Monday Club Sermons Mark 2:7-11 Why does this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only?… One of our modern novelists has written the story of a man who was haunted with remorse for a particular sin, and though sometimes weeks would pass without the thought of it, yet every now and then the ghost of the old transgression would rise before him to his infinite discomfort. It is the story of almost every human life. Sin is not something which a man commits and has done with it. It becomes a part of his being. His moral fibre is changed, his moral stamina is weakened. A traveller soon drives through the malarious air of the Roman Campagna and is out of the poisonous atmosphere; but during his brief transit disease has found its way into his blood, and even though he sits under the cool shadow of the Alps, or on the shore of the blue Mediterranean, the inward fever rages and burns. A man sins, and in sinning introduces disease into his moral nature, and even though he abandons his evil courses the old malady works on. The forgiveness of sin which is so thorough and central that it rids a man of the power and guilt of sin — who is competent to give us that? No specific of man's devising, no course of moral treatment, can effect that. There is only One, Jesus Christ, who has power on earth to forgive sin in that complete and efficient fashion. And that is His chief glory and constitutes His principal claim upon us. It is to say but little of Him, to say that He is the wisest and purest and best that ever lived; that He is the perfect example; that He is the Teacher who makes no mistakes. I do not know Jesus Christ until I know Him in my experience as the One who has "power on earth to forgive sins." And that also is the glory and the commendation of the religion of Christ's gospel. (Monday Club Sermons.) Parallel Verses KJV: Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only?WEB: "Why does this man speak blasphemies like that? Who can forgive sins but God alone?" |
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