(2.) It is a continuous cleansing: that is, continued day by day as long as the walk lasts. It is well explained by those words, John, xiii. 10: ‘He that is,’ or hath been, ‘washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit.’ The first great washing took place when you were first brought to Christ, as represented in your baptism; and now as you are walking home through a defiling world, you require the continual cleansing of the feet. And this is what is promised in the text. We are walking, and the blood is cleansing. It might be rendered, ‘If we are walking in the light, the blood is cleansing us from all sin.’ The walk is continuous, and the cleansing continuous likewise. As we are taught in the Lord’s Prayer to ask for daily forgiveness with the same regularity as we ask for daily bread; so we are taught to trust the cleansing power for every step of the daily life. Day after day, and night after night, we return to the same fountain, and there experience the same power; and so it will be to the end, when all this earthly walking shall cease, and the ransomed spirit shall appear spotless before God. But let us not speak of the blood, and its cleansing power, without remembering well what we mean by it. We do not mean the material blood which flowed from the feet and hands, or trickled down his careworn face from beneath the crown of thorns; nor that which after death gushed from His pierced side; for we can never be sprinkled by that. Still less do we mean what some suppose to be actual blood in the transubstantiated cup. We mean nothing material: for nothing material can cleanse the soul. We mean the sacrifice of the life of the Son of God as an efficacious offering for the life of the sinner.