His Propitiation - Oswald Chambers
“And He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” 1 John 2:2.
“The key to the missionary message is the propitiation of Christ Jesus. … The missionary message is the limitless significance of Jesus Christ as the propitiation for our sins, and a missionary is one who is soaked in that revelation.
“The key to the missionary message is the remissionary aspect of Christ’s life, not His kindness and His goodness, and His revealing of the Fatherhood of God. The great limitless significance is that He is the propitiation for our sins. The missionary message is not patriotic, it is irrespective of nations and of individuals, it is for the whole world. …
A missionary is one who is wedded to the charter of his Lord and Master; he has not to proclaim his own point of view, but to proclaim the Lamb of God. It is easier to belong to a coterie which tells what Jesus Christ has done for me, easier to become a devotee to Divine healing, or to a special type of sanctification, or to the baptism of the Holy Ghost.
Paul did not say-‘Woe is unto me, if I do not preach what Christ has done for me,’ but—’Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!‘ This is the Gospel—’The Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!’”
For by one offering He hath perfected forever them that are sanctified.” Hebrews 10:14
We trample the blood of the Son of God under foot if we think we are forgiven because we are sorry for our sins. The only explanation of the forgiveness of God and of the unfathomable depth of His forgetting, is the Death of Jesus Christ. Our repentance is merely the outcome of our personal realization of the Atonement which He has worked out for us.
“Christ Jesus. . . is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.” When we realize that Christ is made all this to us, the boundless joy of God begins; wherever the joy of God is not present, the death sentence is at work. It does not matter who or what we are, there is absolute reinstatement into God by the death of Jesus Christ and by no other way, not because Jesus Christ pleads, but because He died. It is not earned but accepted. All the pleading which deliberately refuses to recognize the Cross is of no avail; it is battering at another door than the one which Jesus has opened. ‘I don’t want to come that way; it is too humiliating to be received as a sinner.‘ “There is none other Name. . .”
The apparent heartlessness of God is the expression of His real heart, there is boundless entrance in His way. “We have forgiveness through His blood.” Identification with the death of Jesus Christ means identification with Him to the death of everything that never was in Him. … The Atonement is a propitiation whereby God through the death of Jesus makes an unholy man holy.