The Bruised Reed

Sibbes takes a single line from Isaiah, quoted by Matthew about Christ — “a bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench” — and writes an entire book to people who are afraid they are too far gone. His argument is that the bruising is not evidence against them, and that a faith which is all smoke and no flame is still fire.

Sibbes preached in London in the 1620s, to a generation raised on a searching kind of self-examination that could tip over into despair — believers taught to look for evidence of grace in themselves and finding little. This is the pastoral correction to that, from inside the same tradition: not less seriousness about sin, but a different place to look for assurance.

Both halves of the image matter to him. A bruised reed is not a broken one, and smoking flax is a wick that has gone out but still has fire in it: what looks like failure is, in his reading, the thing being kept alight. He is careful not to make this cheap — he has a great deal to say about not mistaking sloth for weakness — but the direction of the whole book is that Christ does not finish off what is already damaged.

Richard Baxter read it at fifteen and said it made the difference: “Sibbes opened more the love of God to me, and gave me a livelier apprehension of the mystery of redemption and how much I was beholden to Jesus Christ.” It has done the same for readers in that condition ever since, and it is short.