"What is it that gave to Luther's conception of Providence an immediacy,
the
freshness and vitality which had not been there since the days of the
prophets and Jesus?
Nought else but the experience of this which he calls
the forgiveness of sins.
We easily miss this connection, because in
the main,
forgiveness of sins is for us a much less fruitful word than
it was for Luther.
For us it tends to become either a doctrine which we
in faith "apprehend to ourselves,"
or else a purely subjective
"experience"; for Luther it meant something far beyond:
a real act of
God, the living God, through Christ, the living Christ.
As I lie there in deepest anguish of soul, he himself comes, and this not as a
pictorial description of a shift in my subjective mood, but as an
altogether actual reality,
to accomplish that blessed exchange with
which Luther speaks about in his book on Christian liberty:
He, all my sin, I, all his fullness."
He, all my sin, I, all his fullness."
Amen. Today our pastor was emphasizing that the communion, Christ's body and blood, was given and shed FOR ME. That FOR ME is the best possible news!
ReplyDeleteThank you. Very encouraging.
ReplyDeleteI love pictures like that one, that have a reflection or shadow of a cross on the object you're looking at. We see everything through the cross.
ReplyDelete