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.

 

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 gladens 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.”