Friday 23 December 2011

There's only One Saviour

Lots of good pithy statements by Warfield about the One and Only Saviour, Jesus Christ and His wonderful salvation, including a comment I've heard before that "the gospel is not good advice but good news." As you rejoice in our Immanuel this Advent, read this and consider again how immense is our salvation

“Jesus did all that is included in the great word ‘save.’ He did not come to induce us to save ourselves, or to help us save ourselves, or to enable us to save ourselves. He came to save us. And it is, therefore, that His name was called Jesus—because He should save His people from their sins. The glory of our Lord, surpassing all His other glories toward us, is just that He is our actual and complete Savior; our Savior to the uttermost. Our knowledge, even though it be His gift to us as our Prophet, is not our Savior, be it as wide and deep and as high as it is possible to conceive. The Church, though it be His gift to us as our King, is not our Savior, be it as holy and true as it becomes the Church, the bride of the Lamb, to be. The reorganized society in which He has placed us, though it be the product of His holy rule over the redeemed earth, is not our Savior, be it the new Jerusalem itself, clothed in its beauty and descended from heaven. Nay, let us cut more deeply still. Our faith itself, though it be the bond of our union with Christ through which we receive all His blessings, is not our Savior. We have but one Savior, Jesus Christ our Lord. Nothing that we are and nothing that we can do enters in the slightest measure into the ground of our acceptance of God. Jesus did it all. And by doing it all He has become in the fullest and widest and deepest sense the word can bear—our Savior. For this end did He come into the world—to save sinners; and nothing short of the actual and complete saving of sinners will satisfy the account of His work given by His own lips and repeated from them by all His apostles. It is in this great fact, indeed, that there lies the whole essence of the gospel. For let us never forget that the gospel is not good advice but good news. It does not come to us to make known to us what we must do to earn salvation for ourselves, but proclaiming to us what Jesus has done to save us. It is salvation, a complete salvation, that it announces to us; and the burden of its message is just the words of the text—that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” B.B. Warfield, The Power of God Unto Salvation

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