Philippians 1:29

Philippians 1:29

The Sacrifice of the Redeemed.

I. Christ's sacrifice is no far-away fact, to be shown and gazed upon; it draws us also unto itself. For consider what exactly it was. Where does its vicarious efficacy for us lie? Surely in this: that Christ made His offering out of our very flesh. He laid hold of no foreign thing to offer; He looked not elsewhere for a gift. He looked at this world we live in; He took of its substance for His gift; He laid hold of its present nature, and offered that. Forasmuch as the children partook of flesh and blood, Christ partook of the same. As He found it, so He took it; just it, and no other; this, just this, is that in which He would accomplish His priestly work. But these are the very conditions in which we to this day live. That flesh which He took we still wear; still it is full charged with ache and torment; still it wastes and sickens. We then hold in our hands the very gift which Christ, our Master, offered. It was just these human sorrows that He turned into sacraments of allegiance. Are we blinded to our opportunities by the fact that they fall upon us by natural laws, or that they seem entirely accidental, or that they are brought upon us unjustly by wicked hands?

II. But consider the offering of Christ. What can possibly be more unlike a pleasing sacrifice to God than His death? What sign of its being a High-priest's offering broke through the shadow of this world's darkness? It differed in no degree whatever from any common disaster that happens to us. It came upon Him by simple natural means; it looked to the outsider as a most cruel and unfortunate and bloody accident. He offered then, and saved by offering, just that human life which still is ours today; and if so, His sacrifice is not only a vicarious act, but a revelation of the true use to which we may put this very world in which we stand, a revelation of the manner by which even it, with all its confusions, and disappointments, and sickness, and weariness, and anguish, and death, may be justified, may be hallowed, may be transformed into the fuel of the one sacrifice which alone can reconcile the world to God. We are drawn into the circle in which Christ's eternal energies work; the love of Christ lays hands upon us and constrains us; we, as we are uplifted by the prayer of His Passion, we, too, recover our priesthood; we may lift the offering of this our flesh to God, since that day when Christ died in the likeness of our flesh and sanctified it to become an offering to God. We may do it now, though we are severed from that great day by eighteen hundred long and weary years, for still today Christ, the ever-living Priest, pleads within that holy place, into which He has passed before us, that holy blood, once poured out in love for us, which makes Him still bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh; and still today, as the Father looks upon that blood, there breaks from His eyes ever and again the splendour of an unappeasable and exhaustless love, which hastens from afar to greet our poor and pitiful gift of ourselves to Him, kissing us and rejoicing, as God, the mighty Forgiver, can alone rejoice, that this His Son was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found.

H. Scott Holland, Logic and Life,p. 133.

Reference: Philippians 1 Parker, Hidden Springs,p. 24.