Gloria Crucis: addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 — John Shaqi
Gloria Crucis: addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907Beibitz, J. H. (Joseph Hugh)
Religion
Gloria Crucis: addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907
Beibitz, J. H. (Joseph Hugh)
Good Friday sermons; Holy Week sermons
Now we reach this immensely important result. We having sinned, our
supreme need is forgiveness. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a Gospel for
this precise reason, that it meets, as it claimed from the beginning to
meet, this uttermost need of men. Its offer is, always and everywhere,
the forgiveness, the remission of sins.
But what are we to understand by forgiveness? The forgiveness which is
offered to us in the name of Jesus Christ is not, and our own moral sense
ought to assure us that it could not be, the being let off punishment.
"Thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their
sins," not from any external pains or penalties of their sins. To be
saved from sin, is to have sin brought to an end, abolished within us. It
is the recovery of the true self, the restoration of that union with God
which is, here and now, eternal life. In other words, understanding the
Divine Wrath as we have seen reason to understand it, forgiveness must
mean to cease to be, or to cease to identify ourselves with, that in us
which is the object of the Divine Wrath. In short, forgiveness is, in
the great phrase of St. Paul, reconciliation with God.
How, then, is forgiveness or reconciliation to be obtained? The answer
which the apostle gives is this: "God was in Christ reconciling the world
to Himself." Let us try to see what this means.
* * * * *
There can only be one way of ceasing to be the object of the Divine
Wrath, and that is by identifying oneself with it; if we may use the
catch-phrase, by becoming its subject instead of its object. This means
that, so far as is in our power, we must enter into the Divine Mind in
regard to sin, and our own sins in particular. Up to the limit of our
power, we must make that Mind our own mind, we must hate sin, and our
sins, as God hates them.
There is one word in the New Testament which expresses all this, and that
is the word only partially and inadequately translated "repentance." The
word thus represented is [Greek text], and [Greek text] is exactly "a
change of mind." It really means the coming over to God's side, the
entire revolution of our mental attitude and outlook with regard to sin.
The word stands for self-identification with the Wrath of God, with the
Divine Mind in its outlook upon sin. That change of mind is itself
reconciliation, forgiveness, remission of sins. And that which alone
makes [Greek text] and, therefore, forgiveness, possible, is the Death of
Jesus Christ upon the Cross.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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