A Devotional Thought From 1 Peter

Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.     1 Peter 2:24

The message we need to constantly keep proclaiming from our pulpits, and in our personal witness day by day, is restated in this verse by Peter. He says, Jesus, when He died on the cross carried our sin. My sins, and I have many, were heaped on Jesus. I don’t know how God was able to do that, but He did. Your sins were placed on Jesus also. And, somehow, He carried our sins in His body, and was crucified for them. That means we were made free of them, or in Peter’s statement here, we died to sin. Sin can no longer make us do anything, and because Jesus did that for us on the cross we are now expected to live differently, righteously. And we can do so, live differently, because of His stripes. The wounds he received from the Roman scourging, which, I think, symbolize the full meaning of His death on the cross.

The message of the church and Christian faith is centered in Jesus and what He did on the cross. “In the cross of Christ I glory towering o’er the wrecks of time.”* The church must glory in the cross. The individual must glory in the cross. One day the world will glory in the cross and the Savior, and then what a wonderful world it will be.

*John Bowring from the hymn