Lesson for the Lord’s Day
In the body of His flesh through death, to to present you holy and unblameable and unreprovable in His sight. Colossians 1:22
If there is one thing that an unsaved sinner is not, it is holy. Not as God is hol!. Tarnished by our original parents’ sin, we have been part of a race of rebels and backbiters, dishonest, treacherous, violent, unthankful, and unkind. As we search our souls today, we can see nothing of holiness that was generated by ourselves. Even now that we are saved, it is but the holiness of God that we present when we come to stand before Him. To be unblmeable means that there is nothing anyone can accuse us of in terms of breaking God’s holy standards. Of ourselves, we cannot say that; in some for or other, we have all broken every one of the Ten Commandments. To be unreprovable means there is nothing in our life and character that is out of line with all that God expects. Ha! How short we come of that standard!There is nothing holy, unblameable, or unreprovable about any of us by nature, so it is wonderful today to turn our attention to the One who not only was marked by these characteristics, but was also willing to extend these characteristics to ourselves.
How is the Lord Jesus able to extend His virtues to His undeserving creatures? Our text tells us that He achieved this through the body of His flesh through death. All that we lacked toward God made us justly subject to His wrath and punishment. We fully deserved nothing but His condemnation and eternal expulsion. But in the body of His flesh, the Lord Jesus has received the punishment that we deserved. He has endured the wrath that ought to have been ours, and has fully met all the grievous debt that we owed. God has declared that our sins deserve death. But God sent His own son to endure the death of the cross. That death is everything that God requires to satisfy His claims against us.
So we gather today to show the Lord’s death. We partake of the bread that speaks of the body of His flesh, in which He suffered so totally on the cross. We partake of the cup that speaks of His blood that was separated from His body to achieve our redemption. He, and only He, could stand in our guilty place. Praise God He willingly did so! And we joyfully stand in His presence today. -Jim MacIntosh