is as truly the act of the will, the act of the personality, as any overt act of transgression could be.
I. TEMPTATION IS NOT SIN. Illustrate by the threefold temptation of our Lord. To have those thoughts suggested to his mind was in no sense sin. We may say, he could not help their coming. They were presented from without. Bodily passion may present to us temptation; the presence of others may become force of temptation; circumstances may prove temptations; evil spirits may suggest temptations; but we must see clearly that temptation is outside our true selves. "Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust;" something he has, not something he is. An old divine quaintly says, "If Satan comes up to my door, I cannot help it; if he lifts the latch and walks in, I cannot help it. But if I offer him a chair, and begin with him a parley, I put myself altogether in the wrong."
II. SIN DEPENDS ON MAN'S WAY OF DEALING WITH THE TEMPTATION. It bears no relations to a man's will until the man exercises his will upon it. And that will may refuse a parley or may admit a parley. That will may reject the temptation or may cherish the temptation. Sin comes with the cherishing. The possibilities of man's dealing with temptation are shown to us in the threefold triumph won by the Lord Jesus Christ over temptation when in the wilderness.—R.T.