What Are Sins of Omission? — Spurgeon on the Things Undone
⏱ 12 min read
The strange thing about omission is that it does not make a sound. The lie, the harsh word, the wrong thing done — these announce themselves. They show up in the body within an hour. The unsaid kindness, the un-made phone call, the un-spoken affirmation, the un-extended help, the un-prayed prayer — these slip past without registering. The day ends and you have done nothing you would describe to a friend as a sin, and yet the small low weight remains, because the not-doings of the day have accumulated quietly underneath the doings, and the soul has somehow noticed them even though the mind has not.
This article is for the weight that has no specific name. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries a slow daily place to bring it, if you want somewhere to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Charles Spurgeon, preaching across the second half of the 1800s to thousands in London while also writing the small daily entries of Morning and Evening, returned more often than the modern reader expects to the things undone. He thought, and the long Christian tradition with him, that the sins of omission were in many ways harder to repent of than the sins of commission, because the sins of commission knew their own name. The sins of omission required a soul slow enough to notice what was not there, and most souls, including most Christian souls, are not slow enough for that.
This slow reading takes two passages from Spurgeon’s devotional work and walks each one carefully, so that the practice of examining the not-doings of the day — the gentle, unhurried examination that Spurgeon’s century called self-examination and ours has half-forgotten — can take a shape the reader can carry into a real Tuesday. If structured daily reflection is new to you, how to pray the Examen is the Ignatian companion to this kind of examination, and it has a worked example that pairs well with this article. If you are walking the season of Lent and looking for a slow rhythm of fasting that holds room for examining the not-doings as well as the doings, lent fasting ideas beyond giving up chocolate is the wider companion; for a children’s version of the same season, the Lent devotional for kids holds one short page per day. And if you are walking this kind of examination alongside a teen daughter who is starting to ask the deeper questions, Christian journal prompts for teen girls gives her one prompt per week for a slow year of self-knowing.
The first passage: virtue evermore going out of Jesus
“He is so prolific of grace, that like the sun which shines as it rolls onward in its orbit, his path is radiant with lovingkindness. He is a swift arrow of love, which not only reaches its ordained target, but perfumes the air through which it flies. Virtue is evermore going out of Jesus, as sweet odours exhale from flowers; and it always will be emanating from him, as water from a sparkling fountain. What delightful encouragement this truth affords us. If our Lord is so ready to heal the sick and bless the needy, then, my soul, be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly. Spurgeon’s prose is fuller than the modern devotional ear is used to, and the slowing is the practice.
Notice what Spurgeon is doing here. He is not lecturing the soul about the sins of omission directly. He is setting before the soul a picture of the Lord — virtue evermore going out of Jesus, swift arrow of love, sweet odours exhale from flowers, water from a sparkling fountain — and then naming the response the picture should be drawing from the reader. Be not thou slow. The whole exhortation about omission is in those four small words at the end.
This is the first thing Spurgeon would have you see. The repentance for omission does not begin with the cataloguing of what you have not done. It begins with the recognition of what He is — the One whose path is radiant with lovingkindness, whose virtue is evermore going out, whose air is perfumed by the very flight of His love. The catalogue of your own omissions, brought without this picture first, becomes one more list of failures for the shame-loop to feed on. The catalogue brought after this picture becomes something different — the slow honest noticing of the gap between His readiness and your slowness, which is the soul-shape from which actual repentance grows.
Be not thou slow. Notice the verb. The opposite of omission, in Spurgeon’s vocabulary, is not do more. It is do not be slow. The fault he is naming is the slowness — the small daily delay between the heart’s prompting and the actual action, the unhurried postponement of the kindness that should have been done now and was instead deferred until next week, the patient settling-back into the chair when the gentle interior nudge had asked you to get up.
Most sins of omission, in modern Christian experience, are not refusals. They are postponements. The phone call you meant to make. The card you meant to send. The friend you meant to check in on. The unkind word you meant to apologise for. The small generosity you meant to offer and did not. The prayer you meant to pray. None of these was refused. All of them were postponed, and the postponement quietly became the not-doing, and the not-doing quietly became the small weight you cannot quite name at the end of the day.
Spurgeon, gently, is asking you to take the slowness seriously — not as a character flaw to be punished, but as the small habit that needs the slow daily attention of the soul that has begun to see virtue evermore going out of Jesus and wants to live nearer to that virtue rather than slower than it.
The second passage: the heart in right tune
“‘Come, then, my Lord, and give me Thy love with Thy grace.’ Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune, that when the fingers of mercy touch the strings, they may resound with full notes of communion.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Read it twice. The image is musical and exact.
Spurgeon is borrowing a string-instrument metaphor that an organist or a violinist would recognise immediately. The instrument that has been left untuned for weeks does not produce wrong notes; it produces muted notes, flat notes, dull notes, notes that should have been beautiful but are not. The fingers of the player are doing their work correctly. The strings are simply not in the condition to respond.
This is, in Spurgeon’s reading, what the soul prone to omission looks like internally. The fingers of mercy are at work. The Spirit is prompting, kindly, regularly, with the small daily nudges toward the kindness, the prayer, the visit, the apology, the generosity. The soul is not refusing. The soul is simply out of tune — its strings are dull, its attention is muted, its responsiveness has thinned through small habitual postponements until the resonance has gone out of the daily Christian life.
The repentance for omission, in Spurgeon’s vocabulary, is therefore not primarily a doing more but a tuning back up. The slow daily practice of returning the heart to a condition in which, when the small prompting comes, the soul resonates rather than dampens. The tuning is the work. The notes will come when the strings are tuned.
What does this look like in practice?
It looks like one slow minute, at the start of the day or the end, in which the soul asks itself one quiet question. What did mercy prompt me toward today that I did not act on? Not as an accusation. As a noticing. The fingers of mercy touched the strings. Where were the muted notes? Where did the prompting come and the resonance not follow?
You will be surprised, the first time you do this, by how specific the answers are. I felt the nudge to text my sister and did not. I felt the prompting to apologise to my husband for the snap-judgement in the car and did not. I noticed the older woman at church looked tired and meant to say something kind and did not. I knew the prayer for the friend with the diagnosis was the thing to do and I postponed it until I forgot. The list is not produced by harsh self-examination. It is produced by simply sitting still for one minute and letting the day’s not-doings surface.
The naming of them, in the slow quiet of that minute, is itself the beginning of the tuning. You do not have to go back and complete each one (though sometimes you will). You have to bring the not-doings to Him — Lord, the strings were muted today. Tune me again. Give me Thy love with Thy grace, that tomorrow the resonance comes when the prompting comes — and let the daily practice of bringing them slowly retune the heart.
This is the slow Spurgeon shape of repentance for omission. Not the production of more activity. The slow daily tuning of the heart to a condition in which the daily promptings of mercy actually land.
A note about the journal
If the slow daily practice of noticing the not-doings is the work you want to walk, the Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around exactly this kind of small daily examination. Each evening, a short page with room for the honest noticing — not a guilt-list, a quiet seeing — and a passage anchored in the Father’s posture toward the soul that is bringing the day to Him. The journal does not produce the resonance; the Spirit does. The journal is the daily quiet structure in which the soul shows up to be tuned.
The somatic that goes with omission
Pause here.
The body holds the not-doings of the day differently than it holds the doings. The doings, when they are wrong, produce hot tightness — guilt has heat. The not-doings produce something colder and quieter — a low background heaviness in the shoulders and behind the eyes that has no obvious source, because the mind cannot point to one specific thing.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let the eyes close, or rest on a fixed point. Take one slow inhale and one long exhale. Let the shoulders drop by an inch.
Now ask the body one question, and do not answer with the mind. What did I leave undone today.
Notice what surfaces. Not the big things. The small specific ones — the conversation you avoided, the help you did not offer, the prayer you postponed, the kindness you withheld because you were tired. Let them come up slowly. Do not make a list. Let two or three of them surface, and let the body sit with them for thirty seconds, breathing slowly. No producing. No fixing. No promising you will do better tomorrow.
The body will soften as the noticing happens, not because the not-doings have been resolved, but because they have been seen. The shame-loop runs on un-seen accumulation. The slow Spurgeon-style examination interrupts the accumulation by simply naming, in the body, what the day did not do.
Then take one slow exhale, and let the noticings be brought — silently or out loud — to the One whose fingers of mercy were prompting toward them all day. Lord, tune me. Bring the resonance back. Continue reading.
What the slow examination changes over months
The point of this practice is not to make you more vigilant about your not-doings on a daily basis. The point is to gradually retune the heart so that the small daily promptings of mercy begin to land more often than they did before.
After one week of daily examination, you will notice that you act on slightly more of the promptings in real time, because the recent memory of having noticed yesterday’s omissions makes you a fraction more responsive to today’s nudge. After one month, the responsiveness has begun to settle in. After three months, the small kindnesses, the prayers, the apologies, the generosities, are being completed at the speed of the prompting rather than being postponed, and the daily list of not-doings is shorter, and the small weight you could not name at the end of the day is lighter, because the strings have been tuned.
This is the slow shape of what the Bible means when it asks the soul to walk in the Spirit. It does not mean a constant felt sense of supernatural guidance. It means a heart whose strings have been kept tuned enough that, when the small daily promptings come, the resonance follows — and the kindness gets done, and the prayer gets prayed, and the call gets made, not because the soul has been heroic but because the soul has been tuned.
The sins of omission are the small daily deferrals. The repentance for them is the small daily tuning. The tuning is the practice. The notes will come when the strings are ready.
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take only one sentence from Spurgeon into this week, take take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune. Carry it on a small piece of paper. Put it inside your journal. The sentence is the practical instruction. The tuning is the work. The resonance will follow.
Your sister-articles in this contemplative-fathers series are what is true repentance — Edwards on godly sorrow and how to confess sin to God — Owen on mortification. Edwards diagnoses the kind of sorrow that draws the heart toward God. Owen carries the practice of confession spoken inside the Father’s eternal, free love. Spurgeon here teaches the daily tuning that catches the not-doings before they accumulate. Read the three together if you can.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each evening, a short page with room for the honest noticing of the day’s not-doings, a verse anchored in the Father’s patient grace, and a small structure that builds, across the weeks, the kind of tuning Spurgeon described.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — virtue evermore going out of Jesus, the heart in right tune, the fingers of mercy touching the strings — into a daily companion built for the woman whose deepest repentance is, at last, ready to be for the things she did not do.
