The Yale expositor. (Yale, St. Clair County, Mich.) 1894-current, 1910-05-06

Pastor Of the First Presbyterian Church
of Yale.
the Lord Jesus Christ and is lovingly
seeking to follow Him. There are
many systems of ethics and many codes
of morals that seek to bring man to the
realization of the duty that is his to
ward God and toward man but these
cannot be called Christianity for
Christianity must be centered in Jesus
Christ. Thus il is important that we
should know what and who Christ is
and just what relation he bears to us
and in particular what we mean when
we say that we believe in and accept
Christ.
In the first place, when we say that
we believe in Christ, we mean that we
believe in Him AS A SAVIOR. This
of course presupposes the need of a
saviour. The fact is too patent to
need argument that man, naturally
following the inclinations of his own
heart, will and does become more and
more the slave of those vile tendencies,
ambitions, cravings and passions, that
wreck and destroy that which is good,
true and holy within him. In the
words of the poet, he becomes
"As some i'll guided bark, well built and tall
Which angry waves cast out on desert shore,
And then, retiring. leave IL there to rot
And moulder in the winds and rains of heaven,
SO he, cut from the sympathies of life
And east ashore from pleasures boistrous surge,
A wandering, weary, worn and wretched thing,
A scorched and desolate, and blasted soul
A gloomy wilderness Of dying thOt,
Repined, groaned and wthefed from the earth"
From beginning to end the Bible
teaches that there is no forgiveness for
such an one without atonement. So in
accepting Christ as our Savior we dis
cover in him "The Lamb of God that
taketh away the sins of the world"
John 1-29) Gin whom we have our re-
demption through his blood, the for.
giveness of our trespasses, according to
the riches of his grace" Eph. LII "For
apart from the shedding of blood there
is no remission of sins" Heb. 9-22)
In the second place, having found in
Him Saviour, we approach Him as
our Lord and Master. Paul says aye
are bought with price" That price
we cannot sum but we know that it
was made up in part of the sufferings,
the life and the death of the Christ and
by these he purchased us, obtaining for
us pardon and eternal life. When
Christ called his disciples he said to
them "Follow Me" so too He bids us
attune our lives to his precepts and for
saking other guides, follow Him as our
Lord and Master, saying TO us "If We
love me, keep my commandments"
John 4-15) and again aye are my
friends If ye do whatsoever command
you" John 14-14)
But in our following of Christ we
are very weak. We have not the wis
dom, nor the strength to follow Him
as we would. We find that though we
have found i'm Him a Saviour we still
have TO fight "the world, the flesh, and
the devil" Regeneration has indeed
implanted within our hearts new life
principle but of times to our dismay
we find that our life is but slowly trans
formed into that likeness which is held
before us. We have need of helper
and Him we find that need. lie says
to us "Lo, | am with you alway" and
when we once learn to trust to Him as
our helper we will find that we have
found the master secret Of successful
Christian life.