CALL TO WORSHIP
(Tune: O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing, #46)

Words by Isaac Watts, 1719

h how I love Thy holy law!

‘Tis daily my delight:

And thence my meditations draw

Divine advice by night.

How doth Thy word my heart engage!

How well employ my tongue!

And in my tiresome pilgrimage

Yields to me a heavenly song.

Am I a stranger, or at home,

‘Tis my perpetual feast:

Not honey dripping from the comb,

So much allures the taste.

No treasures so enrich the mind,

Nor shall Thy word be sold

For loads of silver well-refined,

Nor heaps of choicest gold

When nature sinks, and spirits droop,

Thy promises of grace

Are pillars to support my hope,

And there I write Thy praise.

____________________

hen the Lord has taken a poor sinner in hand He will never leave him, but will surely purge away his dross and tin. He will slay his idols, and tear him from those things he so much loves. He will not be aware how many idols he has, until God shows him in a measure the deceitfulness of his heart. The more God's children are taught spiritually, the greater fools do they become in their own eyes; and the more they know of their own wicked and vile state by nature, the more are they astonished that God should show mercy to such poor worms of the earth.                                                        COPIED

HE BORE OUR SINS

“Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed”                                                                                                                                                                                                                1Pe 2:24 

id Christ in bearing our sins become a sinner himself?  God forbid!  He died ‘THE JUST’ for the unjust, I Peter 3:18.  2 Corinthians 5:21 declares ‘He was made sin,’ it does not say he was made a sinner or sinful, and that is evident by the qualification ‘WHO KNEW NO SIN,’ never EVER became personally acquainted with it,  nor tainted by it.

            What a glorious mystery this is that although He was made sin, (not practically, but by imputation), yet HE KNEW NO SIN.  I Peter 2:22 declares him as that one ‘Who did no sin.”  I John 3:5 says, “And ye know that he was manifested to take away our sins; AND IN HIM IS NO SIN.”

            Some would point to 1 Peter 2:24 as proof that Christ did more than bare our sins, transposing the inspired Word to mean that in some sense our sin was put IN Christ, rather than on him.  However, the first part of the verse says that He BORE our sins. The word is used of bringing the sacrifice to the altar, Isaiah 53:12. “In His body” refers to the fact that He did it as a man, in His body which God had prepared for him (Hebrews 10:5), but in no way means that He became tainted with, or that our sin was somehow put IN Him. 

To say that Christ became a sinner, or sinful, even through the sins of His people is to make Him what He was not nor ever could be.  To say that his flesh was contaminated by our sin and so to become sinful to justify God in punishing Him is to deny Him as the perfect Lamb of God, WITHOUT blemish and without spot.  What? Christ at enmity with His Father, He whose will was ALWAYS in perfect harmony with His Father’s will- Luke 22:42. God forbid!

            Our Lord was made sin by imputation, God the Father laying ON Him the charge of sin that we deserved.  In so doing, He never became a sinner, polluted by it, nor even guilty of it, although claiming it as His own.  On the contrary, it was because He was perfectly just, the sinless LAMB (1 Peter 1:19), that He was capable of suffering FOR the unjust.  Even as no suffering was due to HIM, so the merit of what He suffered (full justification, pardon, and reconciliation of His people to God) was justly imputed to them at His death, not by merit, but by GRACE!

                                               KEN WIMER