September 25 - Morning"Just, and the justifier of him which believeth." — Romans 3:26
Being justified by faith, we have peace with God. Conscience accuses no
longer. Judgment now decides for the sinner instead of against him.
Memory looks back upon past sins, with deep sorrow for the sin, but yet
with no dread of any penalty to come; for Christ has paid the debt of His
people to the last jot and tittle, and received the divine receipt; and unless
God can be so unjust as to demand double payment for one debt, no soul
for whom Jesus died as a substitute can ever be cast into hell.
It seems to
be one of the very principles of our enlightened nature to believe that God
is just; we feel that it must be so, and this gives us our terror at first; but is
it not marvellous that this very same belief that God is just, becomes
afterwards the pillar of our confidence and peace! If God be just, I, a
sinner, alone and without a substitute, must be punished; but Jesus stands
in my stead and is punished for me; and now, if God be just, I, a sinner,
standing in Christ, can never be punished. God must change His nature
before one soul, for whom Jesus was a substitute, can ever by any
possibility suffer the lash of the law.
Therefore, Jesus having taken the
place of the believer — having rendered a full equivalent to divine wrath
for all that His people ought to have suffered as the result of sin, the
believer can shout with glorious triumph, "Who shall lay anything to the
charge of God's elect?" Not God, for He hath justified; not Christ, for He
hath died, "yea rather hath risen again." My hope lives not because I am
not a sinner, but because I am a sinner for whom Christ died; my trust is
not that I am holy, but that being unholy, He is my righteousness. My
faith rests not upon what I am, or shall be, or feel, or know, but in what
Christ is, in what He has done, and in what He is now doing for me. On
the lion of justice the fair maid of hope rides like a queen. September 25 - Evening"Who of God is made unto us wisdom." — 1 Corinthians 1:30
Man's intellect seeks after rest, and by nature seeks it apart from the Lord
Jesus Christ. Men of education are apt, even when converted, to look
upon the simplicities of the cross of Christ with an eye too little reverent
and loving. They are snared in the old net in which the Grecians were
taken, and have a hankering to mix philosophy with revelation. The
temptation with a man of refined thought and high education is to depart
from the simple truth of Christ crucified, and to invent, as the term is, a
more intellectual doctrine.
This led the early Christian churches into
Gnosticism, and bewitched them with all sorts of heresies. This is the root
of Neology, and the other fine things which in days gone by were so
fashionable in Germany, and are now so ensnaring to certain classes of
divines. Whoever you are, good reader, and whatever your education may
be, if you be the Lord's, be assured you will find no rest in philosophizing
divinity. You may receive this dogma of one great thinker, or that dream of
another profound reasoner, but what the chaff is to the wheat, that will
these be to the pure word of God. All that reason, when best guided, can
find out is but the A B C of truth, and even that lacks certainty, while in
Christ Jesus there is treasured up all the fulness of wisdom and knowledge.
All attempts on the part of Christians to be content with systems such as
Unitarian and Broad-church thinkers would approve of, must fail; true
heirs of heaven must come back to the grandly simple reality which makes
the ploughboy's eye flash with joy, and glads the pious pauper's heart —
"Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners." Jesus satisfies the
most elevated intellect when He is believingly received, but apart from
Him the mind of the regenerate discovers no rest. "The fear of the Lord is
the beginning of knowledge." "A good understanding have all they that do
His commandments." September 25 |