Spurgeon opens by cataloging the many ways fallen human beings refuse to face their own sin — hiding it like Achan, making excuses like Aaron, blaming others like Adam and Eve, flatly denying it like Ananias, or covering it with religious performance like the Pharisees — and argues that until a person stops all these evasions and truly confesses their guilt, they will never seek a Savior, never value one if offered, and never receive pardon from a God who requires honest confession before he gives mercy. He then works through six marks of genuine self-knowledge that the Holy Spirit produces: first, seeing not just bad actions but the corruption of the whole nature — like a leper, polluted in every part and rightly excluded from God's presence; second, seeing that even one's best deeds and prayers are as filthy rags, tainted by pride, unbelief, and self-interest; third, seeing that all resolutions fade like a withered leaf, since no man can reform himself into a new creature; fourth, seeing that strong temptation will carry the unguarded soul away like a north wind carries dry leaves, apart from divine grace; fifth, seeing the inability even to pray rightly, let alone wrestle with God; and sixth, seeing that sin has hidden God's face and brought a consuming sense of just condemnation. He closes with two warnings and a gospel invitation: do not be satisfied with merely knowing you are lost, for that knowledge brings no comfort — the comfort is in the remedy, not the disease — and do not settle for a dry-eyed, cycle-of-sin-and-hollow-repentance Christianity; instead, bring your absolute emptiness to Christ using three pleas: the father's love, the potter's power over useless clay, and most powerfully, the faithful saying that "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners," which, simply believed, is all the qualification anyone needs to be immediately and fully saved.
Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on March 2, 1862.