The Blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son
“If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus his son cleanseth us from all sin” — I John
1: 7*
ONE week ago to-night we saw that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. To-night we shall see that the blood of Jesus, whom we saw last Sunday night to be the Son of God, cleanseth from every trace of sin certain persons, and we shall see also how we ourselves can become such persons as are cleansed from every trace of sin by the blood of Christ Jesus.
I. How We Know that the Blood of Jesus Cleanses From All Sin The first question that confronts us to-night is, How do we know that the blood of Jesus cleanseth from every trace of sin?
i. First of all, We know that the blood of JesiAS cleanses from every trace of sin because the Bible says so, and we have seen on former occasions that the whole Bible is the Word of God, and that there¬ fore everything it says is indubitably and unquali¬ fiedly true. I have no hesitation in believing without
13 a
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any qualification or abatement or discount or attempt at a spiritualizing and vaporizing evasion of its plain meaning everything this book says, or to be more exact and definite, everything that God, “who can¬ not lie,” says in this book. Now here in our text we read what God says, not what John says, but what God says, “The blood of Jesus his son cleanseth us from all sin.”
Practically the same thought is found in Eph. i: 7, “We have our redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our sins, according to the niches of his grace.” God here tells us through Paul that the believer in Jesus Christ has “redemption,” i. e., “the forgiveness of his sins,” through the blood of Jesus Christ. Forgiveness of sin is not something the believer in Christ is to get at some time in the future when he has gone through purgatory or when he has struggled long and successfully against his sin¬ ful tendencies and against his temptations, or when he comes to die, or when the Lord Jesus comes back again: forgiveness of sins is something the believer in Jesus Christ gets because of the atoning sacrifice of the blood of Christ the moment he accepts as his own personal Saviour that Jesus Christ who made perfect atonement for his sins on the cross of Calvary, and surrenders to Him as his Lord and Master and confesses Him as such before the world. Forgiveness of sin is something anyone in this audience to-night can get right here now, so that he may know that every sin he ever committed, or ever shall commit, every sin great or small, the blackest sin that any man or woman ever could commit, and the smallest sin he ever did commit, is blotted out of
God’s book and out of God’s remembrance concerning him forever. Oh, precious Gospel! and greatly needed Gospel, needed by every one of us, needed by you fine women, who smugly admire your own immaculate virtue, as truly as by the woman upon whom you would scarcely deign to wipe your feet because of her disgusting vileness and indescribable shame; needed by you Nathaniels, “Israelites indeed in whom is no guile,” as truly as by the publican who smites upon his breast and cries, “God be merciful to me the sinner — the consummate sinner.”
The same thought is found in Rom. 5:9, “Being now justified by (in) his blood” God here tells us through Paul that every believer in Christ is “now justified” — not is going to be justified at some future time when he gets wholly sanctified or gets through purgatory, or when he dies and gets to Heaven, but is justified the moment he believes. Justified means more than forgiven, it means reckoned righteous. The whole verse means that God not only forgives, i. e., dismisses from His memory, every sin the believer in Christ has ever committed, but that furthermore He puts to the believer’s account, because of the shed blood of Christ, the perfect propitiation for the believer’s sin (Rom. 3:25, 26), all his own absolutely perfect righteousness as exhibited in the life of Jesus Christ, God manifested in the flesh. Or as Paul puts it in another place (II Cor. 5:21), “Him who knew no sin God made to be sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” When Jesus the Son of God shed His blood on the cross and thus made a perfect “propitiation for our sins” (I Jno. 2:2), a propitiation
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perfectly acceptable to God, He took our proper place of curse and condemnation arid rejection be¬ fore God, and the moment we take Him we step into His place of perfect acceptance before God, and God looks at us, no matter how vile we may have been, through Him and sees us covered all over from head to foot with His own perfect and glorious righteousness. If the vilest woman in Los Angeles should come in here to-night and accept Jesus Christ as her personal Saviour, and surrender to Him as her Lord and Master, and confess Him as such before the world, the moment she did it every sin she had ever committed would he blotted out and she would he as perfect in her standing before God as the purest woman in this room. Some years ago I was preaching one Sunday morning in the Moody Church in Chicago on Rom. 8: i, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus,” and I made this remark, “If the vilest woman in Chicago should come into the Chicago Avenue church this morning and should here and now accept Jesus Christ as her Saviour, the moment she did it every sin she ever committed would be blotted out and her record would be as white in God’s sight as that of the purest woman in the room.” Unknown to me, one of the members of my congregation had gone out that very morning to one of the lowest dens of infamy in the city and sought out a woman, an utter outcast, and invited her to come to the church to hear me preach. But the woman replied, “Church is not for the likes of me. I would not be welcome at church.” To which the woman replied, “You would be welcome at our church,” which, thank God, was true. But the woman said, “No, church is not for the likes of me.” Then the pure woman said, “If you will go with me I will go with you.” “No,” the woman who was a sinner said, “that would never do. The police know me, and the boys on the streets know me and sometimes throw stones at me, and if they should see you going up the street with me they would think you were just such as I am.” But the woman who was a saint said, “I don’t care what they think about me; if you will go with me I will go with you.” But the woman would not consent. At last they agreed on this, that the woman who was a saint would walk a few steps ahead and the woman who was a sinner would come a few steps behind. So on they came, block after block, up LaSalle avenue, the woman who was a saint a few steps ahead and the woman who was a sinner a few steps behind. At last they reached the Moody Church. The woman who was a saint ascended the stairs, entered the auditorium and took a seat. The woman who was a sinner followed, timidly pushed open the door, saw one vacant seat in the last row under the gallery and slipped into it. She had scarcely taken her seat when I made the statement which I have just quoted, “If the vilest woman in Chicago should come into the Chicago Avenue church this morning and should here and now accept Jesus Christ as her Saviour, the moment she did it every sin she ever committed would be blotted out and her record would be as white in God’s sight as that of the purest woman in this room.” My words went floating down over the heads of the audience and dropped down into the heart of this woman who was a sinner, in the last
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seat underneath the gallery. She saw Jesus hanging on the cross in her place, put her trust in Him, and God then and there forgave her and put to her account all the righteousness of Jesus Christ, and when the meeting was over she came down the aisle weeping, to meet me and to thank me for what God had done for her that morning.
2. In the second place, We know that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin by experience, by the experience of thousands. Thousands upon thousands of sinners, some of them among the wickedest men and women that ever walked this earth, among others Paul, who said, and who rightfully said, that he was “the chief” of sinners, because he had stained his hands with the blood of a multitude of men, women and children whose only crime was that they obeyed and confessed their rightful Lord Jesus Christ (I Tim. 1:15-17), I say there are thousands upon thousands of sinners, including many of the worst this sinful world has ever known, who testify that the blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed them from all sin, and that the Holy Spirit to-day is bearing witness together with their spirit that they are children of God (Rom. 8: 16).
If there is anything absolutely sure in this old world, so full of doubt and uncertainty, it is that the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin. Let subtle and self-satisfied infidels and theologians go and speculate and split hairs to their heart’s content as to what is philosophical and what is not, what is possible and what is not, what is God’s Word and what is not God’s Word, but this fact, not theological or philosophical speculation but fact, stands absolutely and eternally sure, that “the blood of Jesus his son cleanseth from all sin.” That is not something I guess but something I know. I know it because God says so, and He “cannot lie,” and I know it also by blessed personal experience. Years ago I pumped my head full of a lot of evolutionary and other un¬ proven and senseless philosophy, but even that was not able to drown out what I knew, that the blood of Jesus had cleansed me from all sin. Praise God!
II. Just What Does the Bible Mean When It
Says the Blood of Jesus Cleanseth
Us From All Sin?
Now we come to the second question, Just what does the Bible mean when it says that “the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin”? The Bible makes that also clear as day. One of the many wonderful things about this wonderful Book. of God is that it interprets its own statements in an unmistakable way, and therefore does not leave us at the mercy of priests or popes or any unconverted and unregenerated and sin-blinded theologians, Protestant or Roman Catholic, to get our interpretations from them. That is the kind of theologians that that subtle old enemy the devil has succeeded in packing some of our theological seminaries with in this day. What then does the Bible mean when it says that “the blood of Jesus his son cleanseth us from all sin”? To be more specific, does it mean that the blood of Jesus cleanses believers from the guilt their sins bring upon the sinner, or does it mean that the blood of Jesus cleanses the believer from the very presence of sin itself? I say that the Bible it-HOW TO BE SAVED
self answers these questions in the most unmistakable terms. If you will take your Bible and your concordance and look up every passage in the Bible where the word “cleanse” is used in connection with the word “blood 99 you will find that in every instance, CLEANSING BY BLOOD IS CLEANSING FROM guilt. We of course have not time to read all the passages to-night, for they are very many, but if you will come to me at the close of this meeting I will tell you where to find them and you can hunt them up for yourself and be convinced. (Lev. 16:30, 17: 11; 14: 19, 31; Jer. 33:8; Psa. 51:7; Rev. 1:5; Rev. 7:14; Heb. 9: 22, 23; Eph. 1:7; Rom. 3: 25; Rom. 5:9; Matt. 26:28.)
The thought then of our text interpreted in the light of the uniform and unvarying teaching of the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, is that all who “walk in the light” are cleansed continuously (the present tense of cleanse is used, denoting continuous action), cleansed every day and every hour and every minute, from all the guilt of sin, there is not one spot or trace of sin upon them in God’s reckoning. There is absolutely no sin upon them, not one smallest speck. There may be still in moments of weakness and failure sin in their conduct, but there is not one smallest sin upon them in God’s reckoning, it has all been settled, atoned for and washed away forever by the atoning blood of Christ, shed on Calvary’s accursed tree. It is not the blood of the crucified Jesus, but the indwelling life of the risen Jesus that saves from the power of sin, and it will be the completely transforming power of the returning Lord Jesus, Who will make us just like Himself when He comes again (I John 3:1, 2, that will save us from the very presence of sin. But to-night, right now, any man, woman or child, no matter how long you may have continued in sin or how deeply you may have gone into sin, can be cleansed from every trace of guilt and become as absolutely sinless in God’s reckoning as Jesus Christ Himself is, you can become
Near, so very near to God,
Nearer I cannot be;
For in the person of His Son,
I’m just as near as He.
Dear, so very dear to God,
Dearer I cannot be;
For in the person of His Son,
I am just as dear as He.
III. Who Is It That the Blood of Jesus
Cleanses From All Sin?
Now there is just one more question, and it is one of great practical importance for us to answer, or rather for us to get God’s answer to, and that is, Who is it that the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin? The text answers this question also. Listen. “If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin.”
1. First, please notice the word “us” “cleanseth us from all sin.” Who are meant by the “us”? God Himself answers the question in the fifth chapter and the thirteenth verse of this same book: “These things have I written unto you,... even unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God.” The “us” then are those who “believe on
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the name of the Son of God.” But what does it mean to “believe on the name of the Son of God”? Again we are not left to our own speculations and guesses but God Himself answers this question in John i: 12, “As many as received him to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name” It is then those who receive Jesus who “believe on the name of the Son of God,” i. e., those who take Him to be to them¬ selves what He offers Himself to be to everyone and anyone, take Him to themselves to be their personal Saviour by having borne their sins in His own body on the cross, and trust God to forgive them because Jesus died in their place, take Him to themselves as their Lord and King to whom they surrender the entire control of their thoughts and lives. Anyone who thus takes or receives Jesus, believes on Him as the Son of God, and the blood of Jesus cleanses them from all sin.
2. In the second place, notice just zvhat is said in the verse which we have taken for our text, “If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin.” What does it mean to “walk in the light”? The truth is light, error is darkness. The truth revealed in this book is light, God is light (verse 5), Jesus Himself is the Light of the World (John 8:12). To walk in the light is therefore to walk in obedience to the truth, to walk as He whom we have accepted as our Lord and Master and risen Saviour bids us walk and em¬ powers us to walk, to walk in the light is to walk in open confession of Christ, in obedience to His will as He reveals it in His Word, to walk just as everyone who really believes on His name (and not merely professes to believe on His name) will walk.
If anyone here to-night, no matter what you have been in the past, even though you have been the vilest moral leper, or thug, or gunman, or the most outrageous infidel or blasphemer, or anything else, if any man, woman or child of you will right here and now accept Jesus Christ as your personal Saviour, as the One Who bore all your sins in His own body on the cross, and trust God to forgive you because Jesus died in your place, and if you will surrender to Him as your Lord and King and confess Him as such to-night, and go out of here to prove the reality of your faith by walking in the light (walking as He bids you walk) as you certainly will walk if you really accept Him as your crucified and risen Saviour, the instant you do this the blood of Jesus, not your repentance nor your good conduct, nor even your faith, but “the blood of Jesus” will cleanse you from all sin and keep cleansing you to all eternity. But if you do not thus accept Jesus the Christ as your personal Saviour and surrender to Him as your Lord and King, and confess Him as such, you will go out of here to-night utterly defiled by the guilt of your awful sins, far more awful in the sight of a holy God than you think, and to be defiled and dishonoured and accursed by the guilt of these sins forever and ever.
Will you accept Him now?