Evening, March 28
Go To Morning Reading
“I will accept you with your sweet savour.”
Ezekiel 20:41
The merits of our great Redeemer are as sweet savour to the Most High.
Whether we speak of the active or passive righteousness of Christ,
there is an equal fragrance. There was a sweet savour in his active
life by which he honoured the law of God, and made every precept to
glitter like a precious jewel in the pure setting of his own person.
Such, too, was his passive obedience, when he endured with unmurmuring
submission, hunger and thirst, cold and nakedness, and at length sweat
great drops of blood in Gethsemane, gave his back to the smiters,
and his cheeks to them that plucked out the hair, and was fastened
to the cruel wood, that he might suffer the wrath of God in our behalf.
These two things are sweet before the Most High; and for the sake
of his doing and his dying, his substitutionary sufferings and his
vicarious obedience, the Lord our God accepts us. What a preciousness
must there be in him to overcome our want of preciousness! What a
sweet savour to put away our ill savour! What a cleansing power in
his blood to take away sin such as ours! and what glory in his righteousness
to make such unacceptable creatures to be accepted in the Beloved!
Mark, believer, how sure and unchanging must be our acceptance, since
it is in him ! Take care that you never doubt your acceptance in Jesus. You cannot
be accepted without Christ; but, when you have received his merit,
you cannot be unaccepted. Notwithstanding all your doubts, and fears,
and sins, Jehovah’s gracious eye never looks upon you in anger; though he sees sin in
you, in yourself, yet when he looks at you through Christ, he sees
no sin. You are always accepted in Christ, are always blessed and
dear to the Father’s heart. Therefore lift up a song, and as you see the smoking incense
of the merit of the Saviour coming up, this evening, before the sapphire
throne, let the incense of your praise go up also.