Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: April 3rd

A BRIGHT ASSURANCE

But there is forgiveness with Thee that Thou mayest be feared. - Psalms 130:4

"Forgiveness!" The word so translated has for its literal meaning "cutting-oft", ’’excision." And so it suggests the notion of taking a man’s soul and his sin, that great black deformity that has grown upon it, feeding upon it, and cutting it clean out with a merciful amputating knife. You know that doctors sometimes say, "Well, the only salvation of him would be an operation, but the tumour has got so implicated with the vital tissues that it would scarcely be possible to apply the knife." And that is what the world says, and that is what philosophy says, and modern pessimism says, about my sin, and your sin, and the world’s sin. "No! we cannot operate; we cannot cut out the cankerous tumour." And Christianity says, "Miserable physicians are ye all; stand aside! " And it does it by a mighty and wondrous act.

God’s Divine mercy and infinite power and love are in that Cross of Jesus Christ, which separates between man and his disease, and cuts out the one and leaves the other more living after the amputation of that which was killing him, and which the world thinks to be a bit of himself. It is not a bit of himself, says the Gospel; it can all be swept away through His forgiveness.

Men may say, "There cannot be forgiveness; you cannot alter consequences." But forgiveness has not to do only with consequences; forgiveness has to do with the personal relation between me and God. And that can be altered. The Father forgives as well as the judge; the Father forgives, though he sometimes chastises.

If a man has sinned, his whole life thereafter will be different from what it would have been if he had not sinned. I know that well enough. You cannot, by any pardon, alter the past, and make it not to be. I know that well enough. The New Testament doctrine and the Old Testament hope of forgiveness does not assert that you can, but it says that you and God can get right with one another. A person can pardon. We have not merely to do with impersonal laws and symbols; we have not only to do with "the mill of God that grindeth slowly," but with God Himself. There is such a thing as the pardon of God, and forgiveness is possible. His love will come to men free, unembittered, undammed back by transgressions, if the man will go and say, "Father! I have sinned! Forgive! For Thy dear Son’s sake. There is forgiveness with Thee! " And that forgiveness lies at the root of all true godliness. "There is forgiveness with Thee, that Thou mayest be feared.’’ No man reverences, and loves,, and draws near to God so rapturously, so humbly, as the man that has learned pardon through Jesus Christ. My dear friend, believe this: your religion must have for its foundation the assurance of God’s pardoning mercy in Christ, or it will have no foundation at all worth speaking about. I press that upon you, and ask you this one question: Is the basis of your religion the sense that God has forgiven you freely all your iniquities?